Spammers Sue Anti-Spam Groups

SuperBanana writes "The Register reports in a story today that spammers have banded together under the name EmarketersAmerica.org to sue various anti-spam groups- days before a large conference on spam hosted by the FTC(which will be attended by many spammers). Anti-spam groups think the timing is not by coincidence, but believe the move may backfire because they will be able to countersue and get access to spammer's internal documents. By the way, if you're wondering who these guys are, check out Spamhaus's directory of top spammers."

Comments

Broken link

[Anonymous Coward]

Not a big problem but somebody forgot to throw the http:// in front of the url
emarketersamerica.org

Re:Broken link

[PhoenixRising]

Notice also that the website doesn't exist yet; the domain is currently "parked" with GoDaddy.

Actual text of the filing in flordia

[tmork]

A list of mirrors of the text of the filing in flordia's court:

(Spread out which ones you use, these are alot of folks with home machines on DSL lines. Being /.'ed would only make things worse:)

http://ares.penguinhosting.net/~leftreveggplant/ fe lstein/slapp.pdf
http://chickenboner.com/felstein /slapp.pdf
http://cjllewellyn.homeip.net/slapp.pd f
http://home.earthlink.net/~bbay/slapp.pdf
http ://jscript.dk/2003/4/slapp.pdf
http://members.cox .net/lxix/slapp.pdf
http://members.shaw.ca/wooly/ slapp.pdf
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/egplant/s lapp.pdf
http://SteveSobol.com/slapp.pdf
http:// www.acornhosting.net/spam/slapp.pdf
http://www.bi ocenter.helsinki.fi/~atossava/spam/sl app.pdf
http://www.conmicro.cx/slapp.pdf
http:// www.dragonfur.org/peewee/slapp.pdf
http://www.geo cities.com/spammersarestupididioticm orons/slapp.pdf
http://www.linxnet.com/misc/spam/ slapp.pdf
http://www.north-lincolnshire.com/slapp .pdf
http://www.pearlgates.net/nanae/slapp.pdf
h ttp://www.spamblocked.com/slapp.pdf
http://www.te chhouse.org/~lou/slapp.pdf
http://www.tirani.net/ slapp.pdf

There's also been some lively discussion on NANAE about this issue....

Re:No sir, I didn't like it.

[MillionthMonkey]

He means that in theory, if the Internet traffic resulting directly from the activities of these 180 people were to stop, the number of spam emails arriving in your Inbox would drop almost to zero. Only 419s from Nigeria and occasional sporadic one-time spam would remain.

This isn't advocating some sort of lynching or suspension of civil rights- it's just a simple statement of fact. The point is that spam isn't something that a large number of people are doing; it's the activities of a very small number of people making us all miserable, and that small number is approximately 180.

Re:FYI- link to the PDF of the lawsuit

[Anonymous Coward]

Instead of /.ing that one site, chose one from the list tmork provided or use the "randomizer" for this document at http://www.LinxNet.com/misc/spam/slapp.php

The Real Slim Shady

[hendridm]

Oops, I was wrong. A whois at their registrar brought up the results:

Registrant:
mark felstein
P.O.Box 667933
Pompano Beach, Florida 33066
United States
Registered through: Go Daddy Software (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: EMARKETERSAMERICA.ORG
Created on: 16-Jan-03
Expires on: 16-Jan-05
Last Updated on: 16-Jan-03
Administrative Contact:
felstein, mark mefels@aol.com
P.O.Box 667933
Pompano Beach, Florida 33066
United States
9542887575
Technical Contact:
felstein, mark mefels@aol.com
P.O.Box 667933
Pompano Beach, Florida 33066
United States
9542887575
Domain servers in listed order:
PARK3.SECURESERVER.NET
PARK4.SECURESERVER.NET

Want someone to complain to?

[Anonymous Coward]

Try the asshole attorney's supporting this case. Look at the bottom of the slapp.pdf file:

FELSTEIN & ASSOCIATES, P.A.
Attorneys for EMarketersAmerica.org, Inc.
555 South Federal Highway, Suite 450
Boca Raton, Florida 33432
(561) 367-7990 Phone
(561) 367-7980 Facsimile
mark@EMarketersAmerica.org
Mark E. Felstein, Esq.
FBN: 192139

I think we have a new address for every free cd offer, junk ad, and telemarketer list in the world.

Re:Want someone to complain to?

