The California Court of Appeal for the Fourth District held Jan. 11 in Pallorium Inc. v. Jared, Cal. Ct. App., No. G036124, 1/11/06 that an open relay data filter operator who makes his filter and its supporting database publicly available enjoys immunity from liability under the Communications Decency Act. Wikipedia has details about the case here. The entry currently reads as follows:
"In September 2004, Steven Rombom's company, Pallorium, Inc., sued Joe Jared, operator of the free OsiruSoft Open Relay Spam Stopper, alleging that Jared was innappropriately including Pallorium, Inc. on its spam blacklist pages. Jared's blacklist site ran software that determined that Pallorium was running an open mail relay and published that information. The case Pallorium vs. Jared was ruled in favor of Jared. In his judgment for Jared, the judge ruled that the Communications Decency Act provided him with immunity from such lawsuits provided that he was making a good faith effort to stop spam. The judge noted that Pallorium was an "innocent party" and it was suffering from "collateral damage from the war on spam", but the law prevented Pallorium from recovering damages from Jared. Pallorium appealed the decision of the trial court, but on January 11, 2007 the California Court of Appeal affirmed the judgment in favor of Jared. The appeal court ruled that "the Communications Decency Act immunizes 'a provider . . . of an interactive computer service' who makes available to 'others the technical means to restrict access to material . . . the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.'" As the Court said, "whether Jared's filter was over-inclusive is irrelevant so long as he deemed the material to be 'obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable."
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