Schneier on Security

Ummm, the methods for blackmarket disruption focused on by the secondary articles, would work yes... but they also invite retaliation on the straight market.

A couple of black hats could just as well turn their botnets toward disruption of legit commerce using similar methods.

Not to mention that the methods basically come down to slander and fraud if they were used against people in a legit market.

Actually, they may count as slander in this domain as well. Do slander laws make an exception when you're slandering a handle used for illegal transactions?

... actually, how do slander laws apply to handles in general? Is it slander if I post false information about an anonymous account? I'd think it should be, but I'm curious about the present state of things.

I am not a lawyer, and neither do I play one in a TV mini-series.

However, I believe that in order to sue for defamation, you need to demonstrate damages. I doubt that a court would recognise that damage to a profitable criminal reputation constitutes a loss which warrants compensation.

The real issue here, and the root cause of storm, is the ability of "domain tasters" to register domains for several days for free. This is a policy that ICANN could change in a minute, but hasn't. They could also require registrars to disable domains that configure fast-flux DNS, which is not RFC-compliant, but to-date ICANN has sat on it's hands doing nothing while the problem simply gets larger. Compare this with the Bush administration's handling of Global Warming (among other things) and you can see why the Internet needs a change of
government as much as the US.

Common-law countries (mostly the English-speaking countries) have a "clean hands" doctrine. It means that courts won't "get their hands dirty" handling cases on behalf of criminal enterprises.

So, if someone breaches a contract to deliver supplies to a meth lab, the lab owners can't sue (they, of course, have other methods of enforcement). If someone slanders (oral) or defames (written) some hacker's handle, the courts won't get involved.

However, if the handle is used for legitimate reasons (e.g., a pseudonym) the courts might listen. Suppose someone slanders or defames Mark Twain. Samuel Clemmons could have taken him to court. However, intent to harm Clemmons would be the issue (it is impossible to harm a fictional character, Twain in this example).