George@Orwellian.Org wrote:
# One popular theory mooted on the Net is that Brown closed down # the site rather than comply with a New Zealand court order # demanding that he remove two specific ISPs from the blacklist.
I know I sound naive asking this, but has something like this ever happened in the US? The way I read this, the NZ court ordered a private publisher of an enumeration of IP addresses to modify his publication despite the fact that the IP addresses in question met the criteria for inclusion on the list. (ORBS claimed to be a list of open relays, but it was well known that it included any network that blocked ORBS probes, which apparently included the two companies in question.) In addition, even if it did include networks that didn't fit the stated criteria for inclusion on the list, it seems to me that the circumstances under which a particular entry is added to the list are completely immaterial---for any particular entry on the list, its inclusion only indicates that the ORBS administrators are not adequately assured that spam will not originate from the IP address in quesiton. Doesn't seem like that could possibly be considered libel. One might be able to make the case that being listed in ORBS was damaging in that outgoing email from a listed system would be blocked by lots of people, but that doesn't seem compelling---people are _choosing_ to block traffic from your server based on the fact that they trust the recommendations of ORBS and, according to ORBS, it cannot be ascertained that spam will not originate from the system. Like I said, I'm probably just naive. -- Riad Wahby rsw@mit.edu MIT VI-2/A 2002 5105