[swit]

Here is the WHOIS info:

EMARKETERSAMERICA.ORG WHOIS Results

The data contained in Go Daddy Software, Inc.'s WHOIS database.

Registrant:
mark felstein
P.O.Box 667933
Pompano Beach, Florida 33066
United States

Registered through: Go Daddy Software (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: EMARKETERSAMERICA.ORG
Created on: 16-Jan-03
Expires on: 16-Jan-05
Last Updated on: 16-Jan-03

Administrative Contact:
felstein, mark mefels@aol.com
P.O.Box 667933
Pompano Beach, Florida 33066
United States
9542887575
Technical Contact:
felstein, mark mefels@aol.com
P.O.Box 667933
Pompano Beach, Florida 33066
United States
9542887575

Domain servers in listed order:
PARK3.SECURESERVER.NET
PARK4.SECURESERVER.NET

"...interrupt and block ... lawful businesses"

[inimicus]

I find it vaguely amusing that the complaint accuses Spews and Spamhaus of interrupting and blocking "the internet traffic of lawful businesses and individuals."

Name one.

By preference, one that complied with each and every one of the various anti-spam laws in the US. Anyone on the plaintiff's side of the case who did not abide by those laws should be jailed for perjury, I think...

And some of the complaint-items worthy of particular derision:

4: Failure to provide proper and correct addresses to the public for Spews and Spamhaus. Pot calling the kettle black here, maybe? Just a bit?
21: If the IP-addresses and servers in question were your property at the time, all you have to do is prove it. Though I doubt that the business practises were legal anyway...
23: So? So have I. But they didn't block you; they put you on a list that individuals and ISP's used (and trusted) to block you. Sue all of the ISPs that use that list. Dare ya!
32: How many Americans will become unemployed? The owner/operators of the individual spam-companies? Boo hoo!
39: Oh? Really?

Re:FL State Link

[Anonymous Coward]

Dang typo...thought I had it. Here's the link.

sunbiz

this tells you something

[iosmart]

about the number of people out there who actually believe some of the spam they get - if no one bothered with spam and the advertisers realized that they were wasting their money and that no one paid any attention to their messages, it would all stop! wouldn't it?

When do spammers pay?

[phorm]

The big problem is that, of course, the big ISPs also have to support the messages coming in. Also, when email becomes practically useless due to spam, it's not a particularly good business model.

Remember, spammers don't pay for bandwidth etc involved in receiving emails. And the often don't pay for sending either, as they used hacked servers, etc. Even if the US made a move towards a more centralized network, there are lots of other countries where hack-and-spam would still be prevalent...

Re:Yeah right

[Steve B]

Anti-spammers have published the personal information of more than one of the spammers

No law against that.

They have claimed that the spammers break the law, when in most cases, spam isn't illegal

Irrelevant. Pyramid scams, quack medical claims, distribution of pornography to minors, etc. most certainly are illegal.

they have put pressure on ISPs to cancel spammers contracts

So what? It is perfectly legal to boycott a company to pressure them to cancel a contract with someone for any reason, or for no reason. Alan Ralsky may be as clueless about this concept as Susan Sarandon, but that's his problem.

Re: McDonald's coffee lawsuit NOT bullshit

[Alderete]

It says something about our crappy legal system that total crap like this can even be introduced into a court. There should be a pre-trial hearing to determine if something's even worthy of appearing in a court. No fancy legal bullshit, just some guy who looks at something and says, "that's fucking bullshit...trash can". Like the McD's coffee lawsuite, this is fucking bullshit and should have been trashed by the court clerks upon receiving it.

You obviously don't know the facts in the McDonald's coffee lawsuit. McDonald's was serving their coffee -- systematically, as part of the franchise way of doing things -- 30 degrees F higher than "hot", i.e., 180 degrees F instead of 150 F.

Metaphorically, it's a little like the difference between sending someone home with a gun that's not loaded and the safety on, vs. loaded, cocked, and safety off. One is dangerous, but well understood to be so, the other is unnecessarily, negligently dangerous.

Beyond that, McDonald's had a long history of complaints and actions regarding the overly hot coffee. In other words, they were not doing something dangerous unknowingly, they were doing it deliberately.

Regular coffee from your average coffee place will burn you if you spill it on yourself, but it's only a 2nd degree burn. The woman who spilled the coffee on herself suffered 3rd degree burns. Look the difference up in a medical dictionary, preferrably one with pictures, and then imagine yourself having it done to your privates, like she did.

