Spammer That Sued Spamhaus Now Sued for Spamming

Dave Q. Lintard writes with a link to The Register's coverage of a suit against the spammer that sued Spamhaus. e360 Insight, as the company is known, is accused of using a botnet and compromised headers to get their 'advertising' into the mailboxes of the claimant. These are also the folks that tried to get the Illinois courts to suspend SpamHaus's domain registration when they wouldn't play by e 360's rules. 'e360 Insight sued Spamhaus after the anti-spam organisation blacklisted its domains over alleged spamming. In a default ruling made by an Illinois court in September 2006, Spamhaus was ordered to pay $11.7m in compensation to e360 Insight, pull the organisation's listing, and post a notice stating that it was wrong to say e360 Insight was involved in sending junk mail. UK-based Spamhaus did not defend the case and the ruling was made in its absence.'

Factual inaccuracy

[Looce]

Default judgments obtained in U.S. County, State or Federal courts have no validity in the United Kingdom and can not be enforced under the British legal system. A Plaintiff seeking to have such an order enforced must re-file the case in a British court of law and prove jurisdiction, as well as the small matter of proving the merits of the case, all of which were in this case bogus and would not have stood up in any court if tested. Spamhaus had advised Mr Linhardt from the start that a U.S. judgement would be invalid outside of the United States and that he would need to re-file his case in the United Kingdom. Spamhaus understands that David Linhardt does not wish to file in the United Kingdom because his activities are illegal here.

With source [spamhaus.org], of course. Emphasis mine. The entire document linked here is worth reading.

TFsummary failed to mention this.

Re:The Ultimate .Forward

[EveLibertine]

Agreed, no one should be forced to travel to another country to say they don't work there. But, you seem to imply that Spamhaus was somehow forced to represent themselves in this case. They weren't, and they didn't even show up anyway. In the end of it all, they'll probably wind up counter-suing for legal costs incurred over the whole venture. About your idea with court systems not processing litigation. I don't know about this. If a court thinks it doesn't have jurisdiction, it should just get bumped up to a higher court who could have jurisdiction, all the way until it reaches the supreme court. It's fairly trivial in this case, as it all worked out in the end, which you'd know if you read anything about what happened _after_ the default ruling.

The federal judge overseeing the e360insight v. Spamhaus case has ruled against a motion to yank Spamhaus' domain name out from under it.

After that, I can't really understand what the big deal is about. Sure, the $11 million fine is still up in the air, but Spamhaus won't pay it, and it seems it pretty much cannot be compelled to do so (at least not by trying to knock it off the internet). They just need to finish the appeal process and everything should be just fine.

Had Spamhaus made the "no jurisdiction" argument at the onset, it may very well have gotten the case dismissed. Instead, it finds itself in the undesirable and difficult position of having to appeal a summary judgment. Spamhaus is "working with lawyers to find a way to both appeal the ruling and stop further nonsense by the spammer," Linford told Ars Technica.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061020-8037 .html/ [arstechnica.com]

I hate spammers, I think Spamhaus is fantastic. But it doesn't change the situation at hand, which is that there is potentially or allegedly illegal activity going on in servers located within the U.S. Someone is liable for it, and most likely it's the individuals operating those server. The problem is (for e360 anyway) there are hundreds if not thousands of them, and they can't be bothered with that many individual lawsuits. So, they went straight for the company causing them problems, and fell flat on their faces while doing it. I guess you can get mad at the U.S. court for it "thinking" that it had jurisdiction over a foreign company, but that's just the way the system works. As I said before, at the face, it appears that some illegal activity is happening on servers located in the U.S. Someone in the U.S. is liable for that, and e360 alleged that it was Spamhaus. Be mad that Spamhaus acted like retards over the whole thing, not at the courts for doing their job. Otherwise you've just got your sights on the wrong target, just like e360 did. I think a much bigger issue, one that's actually worth getting pissed off about anyway, is that the activity in question (blocking spammers) is actually possibly illegal in the U.S. The most fantastic part about all of it, is that it isn't in the U.K.

Re:Insanely arrogant USA judges

[EveLibertine]

They didn't, at least not in this case. Spamhaus requested that the case be handled by this court. They chould have let it go to any court, then argued that whichever court it was had no jurisdiction, or let the court decide whenever it was handed the case that it didn't have jurisdiction. But that's not what happened. By requesting a specific court, it appeared that Spamhaus was going to actually fight the merits of the case, which would have waved jurisdiction arguements. So, to any court handling the case at this point, it would appear that Spamhaus was going to accept U.S. jurisdiction. But Spamhaus was just moving it to a court that they knew didn't have jurisdiction so that they wouldn't even have to show. I don't know why they didn't just let it go to any court, state or federal, and then claim grounds of no jurisdiction. Maybe their lawyers thought they might run into trouble in U.S. federal courts or something, and thought they had better chances of going this route. Nevertheless, the decision was Spamhaus', not any judge with a "god" complex.

Jurisdiction has already been determined.

[www.sorehands.com]

I am the one who filed suit against E360Insight and Linhardt [myspamsuit.com].

