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Megaspammer Monsterhut Loses On Appeal
Werehatrack writes "Much jubilation was expressed in news.admin.net-abuse.email when it was learned that the long-running court battle between PaeTec and Monsterhut had reached a definitive conclusion on Friday with a New York appeals court finding in favor of PaeTec which finally allowed PaeTec to pull the plug on their least-loved customer's connectivity. PaeTec was actually somewhat restrained in its news announcement on its own website, simply noting that they had won and that they had disconnected Monsterhut."
What I would like to see is a class action suit against these spammers. AOL lost a class action suit a while ago after it claimed unlimited connectivity but there were many business signals, and they simply gave several free hours as a settlement (which is odd since they offered me 1000 free hours in the mail over 45 days, which would be nice if I didn't have a cable modem, wanted a slow net connection with software that corrupts your dlls, and I wanted to be online just over 22 hours per day).
Why aren't there class action suits against spammers? What they are doing is actually against the law in many states, or at least when they forge the headers. They also cause infrastructure damages to ISPs and violate licenses. If they are charged $500 per email in suits against those who complain, and they sent millions of emails, shouldn't they be liable to everyone in a class action suit? Why no one has taken up class action suits against the spammers astounds me, it would be almost certain to win, and it would win large amounts of money.
Hey, maybe I should send an email to millions of people from the Internet about this great idea in which they can make thousands a day!
Just so everyone knows, this case has been dragging on since 3/01. Over a year, in which Monsterhut had unlimitied spamming rights on an ISP's network, actually against their will.
It's so odd. The US is the most litigious nation, worldwide, and yet we STILL suck at it.
Considering they sued the last one. I mean, would you hook these people up, knowing that you'd be lining yourself up for a good round of lawyering?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
BTW, what's up with lawyers and ugly courier documents? They use high-powered computers to draw vertical lines in the document header with ')' characters, as if all they had was an old Smith Corona manual typewriter. They always make documents on unwieldy legal size paper that won't fit in your filing cabinet. They use huge fonts that take up lots of paper. They print single-sided on heavy, thick stock. No wonder they're always running around with special 14-inch thick briefcases.
I've gone through a few patent applications (luckily at my employer's expense), where a lot of the process was paying some attorney $200/hr to: Take my carefully formatted documents (which had nice fonts, tables and clear diagrams), and transform them almost verbatim into an uninterrupted stream of monospaced courier text. They also took my nice diagrams and redrew them in a clunky style with little number tags stuck to every line on the drawings. Oh, and every plural noun had the phrase "a plurality of" inserted in front of it. I could almost write a Perl script to do this job.
No wonder the patent office has a hard time retaining patent examiners. Anybody would go mad reading documents all day that have all formatting and context removed.
Why can't the legal profession just come up with a nice standardized documet template?
Accept that I could be wrong, this is just my interpretation...
From what I read, Monsterhut established a contract with the ISP, then when the ISP provided them notification that the contract had been broken by Monsterhut, and the service was going to be terminated, Monsterhut turned around and got a lower court judge to establish an injunction against the termination of the service by the ISP.
Monsterhut's arguments were that they were not spaming, and that they had otherwise lived up to the contract.
The ISP's arguments were that the thresholds established for determining that Monsterhut had been spaming had been crossed, and that the contract was "At Will" meaning that either party could terminate the contract for any reason, or no reason at all.
The decision by the ISP to terminate the service was based upon the fact that the ISP had received more than 2% email complaining that Monsterhut was a spam source. I do not know what that 2% was of, (network trafic, number of complaints about customer spamming, total volume of e-mail to the ISP) but in my opinion that is a valid threshold. If they set the threshold lower, it is possible that anyone could get kicked off, without having sent any spam, simply because they upset some wanabe hacker who complained to the ISP. 2% of one of these levels means that more money is being spent handling this customer, than the customer is paying.
Personally I think that Monsterhut should be further delt with by making them pay for the ISP's legal bills.
-Rusty
You never know...
Some reasons?
