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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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
"Oh, wait... someone already did that. Well, that's saved me a lot of time, then!"
And my, It has worked so well.
The problem with blacklisting:
1. It easily affects large numbers of innocent people
2. It requires active participation by everyone
3. It does not stop spam
I was hoping for some creative new ideas. Is everyone of the opinion that spam is not stoppable without legislation?
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!