Richard M. Scoville, editor of a site called the Free Speech Store, is suing the operators of the Abusive Hosts Block List (AHBL) for $3.525 million.
On December 17, Scoville got a Texas county court to issue a temporary restraining order, forcing the AHBL to remove his site’s IP address (71.40.8.100 – Road Runner Commercial) from its anti-spam blocklist until the case is litigated. Spam Kings Blog: Site claims $3.5M damages from spam blacklist
I am glad someone has the time to do this, even if it isn’t the strongest case. At TRC we had a similar incident at TRC last year where we got listed in a blacklist and it had a significant impact on business operations. Our “spam” crime that got us listed was being on the same subnet as a suspected spammer! Nevermind that we had operated on the same static IP for years and that there were zero complaints against our IP, we were still listed. When we contacted them for removal they were abrasive and uncooperative and at one point told us to move to a new hosting facility to solve the problem. We were at a major hosting facility as it was and that was an unreasonable recommendation. I’d like to see more of these blacklisters get sued when they are lazy in their implementation or are unresponsive to false positives.