Serial Anti-Spam Lawsuit Filer Loses Appeal... And His Possessions

from the time-to-get-a-job dept

Back when CAN SPAM was passed, one of the (many) parts that annoyed anti-spam fighters was that the law was quite clearly limited in who could bring lawsuits. It was basically designed so that only the government or ISPs could bring lawsuits -- not individuals. This was done on purpose, as lots of marketing companies freaked out that they'd end up dealing with constant spam lawsuits from people upset about receiving their marketing messages. However, some anti-spammers worked on ways to get around this by setting themselves up as "ISPs," though only for the purpose of trying to sue spammers. This strategy backfired. A couple of years ago, one of the most fervent supporters of using this trick (his only "job" was filing these lawsuits against spammers) lost his case, and the court even told him to pay $110k to the firm he had sued.

He appealed, and the appeals court came down even harder on the guy for clearly abusing the law, pointing out that he was clearly a professional litigant, and not someone running a real ISP. But, perhaps even more fascinating is that the guy, James Gordon, didn't just lose the lawsuit, it appears he lost most of his possessions as well. Remember that ruling telling him to pay the $110k to Virtumundo? He refused. The company sent the debt to a collections agency, but told Gordon they'd call off the collections agency if he dropped the appeal. Gordon didn't:

When Virtumundo's collections lawyer showed up at Gordon's house with a moving van and a sheriff, Virtumundo again offered to stop its pursuit of Gordon's assets if he would drop his appeal, and he refused again, according to Newman.

Virtumundo's collections agency then cleared out Gordon's house, according to Newman.

He added that after seizing the contents of Gordon's home, Virtumundo offered to return Gordon's belongings if he would drop his appeal and again, Gordon refused.

As much as I thank anti-spam activists for trying to stomp out spam, that doesn't mean they get to ignore what the law allows, and set up what was effectively a professional anti-spam litigation service.

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Anti-Spammer Fined For DNS Lookup Of Spammer

from the ouch dept

Anti-spam activists often need to do quite a bit of hunting to track down the real identity of various spammers. Over the years, spammers have become increasingly adept at hiding from those trying to shine light on their activities. However, when one well-known anti-spammer used some standard whois and DNS lookup tools (the same kind many of us use every day) to find out the identity of a spammer, the spammer sued him... and won! The anti-spammer has to pay over $60,000 in fines, and possibly much more once lawyers' fees are added up. The judge ruled that some rather basic tools suddenly constituted "hacking" even though the details don't suggest any actual hacking. The anti-spammer simply used the tools available to get the information necessary. He didn't need to break through any security or do anything malicious to get the info. If you read the ruling, it sounds like a judge could define plenty of perfectly normal online activities as "hacking." Update: There's a good discussion in the comments, suggesting that there's a lot more going on here than is clear from the article itself. The judge's finding of facts suggest that the anti-spammer did some questionable things, including lying and ignoring an injunction -- which certainly hurt his case. However, others are suggesting that the judge's finding of facts are incorrect and there's much more to this story that will come out on appeal.

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Appeals Court Tosses Out $11 Million Ruling Against Spamhaus... For Now

from the one-step-in-the-right-direction dept

You may recall that last year there was a lot of news about a direct email firm, e360insight, suing anti-spam organization SpamHaus for listing the email firm as a spammer -- and winning over $11 million. Part of the reason for the decision was that SpamHaus, after originally preparing to fight the charges, simply ignored the case and said that it didn't apply since SpamHaus is based in the UK and the lawsuit was in Illinois. Because of that, the district court judge gave a default judgment to the e360insight and awarded the company $11 million from SpamHaus (which SpamHaus neither had nor intended to deliver). The court also issued an injunction against SpamHaus, saying it could no longer list e360 as a spammer -- which SpamHaus has ignored. However, now, an Appeals Court has tossed out the injunction and the monetary award, saying that the district court judge didn't look closely enough in determining the punishment -- and simply accepted the word of the guy behind e360insight in saying how much SpamHaus's listing had cost him.

While this is initially a victory for SpamHaus, it doesn't change the initial default judgment against SpamHaus -- it just sends the ruling back to the lower court to rethink what the punishment should be. So, SpamHaus may still be on the hook for certain damages and may again be told not to list e360insight (though, again, it'll probably ignore any such ruling). Of course, with the recent ruling that found section 230 of the CDA means that anti-spyware vendors are allowed to call any software they want spyware, as long as they have a good faith belief that it is spyware, you have to wonder if SpamHaus could use the same law to defend its ability to call any particular organization a spammer. It may be too late for that in this case, with SpamHaus already having decided not to take part -- but for future reference, it will be interesting to see if others start using this same argument.

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