Slashdot Mirror
Australian Anti-Spammer Wins Court Case
An anonymous reader writes "The Australian court system upheld the right of internet activists to campaign against junk email in a landmark decision today. Story from The Australian." Sounds like the spammers (T3 Direct, of Perth) were justly told off.
Apparently, as a result of Mr McNicol's actions, 153 penis enlargers and 23 fake degrees never managed to get sold. The bastard.
1. "How to Lose a Lawsuit" (Oct. 17th)
:)
2. "Sending Commercial Email for Fun and Disprofit" (Oct. 19th)
3. "Abusing Educational Institutions' APNIC Records" (Oct. 24th)
4. "How to be a TOTALLY ANNOYING SELF-RIGHTEOUS ASSHOLE SPAMMER" (Every day at 2PM)
Let's see people attend these T3Direct seminars
I heard of someone who's intent on raising several million dollars to finance the hardware, software, connectivity and legal expenses of a new generation international spam-fighting network.
Seems he'll meet his funding targets, after being promised a substantial sum from a former government dignitary from Nigeria...
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
I hope the spammer was forced to pay the defendant's legal costs. The article doesn't say. Especially since the plaitiff was suing for the cost of "replacing" the computer system (according to the original article IIRC), and that is plainly ridiculous.
Also, an important point is that the court found that the plaintiff did not show that contacting SPEWS was illegal. This is good news (in Australia at least), as if the case had hinged on whether he contacted a blacklister or not, it would have a chilling effect on free speech and also anti-spam efforts - you wouldn't even be allowed to tell a third party that you received some email that might, possibly, be spam.
i hate all those damn e-mails like 'hey.. i missed you yesterday' and i find out its just porn. i thought a girl actually was thinking about me! =(
And news.admin.net-abuse.email is always an entertaining and informative Usenet newsgroup to read.
Just fire up your newsreader and...
Oh, look. New porn in the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica groups...
Never mind!
You know, every story I read about the Australian laws/trials on here, the more respect I have for their country. Not so the US - I'd expect this case to drag on far longer, and the spammer to win, based on past articles. Corporation/company vs little guy = little guy gets screwed...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
...and I know someone who works for T3 Direct.
Here's a juicy little tidbit: The company actually uses an application running on a Linux box to send out all that spam. It's called SpamIt, and uses MySQL as its backend.
(posting anonymously for obvious reasons)
By dismissing the case by saying that there was not enough evidence, the judge has avoided making a ruling into whether these types of claims are merited.
A greater victory would be if a judge ruled that spammers were a public nuisance with no legitimate business interests.
Future anti-spammers may still be faced with the prospect of legal action, if their is sufficient evidence to demonstrate their involvement in blocking spam.
Here yuo go:
Anti-spammer wins court case
Caitlin Fitzsimmons
October 14, 2002
THE Australian court system upheld the right of internet activists to campaign against junk email in a landmark decision today.
The District Court of Western Australia dismissed the lawsuit by Perth-based direct marketing firm T3 Direct against anti-spam activist Joey McNicol, describing it as "speculative and based on propositions (the plaintiff) knew to be incorrect".
The Which Company, trading as T3 Direct, had sued Mr McNicol for allegedly getting the company black-listed on anti-spam website SPEWS.org
SPEWS - or the Spam Prevention Early Warning System - publishes a list of internet protocol (IP) addresses believed to be used for unsolicited bulk email or spam. Network administrators and internet service providers (ISPs) can refer to the SPEWS list to block traffic from the black-listed IP addresses on their networks.
T3 claimed the action cost at least $82,000 in lost income and the cost of repairing its computer systems. Mr McNicol denied contacting SPEWS and argued that nothing he did or was accused of doing was illegal and today the court granted Mr McNicol's application for summary judgment.
The court found that T3 offered neither proof that Mr McNicol had contacted SPEWS nor that doing so was illegal.
The court rejected T3's claim that such a complaint to SPEWS was "unfounded", noting that T3 had elsewhere admitted to sending unsolicited advertising emails.
