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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
Well I hope that the spammers get whats coming to them. Keeping stats of my email recently there has been a dramatic rise in the amount of spam I've been getting I've thankful for spamassasin to filter off all the crap.As a slight aside I found out today that debian charges $1000 for each advert (spam) posted to the list. Now that is a cool policy :)
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
Com.com is owned by ZDNet. It's a legitimate site.
I've been saying this all along.
If you fine the people who advertise improperly, then they will stop hiring spammers to do it.
Plus its easier to track down the company that is offering the product/service then the scummy spammer that will hide from you.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I have trademarked this
Use it at your own expense
I'll see you in court
"The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away" -Tom Waits
Haiku fighting spam
Now spammers spamming Haiku
Poetic justice?
I'll admit that I find spam as annoying as the next guy, but I try to take precautions and use a fairly effective junk mail filter, so spam at best rises to the level of minor annoyance. Aren't there better things to spend our money and time lobbying lawmakers and dragging people to court about?
Just a question.
Habeas has patented this idea. I don't know if this means they will block others from using the technique, but if so, I hope they go out of business pronto.
This idea is cute but until I wake up one day and get zero spam and zero false positives, I'll remain sceptical. The patent just makes it more annoying.
Didn't the lawsuits from providers like Bigfoot target the spammer's forging of someone else's trademarked business name in the return address?
perl -MCPAN -e shell ...blah...blah...blah...
cpan> install Coy
cpan> exit
bash-2.05b$ perl -e 'use Coy; die();';
-----
Lao Tse departing
beside a dam. A
singing lark. A dove.
-----
Bankei's commentary...
Died
(Sayings of -e: line 1.)
Ahh, at least perl can die a nice death. Check the man page too, all in Haiku.
Now if only PHP and GCC had this. Then I'd be truly happy and transcending. Or at least able to procrastinate a bit longer.
It's a perfectly cromunlent word.
DataSquid.net, a little about me.
In this overly-litigious society, I'm just waiting for Hormel to file suit against everything and anyone using the word SPAM.
I love to get spam
you can block it all you want
meanwhile, my dick grows
-
girlswhocry.net
-
contipay.com
-
profitabill.com
Why? I've received over 16,000 mail bounces from spam advertising these sites. They, or some person associated with them, has been spamming with "downside.com" return addresses.Rules and comments:
I can be reached at "spammersearch@downside.com". Thank you.
step one is haiku
step two is vast deep unknown
step three is profit!
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.
haiku in header
not viewed by your Aunt Tillie
she won't know to sue
Are you sure? This classic definition of SPAM is the one I like best -- SPAM explained in simple sentences.
I just checked out half a dozen of your comments. Half didn't mention your site at all. And others mentioned it only in passing, sometimes in an amusing way. I don't think this makes you a spam artist.
And I disagree with whatever moderator moderated your comment "off-topic".
http://www.habeas.com/index.htm is obviously the homepage for the firm, it says in the news there that the second lawsuit is against the following: "Dale Heller, Stan Stuchinski (BigDogSecrets.com), and Clickbank, a division of Boise, Idaho-based Keynetics, Inc"
- send my mail with gnus (-6.4 points)
- add an 'X-Cron-Env' header (another -6.4 points)
- add a fake 'In-reply-to' (-3.3 points)
- include the sendmail X-Auth warning (-1.008 points)
- have a sig dash with dense sig (another -6.4 points)
- include some diff -u output (-6.027)
- Have 'foo@bar wrote:' attribution (-6.6)
- Have quote text (-3.3)
- Fake a good Exchange ID (-5.8)
At this point, the message has a -45.135 bonus and would have to be super spam to be scored as spam. Let's hope none of those scum read the comments on Slashdot...-- http://www.swcp.com/~hudson/
Soviet Russia
Feel the zen; it is upturned
Spammers haiku you.
$comment =~ s/($verb)\s+($noun)/IN SOVIET RUSSIA, $2 $1s YOU!/g;
Going after the people who hire spammers is a good idea. If they know that their company will be held liable for spam, they will not hire anyone.
I play the same game with junk fax idiots. I call each and every company and talk to a company officer about the TCPA violation. At the end I make sure to remind them that they have been informed their advertiser is willfully breaking the law. Then I forward a letter to the FCC (copies of faxes included) asking for action to be taken against the parties.
Eventually a federal law will be passed about spam. Then there will have to be some work to get other countries oboard with mutual enforcement agreements.
Of course, the other option is overhauling how email works. 1/100th of a cent for each email? Sure.
Andrew Borntreger
Champion of cinematic disasters
I used to own a domain name that was a common word. (I registered it years ago, before the WWW.)
I had to give it up because spammers were forging email from "my" domain, simply because of the common word I had registered.
