Bad law in North Dakota
This is very bad news for North Dakota-based anti-spammers — a guy called David Ritz is being sued there by alleged porn spammer Jerry Reynolds, for performing DNS lookups, a DNS zone transfer and a Whois lookup. It appears the judge has found Ritz guilty.
This is astonishingly bad lawmaking by the judge. These are entirely innocuous tools, part of every network administrator’s toolkit for debugging and examining internet traffic legitimately. There’s nothing remotely criminal or malicious in their use, and the judge has allowed himself to be misled.
North Dakota Judge Gets it Wrong:
‘Ritz’s behavior in conducting a zone transfer was unauthorized within the meaning of the North Dakota Computer Crime Law. A zone transfer is simply asking a DNS server for all the particular public info it provides about a given domain. This is a common task performed by system administrators for many purposes. The judge is saying that DNS zone transfers are now illegal in North Dakota.’
Tags: cases, david-ritz, dns, ed-falk, fargo, law, north-dakota, spam
Kevin said,
January 17, 2008 @ 6:55 pm
If you read the actual findings, the obvious lack of understanding of the ‘technology’ involved is rather awe-inspiring (not to mention the prolific typos, and at least one completely false ‘fact’). However, it should be pointed out that this was a civil trial and doesn’t set any precedent (fortunately) (and a minor point, the judge is a ’she’, not a ‘he’ ;p)
John O\'Shea said,
January 20, 2008 @ 5:30 pm
Hey Justin, Good related discussion @ http://techdirt.com/articles/20080118/003803.shtml
Lemon Law Attorney said,
January 21, 2008 @ 12:39 pm
Good discussion, Kevin has some valid points here.