Australian IT
I found SPEWS.org to be a great spam fighting tool but what the T3 media group failed to notice that it is just an opinion. How can someone be wrong from sharing their opinion and then other people agree with it, in this case by using spews's blocklist. I'm glad this case has fallen the way it has as it sets a good precedent for any further actions spammers try to take
Cheap UK and US VPS
How can anyone with multiple funtioning brain cells still think a comment this hackneyed is funny.
ok, first off, i am not some ACLU nut. i am not here brandishing my first ammendment rights (i keep that safely in my pocket, out of sight)
i applaud efforts to keep kiddie porn (virtual too... though i realize that virtual porn technically is probly legal... but let us not open *that* can of worms today)
i think the library should carry banned books (like those heinous atrocities, Bridge to Terabitia and Hamlet and others
and i think spammers should rot in that circle of hell that Cerberus pukes all over. (ok, my Dante is rusty, i can't remember which circle, or if i got the puker right.. someone help me here)
but something seems fishy here. the company sued that one guy cos he "black-listed" their firm. the article didn't go into much detail, but it sounds as if that one guy, Joey McNicol, has quite a bit of power. i mean, what if i am a competitor of some company and i can convince Joey McNicol that their IP needs to be banned. as long as Joey McNicol is a true-blue swell guy, there is no way that can happen, but what if he isn't? i am in no way saying we need SPEWS regulated, but i wonder what some rather yucky worst case scenario - long term possible problems could arise from its misuse.
-John
"The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and hoping for different results"
Kiddie Porn = BAD Sunny Day in Spring = GOOD KIDDIE PORN BAD! just wanted to clear that little thing up RIGHT NOW! don't know HOW i missed that while previewing.
"The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and hoping for different results"
Wait for Microsoft to complain that this will result in the loss of projected earnings due to fewer OS liscenses sold.
Less spam = less computers....right? Fewer servers; firewalls; service calls, etc. How's an industrial tyrant supposed to make a living, now that Enron's been deloused.
What is this spammer called T3? I don't think I've ever gotten spam from...
Dang it, I've got mail.
ok, whatever you say mister.
Just step this way please.
Note that this was a case where the company brought the initial action and the court was correct in ruling that there was insufficient evidence. The day when you are not allowed to legitimately complain about inappropriate netiquette (note that Washington state has some statutes on how not to spam people on an opt-out list) is the day when we might as well log off and retreat to the desert.
What is a much harder process is for the individual to bring a suit against a spammer. Various tort actions (based on trespass to chattel) have succeeded but the prohibitive cost for individuals to assemble and argue their case makes this course viable only for deep-pocketed ISPs (who tend to bear a disproportionate share of the cost of wasted bandwidth).
To solve the problem requires much more than legal maneouvers. Fundamentally the internet mail architecture has structural weaknesses and until schemes such as IM2000 (http://cr.yp.to/im2000.html) are implemented, spammers will always have an economic incentive in socialising the costs and privatising the benefits.
LL
I'm not aware of any vaguely popular blacklists that would add an IP/range on the strength of one random unknown person presenting what appeared to be a spam from that IP. That would obviously be ridiculous. Do you really think they would become as popular as they are if they were that stupid?
Either you have to be a known person with a known reputation, or you have to be one of many people presenting mutually corroborating evidence (some popular blacklists work on a voting or threshold system), or the blacklist operators have to have received the spam themselves.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
it's the same old, same old situation
it's the same old, same old ball and chain
The court found that T3 offered neither proof that Mr McNicol had contacted SPEWS nor that doing so was illegal
So in theory nobody exactly won...for had the T3 posted and/or obtained the information that linked Mr McNicol to the blacklisting, the outcome may have been different. Though they have raised an interesting question as well, personally I'm interested why did T3 say that contacting spews would be illegal?
Live for the present, learn from the past, and dream of the future!
a) Sex with a mare.
OR...
b) Sex with a mare.