After spending a few weeks seeing if there was anything I could do about it (I was getting letters/phone calls from idiots (mostly Macintosh users for some reason!) who thought I was spamming them, I just decided to retire the domain.
In a perfect world, the people ruining my good name would be sitting in jail (or dead.)
Best Buy can have you arrested
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
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.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I signed up for Habeas more because I wanted to help essentially fund their ability to sue spammers. I figured it would be a very short period of time before someone violated their trademark and copyright.
/dev/null.
If Habeas takes off, then everyone's headers will have Habeas lines in them, making SpamAssassin even more useful. If their spam suit succeeds, then spammers will be too freaked out about judgements to include Habeas headers.
Of course, it won't solve spam, but anything that reduces volume and immunizes email -- spam can't necessary mutate against Habeas's particular immunity -- has a positive benefit.
SpamAssassin now filters out about 95 percent of the spam I used to get. Since installing it in January, I believe I have saved myself several hours of deleting and filtering email, reduced my download time for email when I'm on the road (even headers), and made my email box so delightfully clean.
And I have received not a single call or follow-up from someone whose email wasn't received that should have been. That is, no false positives at a level that I filter to
Freelance tech journalist for the Economist, MIT Technology Review, Macworld, and others
If you fine the people who advertise improperly, only the people who advertise properly will have spam!
Or something like that. Or is it the cruminals?
*honk*
This is my sig. It's prescription, I swear. I need it for reading things... on the other side of things
A subcontractor for the web designer is in Russia. The money goes to somewhere in the US.
I really do think that the fact you're prepared to sue will generate more interest than the reward. (Spammers getting hit by a Big Fscking Mallet 9000 *is* our reward!)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Absolutely right. We're all more or less anti-spam, but this is actually a frightening development. The same sort of tricks have been tried before, I believe, for example requiring console game cartridges to print a specific copyright message in order to have them run. I would like to see this lawsuit fail, on the grounds that the spammers are simply "reverse engineering" the interface of the anti-spam tools.
A better mechanism would seek to apply anti-cracking laws rather than IP laws. (I don't know US law, but for example the Computer Misuse Act in the UK outlaws unauthorised access to systems.) If someone could work out the details of a scheme that forced the spammers into breaking that kind of law it would be much healthier than this operation.
The crucial difference is that in this case the purported legal victim is a more-or-less unrelated third party. If unauthorised access laws are being used, then the legal victim is the real victim -- the recipient of the spam, whose systems have been accessed in a manner they do not approve of.
copyrighted by IBM (1980)
in the BIOS. This then ended up in the ROMs that were burned on to the boards. When the clones came along, some code started testing to see if it was running on a "real IBM PC" or a clone by looking for this copy right message.
My favorite way of fight back by the clones was inserting a message:
some code expects to find at this location the phrase "copyrighted by IBM (1980)"
Amazing how much two double quotes can change the legal status of a message. I wonder if this can be used as an unfortunate precedence in this situation. I hope not.
Dean
The law should treat any attempt to circumvent an anti-spam filter exactly as it treats any attempt to circumvent any other attempt to keep an unauthorized user out of a computer system.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
The problem is that the spammers NOT use the word spam to describe what they do, they call it "multilevel marketing", "internet promotions" or crap like that. The ones that use that name are mainly the ones that fight against it, and avoiding that they use the word "spam" will make that, well, could complicate things (more people understand what is spam that the ones that understand what UCE means)
I think that's the intent of the lameness filter, but it just ends up being pretty lame.
Internet springtime
the academics messaged
amongst their boxen
the diverse systems
without the scourge of commerce
by s m t p
cooperated
microsoft and sun and dec
unisys, hp
then came eye candy
if you build it they will come
e-commerce flourished
summertime came soon
venture capital dodo
the money dried up
quick buck was desired
send lots of mail to granny
she is rich and dumb
in greed's bosom born
marketing technique evil
electronic mail
spam spam spam spam spam
filtering is most futile
protocol not good
header forging easy
there must be a better way
new rfc please
even with new way
migration would be a bitch
forget about it
Because.. it's a trademark suit. Trademarks must be defended.
Now. those people actively using this trademark in their emails, do they have a contract with the trademark holder?
If not, what differentiates their use from a spammers use of the mark?
Yes, we know what the trademark holder INTENDS.. but remember, a tradmark is a mark identifying a product or service.. and they must be defeneded, and clearly indicated as a trademark.
Trademark does not give absolute power over a series of words.
If this wins, it could set bad precedent.
If you kill the people who advertising improperly, they won't be able to hire spammers to do it. Then, if you kill the spammers, they won't be able to spam. Personally, I see that as the ideal solution, but so few agree :(
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
It was determined to be legal to use that phrase merely because it was used as a key phrase and thus it was not copyrightable. The quotes did nothing. Many of the cloners didn't use any quotes.
