Note that in the US they're protected by 47 US 230 which says they can
do anything they want so long as there's a plausible good faith basis
for doing so. Case law confirms that making mistakes does not mean
you weren't acting in good faith.
Feel free to point me at some reading materials to answer this question, but:
Isn't that statement contradictory to what happened to MAPS?
I believe that all the cases were settled or dismissed. (Not 100%
sure, they're so old that PACER doesn't have documents for most of
them.) MAPS severely underestimated the costs of discovery and such,
even if one wins a case, and I'm not sure how good their overall legal
strategy was. As far as I know, they didn't make a 230 defense; Anne
Mitchell could fill in the gaps if there aren't confidentiality
issues.
More recently, in e360insight vs. Comcast, E360 claimed that Comcast
was unfairly blocking his CAN SPAM compliant mail. Comcast crushed
E360 with a 230 defense.
In Zango vs. Kaspersky, Zango objected to Kaspersky's listing them as
spyware. The court granted summary judgement to Kaspersky noting that
it didn't matter whether their listing was correct, so long as it was
made in good faith.
A silly little company called Holomaxx is currently suing Yahoo and
Hotmail in separate suits for blocking their spam, and we all expect
230 wins there, too.
As far as what to read, CAUCE and the Cornell Legal Information
Institute are working on an online spam law archive as part of
the LII's online legal resources. I expect that will start coming
online in a month or two.
R's,
John
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