Firstly: the decision in this case occurred in an Australian court, so there are no first amendment rights to be brandished anyway (and of course the ACLU has no presence). The merits or otherwise of the US Constitution/Bill of Rights are an unrelated issue - it is a simple fact that they do not apply outside the US.
I would say though, that censorship is usually a Bad Thing - it is just that a blacklisting organisation like SPEWS is not realing censoring - they simply provide a list of spammers to people who want to be able to avoid spam. No one is taking away T3's right to send email, or especially their right to say what they like in that email - but some people would like to be able to choose not to get it.
If a company was unfairly added to a blacklist, they are free to negotiate with the organisation concerned to get their addresses removed. In this case of T3, they are indeed spam merchants, so their chances are happily slim.
First, Joey has no known relationship to SPEWS. T3 deliberately or accidentally confused them because SPEWS does not publish contact info while Joey was visibly complaining about them. SPEWS almost certainly blacklisted T3 on their own without being told by anyone - they monitor spamtrap addresses.
Could SPEWS abuse their power? Well, MAPS and ORBS both abused their power at one point by adding 'spite listings'. This led to the downfall of ORBS and contributed to the irrelevance of MAPS. SPEWS is under a microscope - every one of their listings can be challenged on nanae. On the very rare occasions where they're wrong, the listings are quickly changed. If SPEWS ever has a single known persistent listing that is not justified in the eyes of the anti-spam community, there will be substantial protest and a serious loss of confidence in SPEWS. So far there has never been any mystery - every listed address is linked in some obvious way to persistent mail abusers.
I'm not aware of any vaguely popular blacklists that would add an IP/range on the strength of one random unknown person presenting what appeared to be a spam from that IP. That would obviously be ridiculous. Do you really think they would become as popular as they are if they were that stupid?
:)
yea, i agree. but that australian news article didn't really go into detail of how SPEWS decides who stays and who gets banned. after a quick read of the the SPEWS faq it sounds like they have an automated system overseen by several admins. (news flash) and they only target known spammers and spammer friendly sites. and they stress that anyone who uses SPEWS does so willingly and knowing that some legitimate email could be bounced.
so i suppose in this case, i am sure it's probly a pretty benign system. however, like any banning list, there are people that must make the decisions what to ban and what not to ban. yea, overt spammers get banned, but what about the grey area? also, what about the ones who get banned for no reason? (SPEWS admits it happens and even has a full page dedicated to it.
what i was alluding to in my first post was that having any list like this is a form of censure-ship. though SPEWS says it is not:
from the faq:
Q10: Isn't SPEWS censorship?
A10: No, SPEWS is a list of areas of the Internet that some people do not wish to communicate with. Think of it as one group's Consumer Reports review of portions of the billions of Internet addresses. These are the ones SPEWS members have a poor opinion of. SPEWS is not anti-commerce and fully supports the USA's First Amendment and other nation's free speech protections. In fact, the USA's Supreme Court agrees with the SPEWS view. The creators of SPEWS are its main users and who it was designed for, if others decide to also use its data, they are exercising their own rights. No one is forced to use SPEWS.
no one is forced to abide to banned book lists either. in fact the caveat in the above faq answer closely mirrors the caveat in the pabbis banned book site at the link above that says essentially, that pabbis doesn't think books are bad, that is up to parents to decide. they just provide a list. SPEWS doesn't decide that they are bad, they just provide a list of spammers and companies do what they wish.
but like i said, upon further reading of the SPEWS site, i think they are probly a good thing in the end, but i still think that if used incorrectly (just like every single tool and technology ever created... yea, even sporks) it could become a bothersome hassle or even, in some wacko Brave New World scenario, a way to silence the voice of the people. we could have lists to ban IP's from known dissidant factions or unpopular opinions.
but those days are a few decades away still
-John
"The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and hoping for different results"
With spammers, we all know that step 2 has to be "annoy lots of people."
Catch a ride on the Clue Train, buddy.
SpamIt focuses on the low-end Mom-and-Pop Viagra, penis enlargement, make-money-now, vitamin, collectable plate, juice machine and herbal weight loss SPAM genre.
