Judge Blocks Whois Spam
Misc.
12/12/2000; 1:06:45 PM

'In a ruling in U.S. District Court in New York City, Judge Barbara Jones ordered Verio to stop using customer contact information housed in Register.com's Whois database to carry out a massive telephone and e-mail market campaign.

'In issuing the preliminary injunction, Jones determined that Register.com (RCOM) had a significant likelihood of prevailing on its claims that Verio violated usage policies, made unauthorized references to Register.com in marketing messages, and improperly used robotic search devices to obtain information on company servers.'

If I remember correctly, when InterNIC first changed the WHOIS database system to put terms of use on the use of the WHOIS database, there was some question about whether they could do that. (What is WHOIS?) Part of the question was whether InterNIC could actually claim any sort of control over what is effectively a public resource, and part of it was whether they could claim that control retroactively, without permission from the registrants. This case would probably settle that question.