1. Quick, reactive legislation is not good policy.
2. Distribution of speech is difficult and dangerous to legislate.
3. The correct way to solve this to make spammers pay for bits, changing their business model.
4. Who has time to write laws when their inbox is full?
At least some of the reason is due to court reporters. Long long ago in a job far far away, I wrote court reporting software. They charged by the page, and it used to be (still is?), at least in California, copyright by the reporter, not the court, and ALL rights of reproduction were with the reporter. They charged outrageously for copies, like $5 a page, much more for "immediate" turnaround. Lawyers could not legally photocopy the transcripts for their own use, they had to ask the reporter for more copies. They were constantly fussing with ways to get more pages out of the same transcript, such as 8 pitch, fewer lines per inch, wider margins, and so on. What a racket. Of course, that was when computers were just starting in, and indeed just beginning to be usable, so things may have calmed down since.
Infuriate left and right
http://www.paetec.com/1_2/1_2_6-3.asp?noprint
I'm glad PaeTec won and pulled the plug on Monsterhut (assuming they actually did), but those idiots at PaeTec deserved everything they got for having a "Spam is OK as long as it doesn't generate enough complaints" AUP in the first place.
The handler for them in my sendmail /etc/mail/access list shall remain ERROR:"550 paetec / monsterhut FOAD" until they fix their AUP and post it prominently on their web site. Until then, they can't be trusted to kick spammers off quickly in the future.
Despite the fact that I love to see a spammer take a good legal hit. It saddens me that none of you have seen the REAL legal implications from this judgement.
This allows any ISP to claim a violation under there "Acceptible use policy".
"Memorandum: Plaintiff, a marketing company that uses the Internet for advertising, entered into an agreement with defendant, an Internet service provider, to obtain Internet access services. The agreement incorporates defendant's Acceptable Use Policy, which provides that a subscriber, here, plaintiff, is in violation of the agreement if it engages in "spamming," defined as "[u]nsolicited, commercial mass e-mailing." Shortly after defendant began providing Internet access services to plaintiff, it notified plaintiff of its intention to terminate the agreement based upon plaintiff's spamming. Plaintiff commenced the instant action seeking declaratory relief and an injunction preventing defendant from terminating the agreement."
Note that this judgement does specificaly target "spamming ie mass unsolicited email" but you must think beyond just that small detail and take into consideration the larger implications of agudgeing the legality of the "Acceptible use policy"
This friends is trouble with a capitol T.
For instants... Say a mega large software company *cough* Microsoft *cough* with far reaching clout can convince an ISP to include a rule whereby using blah blah blah free-software is not considered acceptible use. Now suppose it convinces 100's of ISP's to include this.
The legal ramifications are ENOURMOUS.
Pray to god none of Billy's legal staff thinks of this.
is a self perpetulating haven for ambulance chasers. It encourages speculative legal actions irregardless of their merit. The litigant never has to worry about the total cost of the case.
This will not change until its reformed to follow practice of other countries based on common law.
If this was the UK/Ireland/Australia/wherever the losing c*nting spammer in this case would be left with nothing only the shirt on his back after having to pay ALL the expenses the ISP incurred w.r.t this case over the past 12 months as WELL as his own legal expenses.
In fact its doubtful it would have come to trial at all. The barrister acting on behalf of the plaintiff would have made it plain b4 hand that the action was shaky and would have painted a less than rosy picture of the likely financial outcome.
Curmudgeon
The more people and ISPs who start using software like Pyzor the more pointless spam becomes. It routes directly to a spam mailbox completely bypassing potential customers.
http://pyzor.sourceforge.net/
The more users it has, the more effective it becomes. Pyzor uses a central database of spam hashes to compare incoming mail against. If the hash of the body of the incoming mail matches an entry in the database then it's a spam. Discard it.
Sure someone will followup to say that they'll include random characters in each individual mail to change the hash values or they'll change parts of the message on each mail. Yes the authors are aware of this and the software already takes this into account.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
So it's been established that PaeTec must obey the court order. But, how about their peers ? PaeTec would have links to various other ISPs and backbone types. What if someone informed those ISPs of Monsterhut's static IP address, and they dropped all packets coming from there ?
What would happen then ? That's not PaeTec's fault. And, those ISPs could cite their own AUPs.
Because elected officials are no longer representing you, but their campaign funding sources. The right to be heard is now only available to those who have paid for it.
Want to know the fastest way to get spam outlawed? Use it for political advocacy for the upcoming election. Hey, it's extremely cheap, and spammers claim it's effective, so why not use it to shake up the status quo? If you're successful, you'll vote the bastards out. If not, you'll get spam outlawed (after all, we can't have the proles thinking they have any say in government (note: sarcasm)).
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions