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

National boundries don't matter

[WCMI92]

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.

Re:How Big A Problem Is Spam Really?

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

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?

Re:How Big A Problem Is Spam Really?

[WCMI92]

"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.

Re:Fine the *originating* companies

[WCMI92]

"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?