Wonder if you'd think it was a frivolous lawsuit then.

Fun with Discovery and Lawsuits

[billstewart]

I'm glad I wasn't named on this one, and it should probably be safe for the non-US named parties to get out of it (not necessarily, though), but if somebody who's party to it wants to have lots of fun bashing the plaintiffs because of their strategic and tactical mistakes, there should be plenty of opportunity here. For instance:

• "Discovery" is the process of getting the various parties to produce relevant information. The plaintiff asserts that the anti-spammers blocked the domain names and/or IP addresses of the Plaintiff's association's members. That looks like an obvious case to do discovery on the personal/organizational names and contact information of all of those members, and all of the domain names and IP addresses that they claim to own which the spammers allegedly blocked, and maybe all of the other domain names and IP addresses that they own, and which spam messages have been sent from which IP addresses.
  
  
• Oh, yeah, and once that information is obtained through the discovery process, it certainly ought to be posted to the list in nice machine-readable form, like DNS records :-)
  
  
• The complaint refers to contracts that the plaintiff or its fellow-spammers have with several ISPs. Sure would be nice to get the technical details of those contracts made public, specifically IP addresses and contact information.
  
  
• The plaintiff claims the anti-spammers did things to its members. I didn't see an explanation of which of those actions affected the plaintiff itself, as opposed to its "membership base", which might give it standing to sue, or any explanation of what "members" are for a non-profit corporation and how it can speak for them. The tricky part is how to get the cased tossed out but still use the discovery process to force the Plaintiff to fork over all the cool information, so everything has to be done in the right order.
  
  
• Some of the defendants are "more equal than others". It'd be nice if the people who are obviously being abused by this process can get all their legal costs paid (and therefore maximize them) without leading to large legal costs for any defendants who won't be able to get them paid for.
  
• Libel law in the UK is *much* more flexible than libel law in the US. Normally this is a really bad thing; US law has protections like truth being an absolute defense to libel and such, and the fact that UK libel law lets UK people in the UK sue people anywhere in the world is also atrocious. But if the UK defendants want to participate with the process far enough to get dropped from it or get it tossed out (which risks having them forced to give out information during discovery), they might have fun with a libel suit afterwards, and of course that would be tried in the UK.
  
  
• The DNS registrar got named because they hadn't provided "proper" contact information for the real targets, but there's no legal references stated that suggests they had a legal obligation to do so. Does this give them grounds for arguing that it's a frivolous lawsuit, and getting legal costs covered, beyond simply getting taken off the suit? Doing so weakens the whole thing.
  
  
• Most of the other parts are pretty bogus too.
  

Note: I'm not a lawyer, and if you want to get specific legal advice about which 20% of this message is totally bogus as opposed to merely imprecise or incorrect, you could go hire a real lawyer :-) However a lot of this stuff really is pretty readable in plain English.

Re:This is what should happen to all spammers....

[smilingirl]

There's a lot more to NASCAR than that. If you ever watch a NASCAR race, they constantly talk about drafting partners, cars being tight and loose, pit strategy... I mean there is all sorts of technology and things other than cars turning left involved. I used to think the same way until about 2 years ago. Now I watch the Winston Cup race every Sunday that I can. You get the know the drivers and start rooting for your favs (Dale Jr and Michael Waltrip for me) and booing the ones you hate (Sterling Marlin.. pff what a jerk).

Anyhow, they definitely have a lot of car techonology talk in these races. I don't know a whole lot about cars (yeah, I'm a girl. I just get my dad to change my oil. =) But I'm schooling to be an engineer, so I'm pretty technology-savvy.)

I think it's cool to see how the cars can't even compete in the race unless they are drafting with someone. (ooo physics!) This creates the drama of who's gonna draft with who, and it's just so exciting. And then they have to calculate their gas mileage and stuff, so they know when to pit before they run out of gas. It gets more complicated than it sounds, cuz they sometimes aren't sure how much gas exactly when into the car cuz it spills out and stuff. Many a car has run out of gas...

They run these cars through wind tunnels and stuff to test the aerodynamics. A lot of times during the races they put duct tape over the air vents at the front of their car to help that. And yeah, these cars are nothing like the chevy monte carlo's and ford taurus's that we can buy. And yeah they are all basically the same, especially during restrictor plate races (which I personally dislike. the race would be better if they weren't all restricted to the same RPM limit)

You guys should really watch more Nascar races... =)