Anti-spammer fined $60K for using 'whois'

This is ridiculous:

"David Ritz, the veteran American spam-fighter, has been hit by $60,000 in fines plus lawyers fees after losing a civil suit that accused him of illegal hacking."

"The complaint alleged that Ritz "hacked" servers owned by Sierra (which describes itself as a specialist web hosting and internet services firm), obtaining confidential internal network configuration data (using a zone transfer, host -l command) and domain name information (using whois) before publishing that data on the net."