Slashdot Mirror
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.
For spam to American e-mail addresses to be effective, a product has to be delivered TO an American physical address.
Any judgement against the spam should be enforced against the money being transacted to the spamvertiser.
Cut off the money supply to the spammer's customer, cut off spam.
Corporatism != Free Market
If you don't think bandwidth use is a problem, if you don't think needing spam filters is a problem, if you don't think storage space is a problem, if you don't think that losing legitimate email when a spam filter malfunctions is a problem, if you don't think unauthorized computer access is a problem, if you don't think that crashing mail servers under abusive volumes of traffic is a problem, if you don't think wire fraud is a problem, then consider this:
Spam is threatening connectivity and shutting down useful services. Open relays used to be a public convenience. Because of spam, if you set one up today, you'll find thousands of places blocking your traffic. Mailing lists used to allow non-subscribers to post. Because of spam, you now have to subscribe first before asking a question. We used to imagine the net as a worldwide utility. Because of spam, many people are now blocking everything from China.
Does this answer your question?
"here are better things, for sure, but spam is not a small problem. It's fine that you can block out most of it and make it a minor annoyance, but what if everyone would do that? The end result would that there would that you would get more spam, because the spammers would be forced to find a way around your filtering system, which undoubtedly they eventually would do. Also, spam is overall a drain on resources: a drain on bandwidth, a drain on processing power passing them on from server to server, and a drain on disk space storing them, so spam is a problem, and it should be stopped, even if right now it is only a "minor annoyance"."
So, we should all leave our front doors unlocked, and the keys in our car's ignitions just to prevent the crook from having to WORK HARDER to violate our space?
I fail to see the logic in your agument, though I agree filtering is not the answer.
What should be illegal is unsolicited advertising that uses the victim's RESOURCES. That is theft.
Corporatism != Free Market
"he problems I've seen from large companies is that they hire "marketing" companies who say they have "opt-in" lists and then proceeds to spam the living hell. Complaining seems to just get you listwashed so I just end up blocking them. Seems to work"
Doesn't matter how many layers deep the originating company buries it. Somewhere there is STILL a transaction of money from that company that ends up in the spam.
And somewhere from the spam there is a resulting transaction that results in profit for that company.
Which, if it's a LEGAL enterprise, is all on the books. Else the company, managers and officers are comitting felonies.
If it's NOT a legal enterprise, then obviously the spammer himself is aiding and abetting, itself a crime.
How many want to guess how much crime and fraud have been aided and abetted by Ralsky and co?
Corporatism != Free Market
This gives them a dual-pronged legal attack approach on anybody who uses their header without permission, which I suppose makes it easier to enforce. And, in fact, they force their own hand by including trademarked slogans, because failure to sue violators would result in possible loss of trademark rights over time.
However, the part that irks me is that according to their FAQ they have patented their "system". Their system? How the hell can you patent the use of a legal mechanism? There is no technical novelty to their spam filtering mechanism, and in fact, they provide no spam filtering themselves, you just set up Spam Assassin or other programs to account appropriately for their particular headers. I've seen plenty of other header-flagging schemes for assisting spam filtering. The novelty then is claiming both copyright and trademark to the header text? Okay, this makes me not terribly fond of this company, even though it's nice and all that they are giving royalty-free "licenses" to individuals, I am not clear that they could ever successfully prosecute a patent case against anybody else who uses header-filtering of copyrighted or trademarked text of their own choosing to fight spam. Anyone have any information on case law describing patents of legal constructs? How would that differ from trying to patent a tax shelter mechanism? If you could actually do that, don't you think KPMG et. al. would have been using patent law to protect their legal constructs all along?
This is just one of those funny, small, novel legal ideas that would be nice to generate and give away to better humanity, but is simply crazy to try to build a business around.
"companies who say they have "opt-in" lists"
Then a $1,000,000 dollar fine should convince them that it's worth ensuring that the companies they deal with don't lie.
No, his point is that, at best, spam can be solved only for the technologically aware elite who know how to use mail filters and such better than others. His point is that if everyone else learns how to use our tools, spammers will find better tools, forcing us to find yet better ones.
In other words, it's like the old joke about two guys that are attacked by a tiger. One guy puts on his running shoes, and the other guy says "You think you're going to outrun a tiger?!?" The first guy says, "No...I only have to outrun YOU." Point is, the only reason we don't get so much spam in our inbox is that spammers are perfectly fine feeding off of people who don't have our abilities, and I'm not OK with that. As you say, it doesn't mean I'll take off my mail filters, but I don't think anyone was suggesting that.
Ultimately, I agree with him - I think finding a solution that works not only for me but for less capable compter users is a good thing.
And, as he says, eventually the bandwidth problem will be so severe that spam will increase the cost of internet access for everyone, and that, I think we can agree, is bad, and makes spam a problem that is worth solving - ask any operator of an ISP how much of their traffic is spam-related.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Ignoring a problem will not make it disappear, but could make it grow worse until you really notes it, and maybe then will be too late.
IANAL, but couldn't you sue "John Doe", and then find out who they are via discovery from their hosts?
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
Where's law enfrocement when it comes to fraudulent businesses, anyway? At least half the spam I have is for products that are obviously fraudulent, and some (like untested medical products) that may be illegal.
About the other half is for porn, of which I presume a large precentage are running credit card scams.
The Iraq T-shirts ad may be about the most legit spam I've gotten, but who knows. But I got only one. The other 99 in my bogofilter-current directory are all total BS.
Is it the war on terror or something, or does the federal government just not give a shit about prosecuting fraud?