SpamIt's target audience are those poor DSL/Cable enabled schmucks who would otherwise sell Amway.
First, Joey has no known relationship to SPEWS. T3 deliberately or accidentally confused them because SPEWS does not publish contact info while Joey was visibly complaining about them.
:), the idea just hit me as i read that article.
point taken. also to the rest, i agree, if SPEWS begins to misbehave, it will lose power. i guess what sparked me to comment was my concern of lists of IP's being gathered and distributed in legit ways and the possibility of those lists being misused somehow. no i am not a government-hating paranoid nut
-John
"The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and hoping for different results"
Firstly: the decision in this case occurred in an Australian court, so there are no first amendment rights to be brandished anyway (and of course the ACLU has no presence). The merits or otherwise of the US Constitution/Bill of Rights are an unrelated issue - it is a simple fact that they do not apply outside the US.
point taken, however, i wasn't referring to the US constitution and trying to apply it in a foreign land. that would be silly. i only mentioned that little bit to let everyone know that i wasn't some civil liberties crusader out trying to rid of the world of censoring and banning anything. I am not like that and didn't want my post to be taken that way. sorry if i wasn't clear.
as for the rest, yea, in this case T3 was probly guilty, especially since it came to my attention that i misread and Joey wasn't even part of SPEWS. oh, and i agree it's not censoring, but if enough people adopt the list, it is effectively the same as censoring... though a full censorship of those stupid emails would be nice.
regards, John
"The definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and hoping for different results"
you leave out the part where she objects and kicks your balls into the next timezone...
I am here to help, and I remain, dear sirs,
The_Messenger
I hope no one will sue me about the aproximately 42 million spam mails that got lost in my honeypot. (I honestly didn't think anybody would miss them.)
Oh well, if they try something, I sue them for trying to abuse my computer as open relay and win the case.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
...see, I told you there were people outside of the United States that bring stupid lawsuits to court!
A farmer is sitting in the neighborhood bar getting soused. A man comes in and asks the farmer, "Hey, why are you sitting here on this beautiful day getting drunk?"
Farmer: Some things you just can't explain.
Man: So what happened that is so horrible?
Farmer: Well if you must know, today I was sitting by my cow milking her. Just as I go the bucket about full, she took her left leg and kicked it over.
Man: That's not so bad, what's the big deal?
Farmer: Some things you just can't explain.
Man: So then what happened.
Farmer: I took her left leg and tied it to the post on the left with some rope. Then I sat down and continued to milk her. Just as I got the bucket about full she took her right leg and kicked it over.
Man: Again?
Farmer: Some things ya just can't explain.
Man: So, what did you do then?
Farmer: I took her right leg and tied it to the post on the right.
Man: So then what did you do?
Farmer: I sat back down and continued to milk her, and just as I got the bucket just about full, the stupid cow knocks over the bucket with her tail.
Man: Wow you must have been pretty upset!
Farmer: Some things you just can't explain.
Man: So then what did you do.
Farmer: Well I didn't have any more rope, so I took off my belt and tied her tail to the rafter. In that moment, my pants fell down and my wife walked in.
banned book lists [pabbis.com]
a farewell to arms?
of mice and men?
american heritage dictionary??
animal farm?
flowers for algernon?
WHERE'S WALDO?????
these are banned books? i find that hard to believe...
Hmm.. I beg to differ.
1. Send Spam
2. Profit
3. Attend Court
4. Hear "you naughty boy" lecture.
5. Pay small % of item no.2 in charges
6. Rinse
7. Repeat
The website that has been following this issue from the start, http://t3-v-mcnicol.ilaw.com.au, has finally published the decision in pdf format (see it here). On pages 6 & 7, Deputy Registrar Hewitt, in paragraphs 15 & 16, says the following:
"15 Counsel for the plaintiff suggests that it would be unfair to end this action at this stage without giving the plaintiff the opportunity to further explore this case using the interlocutory processes now available to it in these proceedings.
