Habeas Seeks Poetic Justice for Trademarked Spam

Remember the company who started using haiku to fight spam? According to a news.com article, it will now be tested in court. Habeas is suing two internet marketers, saying that they've included Habeas' haiku in their mail, thereby lowering their SpamAssassin score by 6 points, but allegedly violating the trademark. It's interesting because the end effect of this will be more or less spam, but it's based on trademark law. It'll also be interesting to see how well this holds up across national boundaries.

Comments

Fine the *originating* companies

[nurb432]

I've been saying this all along.

If you fine the people who advertise improperly, then they will stop hiring spammers to do it.

Plus its easier to track down the company that is offering the product/service then the scummy spammer that will hide from you.

Re:Tagging

[WCMI92]

I've been using PopFile for the last month and a half... Out of thousands of emails I've received, Popfile has made only a handful of mistakes. It runs over 99.3% accurate. I've used the same e-mail address for 5 years, and it's obviously on virtually all spam lists...

I too have noticed that the number and voracity of spam has increased DRAMATICALLY in the last few months. And lately some seem to find their way around my blockers.

I don't get it... If I am going to such extremes to AVOID spam, why should the spamemr WANT to go to lenghts to get around it? I obviously am someone who DOES NOT and WILL NOT patronize their products... So why waste the effort?

PopFile, btw, is free software:

http://popfile.sourceforge.net/

Re:Waiting....

[mistered]

Nah, Hormel's cool about using the term spam to describe unsolicited commercial email. It's so refreshing to see a company have some common sense when it comes to trademark issues.

We do not object to use of this slang term to describe UCE, although we do object to the use of our product image in association with that term. Also, if the term is to be used, it should be used in all lower-case letters to distinguish it from our trademark SPAM, which should be used with all uppercase letters.

This slang term does not affect the strength of our trademark SPAM. In a Federal District Court case involving the famous trademark STAR WARS owned by LucasFilms, the Court ruled that the slang term used to refer to the Strategic Defense Initiative did not weaken the trademark and the Court refused to stop its use as a slang term. Other examples of famous trademarks having a different slang meaning include MICKEY MOUSE, to describe something as unsophisticated; TEFLON, used to describe President Reagan; and CADILLAC, used to denote something as being high quality.

Re:$100 reward for information about a spammer

[AndroidCat]

If you want to unleash the experts on the people who joe-jobbed you, you should post this to the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email. Most of the people there would help out just to bag these turkeys. (And some might have a good idea of who they are already.) High noise ratio, but no worse than Slashdot.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:How Big A Problem Is Spam Really?

[Caveman Og]

Spam is a VERY big problem.

The trouble is that you, as an end user, can't possibly SEE how big the problem is. In addition, filters, while protecting you, the end user, only MASK the extent of the problem.

The costs incurred by spam are incremental, and are spread out among all the various parties who must decide whether to transmit, or block each spam message. These parites include far more than the sender and the recipient.

There's an interesting whitepaper at

http://word-to-the-wise.com/whitepapers.htm

The first doesn't bear on this issue, but the second one was a presentation given at the recent meeting of the IRTF's Anti-Spam Research Group. Those are real-life figures based on what real Internet providers are seeing.

The numbers, when you add them up, are scary.

--Og

Re:Why this might not be so good.

[sharph]

Yes, they do have a contract with the contract holder. They give away the right to use the trademark in e-mails for personal or ISP use.