(Disclosure: I'm a SpamCop customer.)

It seems Ed Felten is a taking out his frustration in the wrong place. He's making SpamCop out to be a Stalinist boogeyman, when the main problem is his ISP took SpamCop's email (which is generated automatically when a SpamCop user requests it) and performed no due diligence.

Yes, Mr. Felten is right, any nitwit can incorrectly complain about spam. They can use a tool like SpamCop to do it, or they can do it manually.

But if your ISP goes off half-cocked, don't blame SpamCop. SpamCop didn't shut the site down, his ISP did.

I don't think an ISP puts any more weight behind email sent from SpamCop's automated agent than they do a manual email.

As far as the SpamCop blacklist, it does age by itself, because the engineers at SpamCop realize people get confused and report legimate email lists fairly often. There's more information here.

SpamCop lists plenty of information for ISPs on what to do if they get reported. Though I'm sure they aren't exactly fast.

Bottom line to me: Mr. Felten is foaming at the mouth. His problem is with his ISP, not with SpamCop. If his ISP had checked with him, the worst that would have happened is SpamCop customers would have emails from that list send to their "hold" box for a week.

To me, this isn't a big problem.