On 01/17/2010 12:50 PM, Bill Silverstein wrote:
By-the-way, there are reasons to believe that Can-Spam could fail a Constitutional challenge, particularly for domain names used in a political or religious context or when it affects the exercise of a fundamental right.
I am going to disagree on this. CAN-SPAM is limited to commercial e-mail.
The V.. g.. r.. a type drug for example, oft the content of spam, pertains, arguably, to the fundamental right of procreation (which would thus trigger some strong Constitutional protections.) Are Nigerian princes who only need your help to release piles of money engaged in commercial or personal outreach? Drawing lines between commercial and non-commercial activities are hard and a clever person can slip-and-slide to whichever side of the line is most convenient for a given situation.
Your application of whois privacy to yet to be released products fails. The specific provision of CAN-SPAM that addresses this applies to the use in commercial e-mails. Why would a legitimate business be advertising a not-released product while it hides its relation to the product?
I'm was pointing out but one example of when people/corporations quite reasonably seek not to have a direct contact listed in "whois". To my mind the argument that "not listing myself in whois" ==>therefore==> "an act that is otherwise lawful becomes unlawful" is a very poor argument because it not only ignores the reasons why one might want privacy but, also, goes so far as to switch the burden of proof so that a person must justify his/her privacy rather than putting the burden onto the person who desires to penetrate privacy. --karl--