Court Tells Spammer That It's Not Illegal For An ISP To Filter Its Emails

from the in-no-uncertain-terms dept

If the name e360 sounds familiar to you, it may be because it was the company that sued Spamhaus for including it in its spam filter list. e360 insists it's not a spammer and anyone filtering its messages is somehow infringing on its rights. Of course, there seems to be ample evidence that e360 has been spamming, and the company has been sued directly as well. e360's latest lawsuit was against Comcast for filtering its emails, but as Slashdot lets us know, a judge has tossed that suit out of court while also declaring in no uncertain terms that e360 is a spammer.

Plaintiff e360Insight, LLC is a marketer. It refers to itself as an Internet marketing company. Some, perhaps even a majority of people in this country, would call it a spammer.

The key in this case was that the judge relied on section 230 of the CDA -- a section of the law that we often talk about for shielding service providers against the actions of its users. In this case, it's a different part of section 230, which also shields ISPs from liability for "good faith" efforts to block objectionable content -- and then the court says that it's clear that Congress and the courts have determined that spam is objectionable content.

This isn't the first time we've seen cases like this. A few years back a series of courts all ruled against a spam company which claimed that it had followed the "rules" in CAN SPAM, so filtering its spam was illegal. It's nice to see the courts recognize that's simply not true.

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