Anti-Spam Lawyer Loses Appeal, and His Possessions 237
Techdirt is reporting that one particularly rabid anti-spam fighter has not only lost his case, but most of his worldly possessions as well. James Gordon tried to set himself up as an ISP to get around the conventions of the CAN SPAM act in order to set up a litigation house designed to sue companies that spam. Unfortunately a judge did not take kindly to this trick and ordered him to pay $110,000 to the firm he was suing, a decision that was not only upheld on appeal but accompanied by some very unkind words trying to shut down litigation mills like his. "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."
He should have set up a company to sue for him (Score:4, Interesting)
The appeals court made a really biased decision. (Score:5, Interesting)
Reading the decision, it is clear that the appeals court was biased.
On the issue of the Washington law preemption, the Court referred to the complaint regarding subject lines and from lines as being "vanity domain names" that were not deceptive. The use of From lines of "Free IPOD" or "Free 50 inch Plasma TV" is deceptive. Just because, after opening the e-mail, and doing whois lookups, that you can determine that it is from Virtumundo, does not mean that the from is deceptive.
The appeals court refused to rule who is an IAS, but said that a well known IAS (ie. Hotmail) does not have to show harm from spam because it is obvious, but a little guy does. The Court went further and said that harm under can-spam can't be the ordinary business expense of carrying e-mail, but one can argue that any mail provider must filter spam and carry spam, therefore there can never be harm from spam, illegal or legal. Any good IAS must provide extra capacity so that if there is spam, they will not crash.
Do you feel sorry for the professional spammers that get harmed by the professional anti-spam litigation service? Of course, if Virtumundo itself in the from line, their spam would have been deleted by most filters.
People do this for Faxes too (Score:5, Interesting)
The anti-spam-fax law allows for individuals to sue for damages and so many people have set up fax lines and started collecting faxes and collecting money. I don't know if that is still going on or not, but I heard some people made it a full-time living.
The CAN SPAM act is another problem in that individuals are not allowed to sue. The ISPs are the ones who are eligible for that. This part of the law needs to change. While allowing individuals to sue might be a bit too much for some litigation-happy individuals to resist, I think it might be fair enough to allow domain holders and mail hosts to sue under the CAN SPAM act. I say this because I own three domains and would be happy to file a legal action or two except for the fact that the amount of spam I receive is pretty low at the moment... and by low, I mean one or two every two or three days. (Thank you greylisting! Say that "it won't work" all you like, but the results speak differently.)
Should setting up shop in order to take advantage of a law against spamming be allowed? HELL YES it should! The opposite is certainly true and acceptable -- for business to have laws written to their advantage. Is the a provision in the CAN SPAM act that says you can't do this? Is there any law, federal or state, that says you can't do this? The bottom line is that someone set up a "honey net" for profit via the judicial system. Perhaps its the perceived abuse of the judicial system that is the issue?
Wait, why 'haha'? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wait, why is this tagged 'haha'?
If I understood the summary properly, an anti-spammer's life is being ruined by a spammer?
What the hell? Surely this is a bad thing! Coincidentally, virtumondo is a very nasty piece of Windows adware/spyware too!
Re:People do this for Faxes too (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder if a "real" ISP would be able to partner with a spam-fighter to allow them to fight the good fight. I'm sure within half a dozen phone calls, you'd fine one that was willing to lend you their name. I'd suggest looking at the list of registered ISPs at the Copyright office - http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/list/index.html [copyright.gov] as they're likely to have all of the other bases covered already.
Re:People do this for Faxes too (Score:2, Interesting)
Should setting up shop in order to take advantage of a law against spamming be allowed? HELL YES it should! The opposite is certainly true and acceptable -- for business to have laws written to their advantage. Is the a provision in the CAN SPAM act that says you can't do this? Is there any law, federal or state, that says you can't do this? The bottom line is that someone set up a "honey net" for profit via the judicial system. Perhaps its the perceived abuse of the judicial system that is the issue?
Well, either that or the fraudulent court filings where the guy claimed he was an ISP, but he wasn't. If you seek to use a "honey net" in the judicial system, you have to make sure you're acting completely above board.
The CAN SPAM act is another problem in that individuals are not allowed to sue. The ISPs are the ones who are eligible for that. This part of the law needs to change. While allowing individuals to sue might be a bit too much for some litigation-happy individuals to resist, I think it might be fair enough to allow domain holders and mail hosts to sue under the CAN SPAM act.
Also, this is an interesting thing I'd like to point out. You're in favor of suing spammers, but are opposed to litigation-happy individuals doing it, because... we'd have to read about all those spammers facing trials on Slashdot? Seriously, why? It seems, from your reference to "litigation-happy individuals" and suggestion that it be limited to people in your situation, your primary complaint is that some people might make money for their time and efforts suing spammers, and that those people aren't you. This is a bit disingenuous.
Re:The appeals court made a really biased decision (Score:5, Interesting)
Spam can really cost someone money even if they aren't an ISP. I eventually had to change hosting companies just to kill that email address. To this day I can't use that address. Even with modern email filters, enough crap would get through to make it not worth using. I'm now using a gmail account.
Re:Wait, why 'haha'? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because, like a patent troll, Gordon wasn't trying to eliminate spam, he was trying to profit off laws against spam that might allow him to sue--a professional litigant.
Why do I give a shit if the man profits from it? Good for him. You sound like one of those guys on the freeway who lets nobody merge just because you don't want anybody to get ahead of you. I was not aware that it was a race or competition.
sometimes bad people (Gordon) do good things (fight spam) for the wrong reasons (personal profit) at a cost to us all (tying up the court system)
How is this tying up the court system? I suppose you'd prefer if everybody sued individually, multiplying the case load by thousands of times? I really am not following this logic.