16 I do not agree. The plaintiff has commenced an action which appears to me to be speculative and based on propositions which it knew to be incorrect (see my earlier discussion regarding unfounded). If not an abuse, the action is akin to one."
In other words, the Deputy Registrar feels that T3 and Mansfield's bringing this suit forward was as close to abuse as they could get without the action being prosecuted as being frivolous and without just cause! What a maroon!
I read NANAE regularly; this whole T3 Direct saga has been nothing but the highest entertainment to me. It's even better than watching circus clowns!
Rich
I think he's got the old stories/diaries archived too, so hopefully they'll resurface. I've also got a couple of ideas for stories that I'm saving up until the site's live, so hopefully it'll not be too far away.
BTW, is your email still T....T......@hotmail.com? If so I'll try and talk to Joe and see if he can get you into the irc channel - it's kept well protected these days. If I can get hold of him I'll mail you the info.
PS. Thank's for inventing the AOL/Internet.
Why are we happy when something that should be handled by new technology gets taken care of by the legal system? To me all it this says is that nobody is serious enough about SPAM to come up with a smart solution.
If it was your job to come up with a technological solution to SPAM, what would it be? Come on people, we don't have to sit around and wait for government action to "fix" this.
Maybe part of the solution could be a service where mail servers could freely send timestamp, IP address, and maybe checksum on the last 10 lines of incoming emails. If there is a high percentage of matches that are milliseconds apart, it's probably spam, and the service could send out "probable spam" warnings to the servers that sent the checksums. The servers could then act on the info as they please. The mail servers could delay delivery for maybe 7 minutes to see if they get a "probable spam" warning (remember, email was not designed to be an 'immediate delivery' service).
This was off the top of my head, and yes, I see numerous holes in it (legitimate mailing lists not withstanding), but this could be part of a solution in conjunction with other ideas.
So, what would you suggest?
On the other hand - what's it costing them?
1:"Shall we pay for advertising?"
2:"Fsck no! Just click this big button here marked 'Spam'."
1:" . . . . "
2:"It's free."
1:"Hot damn!"
"If being a geek means being passionate about something, then I pity those who aren't geeks." - Pike65
A spanish person ((thor.)compuocasion.com & ventasdirectas.net) who kept trying to spam me used a SUSE box server.
There are a couple of recent articles over at The Truth Laid Bear regarding various techno-approaches to spam and telemarketing. And this is good. However we see that regardless of the technology, spammers seem to wiggle around it.
Similarly, in the past few years, at least in the States, we've begun to see legislation on a state-by-state basis. Mostly to no avail.
So if technology isn't working, and legislation isn't working then does this imply that us resorting litigation indicates we are beaten? Is taking these scum-buckets to court a last desperate attempt by those of us frustrated by this flood-o-crap we call spam?
healyourchurchwebsite.com - WWJB?
Sure there is. MAPS lists and Paul Vixie. :-) Not to rag on Paul. He's a swell guy. But if he said to list them because they're spammers, I'd believe him without a doubt.
It was not a cease and desist order type of a lawsuit. It was a civil case where the plaintiff was seeking compensation for lost income and for other costs from the defendant.
Joey's legal bill ran to a couple of tens of thousands USD and yes, the judge ordered those costs be paid by the plaintiff. Joey McNicol posted as such in news.admin.net-abuse.email last night.
The judgment can be found at http://t3-v-mcnicol.ilaw.com.au/judgment.pdf
Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Can you appeal a summary judgement? That would seem foolish, since the point of summary judgement is to keep from wasting the court's effort on hopeless cases.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
1) The court concluded that Suing Spammer had not shown that the defendant had contacted SPEWS, and
2) The court concluded that the Suing Spammer had not shown that reporting Spammer to SPEWS would have entitled Spammer to damages.
Now, for bonus points and to complete the in-session asskick of Suing Spammer,
3) The court notes that Suing Spammer has been sending unsolicited bulk e-mail, and so blacklisting Spammer on SPEWS was appropriate by whomever did it.
What a complete kickass! I just love it when people actually have common sense!
Waldo, obviously, must be using such Satanic means as witchcraft, mind-control, and either flight or teleportation (no doubt with the assistance of Dark Powers) in order to manipulate crowds into resembling him so closely while he flees into obscure locations. I highly recommend keeping this daemonic tome away from ye spawn.
Well, maybe not. Go ask the American Library Association; according to that List of Lists, for some reason it's 87 on the list of "most challenged" books. One could argue that it's not much of a "book" if the objective is to stare at pictures and find somebody, but *shrug* maybe the daemonologie explanation is more satisfying...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Suppose someone bookmarks the addresses and then gets hacked. We have this all the time. We have several info@addresses and we find that quite a lot of spam arrives with us as the "return address". People book mark us then get hacked and the address does end up being used to contact legitimate people. It is really defamation of our character that is going on here but it is presently not worth the trouble to track down those spoofing our addresses at this time.
One day, however, I'm sure we will be in court over this because we have atourneys on retainer in 2 countries and that is a little more fire power than most spammers think is pointed at them.
-- The_Messenger
While T3 Direct (those filthy spamming slimeballs) could appeal, and it ain't over til it's over, this was GOOD news. :)
Catherine
but with the whole bali thing, i dont think there's gonna be much else on the news here - you may not have heard of it yet - i mean, i dont think any americans died in it.
It was the first item on ABC News last night.
IIRC, two Americans died or are presumed dead.
However, my guess is that it would have gotten short shrift if it weren't for our country's hysterical freedom-sapping anti-terrorism insanity that has occurred since 2001-09-11.
Even so, BBC World's coverage was more comprehensive than ABC's "World" News Tonight (or even PBS's News Hour), and it wouldn't surprise me if not much more is heard about this incident on American commercial television.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
The ultimate Court of Appeal is Australia is the High Court not the Supreme Court and the High Court has held that there is an implied right of free speech in the Constitution. The Supreme Courts are only the highest Courts in the States and Territories. There is also plenty of common law, essentially the unwritten judge determined law which forms much of Australian law, confirming the existence of free speech. A good book of the subject, albeit a bit dated, is Frank Brennan "Too much order, too little law". Father Brennan is a son of a former High Court Chief Justice and a lawyer himself.
The situation would be different if someone falsely reported a person to be a spammer with te intention of damaging the "spammers" reputation or business that would be a tortious act.
T3 Direct says it will appeal the case on the grounds that it sends legitimate opt-in email as well as spam and the blocked IP addresses affected that part of the business too. Full story here.
The slow downloading might have something to do with the fact that there is a deluge of traffic to the stories about the Bali bombings. Priorities, priorities!
Read more, post less.
:-)
It seems SPEWS only used Joey McNicol's webpaged gripe about T3 as one of many links and bits of data that showed T3 to be spamming scum.
Why was he sued? Guess because he was a close local target.
Gotta go now, my "censure-ship" is leaving port and I've gotta be on it!
These systems are "self-correcting", that's the beauty of them.
If SPEWS or any other spam stop list starts listing things that are not related to the spam problem, people will just stop using them and switch to systems that do.
I've used SPEWS (with other lists) at our servers for a year now - zero problems that were not transient. Customers love it, and when I see the 80%-of-email-is-bounced-spam on the weekends which did not cost us bandwidth or storage, I love it.
Hmm.. I beg to differ... or at least offer a differnet path.
1. Send Spam
2. Get blacklisted
3. Find you can't reach a segment of the net
4. Make less profit
5. Rinse
6. Repeat
In my version the loop eventually breaks when [profit < time+effort put into spamming]
Two other methods, based on biological methods of pest control:
Sending spam: The majority of systems connected to the Internet do not run SMTP servers. If all of them started running an SMTP server that accepted all email that it was asked to relay, checked it for validity and then simply discarded it, the few genuinely working open relays would soon get lost in the mass of sterile ones.
This is the same method that is used to get rid of insect pests: flood the population with masses of sterile males so that all the females think they've bred but actually haven't.