And yes, this is precdent. See my Sega v. Accolade post below.
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.
Well put. As another poster has pointed out, this legal action is (fortunately) a non-starter (Sega vs Accolade).
The key difference between your two examples is that in case 1 the owner of the computer which receives the mail is the one who would want to take action, and in case 2 the owner of the printer which recieves the cartridge would not want to take action (since he's the one who chose to insert the cartridge anyway -- or if not he has a valid complaint).
The ideal set-up would use my intellectual property or confidential data to send mail to me, not some remote third party's, so that it would be up to me to decide whether it was actually something I objected to or not
It may come to that, but I have information that some part of the operation is in California, where I am, while their hosting operations are elsewhere. If I can find them, it's an easy lawsuit.
Thanks. Your comment justifies my method of expressing myself on the internet. I wish certain others understand what you understand.
I thought digging spammer dirt was just Shiksaa's hobby. Now she's going to be paid for it.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Intresting that the people filing the suit don't even understand trademark law. This is a copyright issue, not a trademark one. There's nothing illigal with using someone else's tradmark in a string of text, just using that trademark as a name for your product or service.
I can say "google" all I want, but I wouldn't be allowed to start my own search site called "google"
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
it's illeagal for a company to hire someone else to do the dirty work, much like it is illegal to hire anyone to commit crime, and afaik, here even if the company doesn't know they're hiring them to do something illeagal they're still guilty
Yes, they would be guilty, if spamming were illegal. But spamming is not illegal, so you really don't have a point.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
God. Why is it so hard for people to understand the diffrence between trademarks and copyrights. I can use all the trademarks I want as long as I don't use them as my own name or the name of my products/services!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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?
The Habeus approach is interesting, but since they've patented it, they could easily make it the only game in town. In particular, I concerned that they might be able to tax any email sent/received! I'd prefer to see methods where there is no centralized authority. Decentralization removes the danger of a single point of failure (and the taxes that often come from one).
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
I think the issue of "nett value" has to be considered when deciding if something qualifies as spam/junk-mail.
.sig of my newsgroup postings.
For instance -- if someone sends me an unsolicited piece of junkmail printed on crapy, cheap paper and promoting some product or service in which I'm not the least bit interested then it's spam.
However, if that same person sent me the same piece of junkmail, printed in water-soluble ink on the back of a $100 note then I think it would simply be a very clever marketing technique.
In the first instance the communication contains absolutely *no* value to me. In the second, the nett value is $100 less the value of the time required to wash off the water-soluble ink.
The same goes with online spam.
One of the most effective methods I've ever used is to promote my products or services in the
So long as the posting contains a positive contribution to the thread concerned then the fact that I include two-lines of "pitch" still means that the whole thing represents an acceptable level of "nett value" to the reader.
The big problem is that your average spammer is a thief. They only want to take and not give anything in return. The "nett value" of most spam is decidedly negative -- and that's why people hate it.
It also says a lot about any vendor that would start picking your pocket (by spamming you) before you've even bought anything from them.
Sales made by spammers are just a way of fining the terminally stupid I guess.
A flower blossoms
Poetry fights evil spam
Fresh spring for email.
Spammers pluck blossoms
good idea wilts like cut
flowers in summer
A golden leaf falls
Harvest time for Habeas
Copyright on poems
Alas, bitter cold
These lawsuits are frozen in
Chinese court system
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I can be reached at "spammersearch@downside.com". Thank you.
Dear spammersearch,
You can increase your penis size by 1 to 3 inches...
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Attack of the Clones?
If they want to get a spammer by the balls this is a good way. If they want to seperate important internal and client mail from junkmail they could do better with the more than obvious:
Digital Encryption and Signing.
There is no problem whatsoever in building a mailserver that only accepts a set of allowed public keys and signatures. All you have to to is train your folks to use encryption (easy: only send encrypted msgs) and convince your clients to jump the bandwagon when mailing to you (aka tell them you only accept encrypted and signed mail and explain to them why). That would make for some quality increase of email culture too.
And if the idea spreads spammers will have a hard time.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ditto what AndroidCat said, but also:
$100 seems a bit cheap, unless you figure someone just happens to know the info you want and will send you an e-mail for the $100.
If someone's going to actually investigate this for you, even online, you should offer a greater reward, even if it's mostly symbolic.
How about $100 plus half of any damages you collect (minus legal fees)?
Or $0 and a free ticket to $WHEREVER_YOU_LIVE and some nice gesture of personal thanks?
Or $500 donated to a good charity in the name of the successful sleuth?
Don't get me wrong, I think you will probably find someone who can help you and will do it just on principle. But if you're going to offer monetary compensation for technical assistance, you should either up the ante or hire a private detective.
Anyway, good luck with your search.
PS: I assume you've already asked Miroslav Karel in Prague...
This Like That - fun with words!