Re:People do this for Faxes too (Score:2, Interesting)
You know what? Spam doesn't affect my life. I don't care to sue a spammer any more than I care to sue a homeless man on the subway or the chinese restaurant that slips a menu under my door. It shocks me that this is such a big deal. If everyone ignored it, it would go away.
Re:Morton's Fork (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Thank you (Score:1, Interesting)
...So I'd reverse your ratio there, and say 2% of the lawyers make the other 98% look bad. You just don't hear about the ones putting in regular hours, collecting their paychecks, and going home every night...
While what you post is undoubtedly true, in the legal profession they are supposed to be regulating each other and eliminating the bad 2% of lawyers (Bar Associations). That doesn't happen. Of the few lawyers disbarred at least half get reinstated in the same or another jurisdiction. Far too high of a percentage of those disbarred are disbarred because they committed felonies, not because of legal misconduct. Pick up one of Richard Abel's books on the legal profession such as American Lawyers or Lawyers in the Dock and read some about these sort of issues.
Re:Morton's Fork (Score:5, Interesting)
Spam doesn't break the system, it shows that the system is already broken. Building a robust system that actually works is better than building a broken system, hoping people don't exploit it, and then prosecuting people who inevitably do.
In computers, things that you aren't allowed to do you shouldn't be able to do. Processes shouldn't read each others' memory, so the operating system doesn't let them. Bob shouldn't read Alice's private files, so he can't. This is common sense design. We don't give the root password to some homeless guy, trusting it will be safe because he knows he'll be hung for high treason if he gives it away. OK it'll probably stay secret, but the whole affair was completely unnecessary as he didn't need the password. I call this a new design principle: Don't Randomly Give Away Your Passwords To Strangers That Are Good At Keeping Secrets.
It's the system's responsibility to maintain order. "Spammers shouldn't send mass mail, so..." should end in "...they can't." just like the other examples, and unlike your version which is "Spammers shouldn't send mass mail, so..." "...we prosecute them".
So good night argent (18001). Go back to your cowering behind your OS's memory protection, which prevents more useful inter-process communication than overflows.
Re:Morton's Fork (Score:4, Interesting)
Tell the credit card companies (American, all of them) that if anyone pays for an item advertised by spam using thier card, they are toast.
The credit card companies totally control what their merchants sell, how they sell it, etc. and could stop spam on 30 seconds if the US authorities went after them. Unfortunately they probably own the US government.
In simple terms spam is there, because the US gvernment wont stop it
abuse of the obvious (Score:3, Interesting)
The fly in the ointment is that sometimes the obvious won't peacefully coexist.
Arrow's impossibility theorem [wikipedia.org]
With email, we want some semblance of anonymity, the ability to cold-call (write to someone you've never written to before, who hasn't written to you, either), yet no ability to churn poo in mass quantities.
This is surprisingly difficult to engineer. With voting systems, first past the post is known to have more flaws than average, yet we persist with it on the grounds, I suppose, that people deserve the fruits of their inability to emotionally comprehend a system that works.
Plurality voting system [wikipedia.org]
For simplicity, every alternative system is lumped under the heading "the Italian model". This scares most people more than the mafia.
I was explaining to my sweetie the other day that math is all about spending hours to crack tiny grains of rice. Many of the people who struggle with math get caught up in the manipulations. The big ideas are tiny: positional number system, the digit zero, and challenge-response proof structure (aka calculus).
Let me explain that last one. Continuity was a tough nut to crack. All that infinity, how do you stop? It turns out, you don't actually show that the slope equals a value (that would be stopping, and stopping is verboten), you instead show that error bound can be made arbitrarily small (for any epsilon challenge, a delta response exists). It's a small idea, but essential, and rest of calculus follows directly.
From Arabic numerals [wikipedia.org]
Fibonacci, a mathematician born in the Republic of Pisa who had studied in Bejaia (Bougie), Algeria, promoted the Indian numeral system in Europe with his book Liber Abaci, which was written in 1202
This late date never fails to stun me. So much for the obvious being obvious.
My own proposal, which I contemplated in idle moments some years back but never fully fleshed out, is that we add computational cost to the email syn packet (aka the "cold call"). email messages part of a back and forth exchange could linked cryptographically by any of the methods that prevent hostile packet insertion in e.g. ssh sessions. The details are difficult and exceed my attention span, but it has obviously been done.
The receiving mail host could inspect the incoming message, determine that the packet is a syn packet (not linked within an established exchange) and then decide to impose a computational cost on the sending machine: please factor this product of two large primes, then I will trust you enough to relay this message.
The essential feature is that this functions as challenge response: the imposed cost (product length) can simply scale as a function of how bad the spam problem becomes. If the amortized computational cost imposed exceeds the expected return, the economic incentive to push spam will vanish. It's far easier for the receiving host to generate the prime product than the sending machine to perform the factorization.
There are other asymmetrical math problems if this has some defect. It could equally be solving SETI frames or protein folding, if those have no fatal flaws. (A determination which is best left to specialists.) The size of the prime product challenge could rise and fall in a manner similar to TCP/IP congestion control: if more spam gets through, cost escalates, until the spamholes declare a loss and bugger off again.
The game theoretic proposition from the spammers perspective is this: the receiving hosts can band together to make pushing spam arbitrarily expensive.
Some legit mail (cold call subset) might entail a mail host devoting hours to a factorization challenge. Ideally this computation would be delegated back to the email origin. I'd happily let my system grind for day to authenticate one outb