Receiving spam: Set up a number of bottomless mail domains (bottomless = email sent to an address in that domain is accepted but silently evaporates) and flood Usenet with their addresses. There should be no problem in increasing the number of harvestable email addresses by a factor of 1,000 in this way: which means that a typical harvested address has a 99.9% chance of never being read-- those "1,000,000 email addresses" CDROMS will only contain 1,000 real ones.
Find out who they are and send round a couple of stout fellows with crowbars.
People don't mind being sued but object to the prospect of life in a wheelchair. Do the first two or three spammers and word will get round: spam will stop overnight and the lawyers will go hungry.
Muscle is cheap.
Senator NETTLE -- Mr President, I ask a supplementary question. I thank the minister for his answer and I am sure that he will be able to pursue that further. Could the minister assure the Senate that the government will not be using the horrendous events that happened on the weekend as an excuse to justify a further crackdown on civil liberties in Australia?
Senator HILL -- We certainly will not crack down on civil liberties, but we do believe that, in effectively responding to terrorism, there is sometimes a need for us all to accept that the extent of our traditional freedoms needs to be modified in these circumstances. That is why we have put legislation before this parliament which has that effect. We seek to do no more to modify those traditional liberties than is absolutely necessary to attack this terrorist threat, but if ever we need an example and illustration of how real this threat is we have had it in the last few days. We must do everything possible to effectively respond to it and to protect our people.
Article taken from here.
*********
Appeal likely in anti-spam case
Caitlin Fitzsimmons
OCTOBER 15, 2002
A DIRECT marketing firm suing an anti-spam activist has vowed to appeal after losing its court case in Perth yesterday.
The Which Company, trading as T3 Direct, had sued internet activist Joey McNicol for allegedly landing the company on a "blacklist" run by anti-spam website SPEWS.org.
SPEWS (spam prevention early-warning system) runs a list of IP addresses believed to be used for spam. Internet service providers (ISPs) or systems administrators can refer to SPEWS and choose to block traffic to and from the blacklisted IP addresses.
Yesterday, the District Court of Western Australia threw T3's claim for more than $80,000 damages out of court, describing it as "speculative" and based on propositions the plaintiff "knew to be incorrect".
But Wayne Mansfield, the owner of T3 Direct, said he would appeal within the next 14 days.
"We will appeal on the basis that we failed to explain the difference between unsolicited email and opt-in lists, between clients and ourselves," Mr Mansfield said.
While he admitted T3 Direct sent unsolicited emails, he said the company also managed opt-in lists on behalf of clients.
Mr Mansfield said the SPEWS blacklisting had blocked IP addresses, which were used to provide legitimate services to his clients and kept separately from the IP addresses used for spam.
He said publicity from the court case had helped his business but it came at a hefty price.
"We've had people screaming down the phone, we've had bricks through windows, it's just beyond comprehension," he said.
In the original case, T3 asserted the SPEWS listing cost more than $40,000, including $14,000 to replace the IP addresses, $4750 to pay technicians to set up an alternative mail delivery system, $5000 for a new server, and $20,000 for lost income while waiting for a new internet connection.
The total damages claim blew out to more than $80,000 when internet providers Swiftel Communications, OzEmail and web hosting firm WebCentral cut service to the company for allegedly breaching anti-spam clauses in their terms and conditions.
The case attracted international attention and concerned internet users, worried that a win by T3 would legitimise spam, contributed more than $10,000 to help cover Mr McNicol's legal costs.
Mr McNicol admitted to publishing details about T3 Direct on his website, but denied contacting SPEWS and argued nothing he did or was accused of doing was illegal.
Yesterday, the District Court of Western Australia found there was no evidence that Mr McNicol had contacted SPEWS and in any case doing so would not be illegal.
The court also rejected T3 Direct's claim that Mr McNicol's complaints about spam were "unfounded", pointing out the company had itself admitted to sending unsolicited emails.
Mr McNicol said he was relieved the court had made such a "strong decision".
"It would have been disastrous if they'd taken away our right to complain," he said.
"It would have rendered email pretty useless - it has got so out of hand already."