Australian ISP SysAdmins To Go On Trial For Faulty Spam Filters?
from the wait-a-second... dept
A few months back, we mentioned a situation in Australia where the music industry's private police force got to raid an ISP, claiming that it was allowing BitTorrent-based illegal file sharing. What was odd, at the time, (beyond letting the recording industry raid another private business) was that it seemed like it should be the customers of the ISP who were sharing the files that should be responsible, rather than the ISP itself. Well, it's still murky, but a few more details are seeping out. It appears that the recording industry also is trying to accuse two of the ISP's sysadmins of being guilty of this as well. While a lower court said that the sysadmins couldn't be accused separately, a new judge has changed that ruling. Basically, it sounds like the recording industry sent these sysadmins typical "takedown" notices, and the sysadmins ignored them. However, what makes these even stranger, is that the recording industry says the two of them: "treated the infringement notices like spam." If that's the case, then it sounds like the industry only sent email notices -- so it would be quite hard to prove that the sysadmins actively ignored them (or even saw them). In fact, it's quite possible that it wasn't the sysadmins who treated the messages as spam, but the spam filters they used. So, perhaps, the real culprit in this whole mess is the spam filter. We expect the recording industry to take the spam filter to court shortly, as well.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Block Lists
Also a few wankers think it is amusing to attack controversial organizations, such as the recording industry, by filing false spam complaints with blocklists. This is futile because the victim gets unblocked as soon as they notice, but it does increase support costs for innocent ISPs and increase bills for the rest of us.
Mike is speculating, but it's certainly feasible that takedown emails could have been blocked, if sent by a standard mail-server, even if the ISP's admins were doing everything right. Would-be litigants should use a specialist service to get their emails delivered, or complain directly about blocking and re-send the emails.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Re: Block Lists
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
delivery vs receiving
[ link to this | view in chronology ]