Courts already ruled that spammers can be sued where the spam is received (known as the effects test from Calder v. Jones, 465 U.S. 783, 804 S. Ct. 1482). My successful brief agaainst a porn spammer is here [barbieslapp.com].

Additionally, E360's sister business (http://www.bargaindepot.net) specifically programmed their web site to take orders from California (via drop down lists).

I don't think that any motion by them saying that there is no jurisdiction over them in Califonia, but they have jurisdiction over Spamhaus in the UK will pass either the smell test or the laugh test.

Careful what you say online about E360...

[merc]

The Usenet newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email (aka, NANAE) is wonderful for watching E360INSIGHT's Lindtard CEO try and support their suit against Spamhaus, as well as read Spamhaus' Steve Linford rationally explain themselves. Various posters to that newsgroup have outed E360 for spams they have received in the past and present.

Recently E360INSIGHT have filed a suit against those same people, likely for defamation (or libel, not sure). However it's worth noting that they feel they can use the law to suppress anyone who wishes to refer to them as spammers.

The old saying still rings true, that spam is continually being redefined by the spammers as "that which we do not do".

http://spamresource.googlepages.com/e360vFerguson. pdf [googlepages.com]

I'm not being very original...

[msimm]

But reposting [spamhaus.org] Spamhaus' own statement here seems reasonable. I hadn't read it before today myself.

A SLAPP lawsuit filed in an Illinois (United States) court by David Linhardt (aka e360 Insight LLC) against The Spamhaus Project Ltd., a British-based non-profit organization over which the US court had no jurisdiction, went predictably to default judgement when Spamhaus did not accept U.S. jurisdiction.

To get the lawsuit case accepted in Illinois, instead of filing in the correct jurisdiction (United Kingdom), David Linhardt fabricated under oath that Spamhaus "operates a business in Illinois". Despite being fully aware that Spamhaus was UK-based and that the British organization had correctly filed an Answer to the court declaring there was no jurisdiction, Illinois District Court Judge Charles Kocoras accepted Linhardt's false claim and proceeded, without asking to see proof of jurisdiction, to rule the British-based organization to be in Illinois jurisdiction. The Spamhaus Project in fact operates no business in the United States, has no U.S. office, agents or employees in Illinois or any other U.S. state.

The default judgement issued by Judge Charles Kocoras awards Linhardt, a one-man bulk email marketing outfit based in Chicago, compensatory damages for ficticious 'lost contracts' totaling US$11.7 million, orders Spamhaus to supress evidence of illegal spamming by Linhardt and to permanently remove Linhardt's spam evidence records, orders Spamhaus to lie to the public by posting a notice on its website stating that Linhardt is "not a spammer" and orders Spamhaus to cease stopping spam sent by Linhardt's company e360 Insight LLC to Spamhaus' users.

Spamhaus firmly stands by its position that Linhardt is a spammer (i.e: "a sender of unsolicited bulk email"), Spamhaus has a large evidence archive of spam sent by Linhardt and spam advertising Linhardt's website www.bargaindepot.net, sent to Spamtraps and non-existent users, including spam sent by Linhardt to a number of Spamhaus own investigators. Plus Spamhaus has many complaints from Internet users ready to testify they never opted-in to any such list and were being spammed by Linhardt/e360. (see samples of e360 spam below)

Spamhaus additionally has samples of spams advertising www.bargaindepot.net sent, in violation of the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act, with false routing information, from compromised computers on ADSL lines in Vietnam, China, Korea, Taiwan and Norway.

Spamhaus also stands by the absolute right, under the European Convention on Human Rights, of Spamhaus' users to refuse access to their private mailboxes on their private networks to senders of unsolicited bulk email or indeed any unwanted email, a right established also in U.S. law by Chief Justice Burger, U.S. Supreme Court, who ruled: "The asserted right of a mailer stops at the outer boundary of every person's domain". Spamhaus maintains that while Linhardt has a right under U.S. law to send as much unsolicited bulk email as he likes, he has no right under any law to force Spamhaus users to receive it.

The Illinois ruling shows that U.S. courts can be gamed by spammers with ease, and that no proof is required in order to obtain judgments over clearly foreign entities. Additionally, as spamming is illegal in the United Kingdom, a U.S. judge ordering a British organization to not block incoming Illinois spam into Britain goes contrary to U.K. law which orders all spammers to cease sending spam in the first place.

Default judgments obtained in U.S. County, State or Federal courts have no validity in the United Kingdom and can not be enforced under the British legal system. A Plaintiff seeking to have such an order enforced must re-file the case in a British court of law and prove jurisdiction, as well as the small matter of proving the merits of the case, all of which were in this case bogus and would not have stood up in any court if tested. Spamhaus h

Re:Insanely arrogant USA judges

[choongiri]

This statement requires substantiating evidence.

Here you go: http://www.spamsuite.com/files/e360vSpamhausNotice Removal.pdf [spamsuite.com]

By submitting the notice of removal instead of a defence of no jurisdiction, Spamhaus shot themselves in the foot, and submitted by default to the jurisdiction of the Illinois court.