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.

Tagging

[rf0]

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

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: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?

Trademarked Haiku

[idfrsr]

I have trademarked this
Use it at your own expense
I'll see you in court

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?

ode to spam

[1nv4d3r]

I love to get spam
you can block it all you want
meanwhile, my dick grows

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.

$100 reward for information about a spammer

[Animats]

I, John Nagle, owner of the US registered trademark "Downside", will pay $100 to the first person who can provide to me the identity of the actual person or persons behind any of the following sites:

• 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 already know what Whois and traceroute will tell me, and I know who hosts those sites. That's not helpful. I do have information that indicates that the operation is inside the United States. So I will only pay for a US name and address at which a process server can deliver a summons.
• The sites for "contipay.com" and "profitabill.com" look like sites of businesses that do billing for third parties. They're not real companies; they're false fronts.
• These sites have changed hosting providers and billing arrangements since I started looking for them and talking to their hosting providers. But they tend to stay up, although they move around.

I can be reached at "spammersearch@downside.com". Thank you.

habeas business plan

[1nv4d3r]

step one is haiku
step two is vast deep unknown
step three is profit!

Re:habeas business plan

[cperciva]

step one is haiku
step two is many lawyers
step three is profit.

Why put the poem in the extended headers?

[1nv4d3r]

haiku in header
not viewed by your Aunt Tillie
she won't know to sue

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.

How to beat the spam detectors

[tramm]

If I were to ever become a spammer, I would:

• 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...

Re:How to beat the spam detectors

[Dwedit]

Mod parent down! Scum DO read slashdot! Censor this post!

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.

We need a new protocol for mail

[infernalC]

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