As Nick points out, the clearest violation, if there is one, would be the terms of service of the RIPE DB. There may be others, that would be somewhat up to your local laws and how you would like to pursue things. Should anyone believe they have been spammed by someone who they believe has harvested contact details from the DB, then they should contact abuse@ripe.net to report it. Handily there are rules in place for this, should it ever happen... Thanks, Brian Brian Nisbet Service Operations Manager HEAnet CLG, Ireland's National Education and Research Network 1st Floor, 5 George's Dock, IFSC, Dublin D01 X8N7, Ireland +35316609040 brian.nisbet@heanet.ie www.heanet.ie Registered in Ireland, No. 275301. CRA No. 20036270 ________________________________________ From: anti-abuse-wg <anti-abuse-wg-bounces@ripe.net> on behalf of Nick Hilliard <nick@foobar.org> Sent: Thursday 7 May 2020 10:26 To: Töma Gavrichenkov Cc: anti-abuse-wg@ripe.net Subject: Re: [anti-abuse-wg] Spamming LIR accounts CAUTION[External]: This email originated from outside of the organisation. Do not click on links or open the attachments unless you recognise the sender and know the content is safe. Töma Gavrichenkov wrote on 07/05/2020 10:03:
What does GDPR have to say about this?
You mean the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations / PECR. Spamming is prohibited under article 13. National transcriptions of this legislation have implemented this as a civil offence in some EU countries and a criminal offence in others. Note that this mainly applies to personal accounts, not role accounts. In any event, spamming using contact information harvested from the RIPE database is a violation of the terms of use of the RIPE Database:
https://eur02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ripe.n...
specifically:
Users may not use the RIPE Database or the data contained therein for advertising, direct marketing, marketing research or similar purposes.
Nick