serve, contravenes the country's "CAN SPAM" laws. It ruled that the use of a whois privacy service constitutes a deliberate attempt to mislead internet users.
http://www.domainnamenews.com/legal-issues/whois-privacy-material-falsificat...
What are you getting at exactly?
I believe you guys are taking the interpretation of the Court's response to the appeal way too far. The response does not exactly "ruled that the use of a whois privacy service constitutes a deliberate attempt to mislead internet users." The case is not just about WHOIS data, and you can't take few things here and there out of context and put it as a blank statement. In this case the bad guys were obviously and intentionally trying to "conceal" their identity and contact information, something that on their conviction was considered material falsification. On their appeal they argued that “impair,” “altered,” and “concealed" are vague terms in the definition of material falsification (sounds familiar when in the GNSO we waste a lot of cycles trying to define the meaning of the word meaning whereas it has any meaning), and that this would criminalize private registration of a domain name because "many innocent people who privately register without the requisite intent may be subject to investigation for violation of § 1037." IMHO, extremely stupid attempt/move from their attorney.
Legitimate businesses do not hide behind anonymous domain registrations.
anonymous != private and private does not make it illegitimate.
Now an important US court agrees.
Nope, it does not say that. It just says that these two crooks deserve what they've got and probably more for trying to obstruct and twist things around. Obviously a complete different context but you are an IETFer so you most probably know that "would" != "shall." Also falsified information or anonymous != private, legitimate business and decent people (I do) may want to keep their contact information private, I don't believe that registering a domain name gives them the right to provide false information but IMHO they have the right to keep it private and we should argue and fight to keep it that way. You also said "In this case the defendants were sending porn spam from addresses hidden behind WHOIS privacy services", the appeal does not says that, it says: "Defendants had their employees place fictitious information in the headers of their bulk emails. Defendants’ employee Jennifer Clason created nonsensical domain names and matched them with generic user names to generate a series of different email addresses that were almost certainly nonfunctional. These were placed in the “From” field of the headers of each email sent out. Another employee of Defendants, Kirk Rogers, designed a program utilized by Defendants that generated non-functioning email addresses in the “From” field by combining the domain name used to send each email with the recipient of the email’s user name. In addition, the email address appearing in the “From” field and “Return-Path” field of the headers of Defendants’ emails differed, indicating at least one was false." Notice the "nonsensical domain names", where do you register those ? About the WHOIS data says: "Defendants also falsified information appearing in the registration of the domain names they used. The registrant for each of the emails was listed as Ganymede Marketing. The correct physical address for Ganymede was listed, but the contact person and phone number listed were false. The email listed in the registration was never tested for functionality, though the evidence indicates that at some point it became invalid. A reverse look-up of the internet provider address appearing in the email headers came back to a different entity, Kobalt Networks, registered in the Netherlands." I don't see any reference to "private or anonymous registration" there, they blatantly and intentionally provided false information. I find extremely troubling that somebody person/company is being tagged as not "legitimate" because she/he/it cares about its privacy. My .02 Jorge