Spammers Threaten Techdirt With Lawsuit

An anonymous reader writes "Found over at Declan McCullough's Politech, some spammers who had been written up in the NY Times found their contact info displayed on Techdirt, after they wrote about the NY Times story. Apparently, someone was trying to pull a Ralsky on the spammers. The spammers got pissed off and threatened to sue Techdirt - even though all the info was publicly available and other court cases have shown it's legal to post spammer's contact information. Techdirt, interestingly, took the contact info down because they feel that no one should get spammed. I'm kind of torn on this one. On the one hand, I respect Techdirt for taking such a stand, but on the other, I feel that the spammers clearly deserve to be spammed back. The fact that they threatened Techdirt, despite them not having done anything wrong (it wasn't even the folks at Techdirt who posted the info - but some readers), makes me even angrier at the spammer."

Comments

You have the money?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you risk the lawsuit. We all know what American justice is like. I'm not suprised at all, and their decision (to pull the info) has nothing to do with morality, or right and wrong, just common sense.

Laughable.

[Tinfoil]

they feel that no one should get spammed

How very naive of them. Why shouldn't the people that force us to take extreme measures for a little bit of privacy, convenience, not be made to deal with the same garbage that we do?

Re:Laughable.

[bwalling]

How very naive of them. Why shouldn't the people that force us to take extreme measures for a little bit of privacy, convenience, not be made to deal with the same garbage that we do?

Because they are idealists, which means that they will never get anything done and they will always be inconvenienced by their ideals. That said, we can all benefit from those who believe so strongly in their ideals since the majority of us are weak enough to compromise our ideals any time it is convenient, profitable, fun, or whatever other excuse we invent.

Re:Laughable.

[Daetrin]

I've always been an eye for an eye type guy myself. If you knowingly commit a crime or immoral act, then you forgo your legal/moral protection from the same. No one complains when a thief gets fined or when the murdering bad guy in a movie gets killed (people get much more worked up about state-sanctioned death penalties, but that's more of a political thing)

If they want to send unsolicited junk mail, either because they think that it's okay, or they don't care that it's wrong, they've got no right to complain about the same thing being done to them, and people who have been spammed by them suffer no karmic penalty for doing so.

Likewise, if the spammers are going to try and claim that the right to free speech protects them, they've certainly got no right to try and sue people who use their right to free speech to tell their friends which incoming email addresses they should block.

Re:It's a sad fact of modern life...

[selderrr]

I agree with you, but compare this to the situation in the past : 100 years ago, we had the same issue with industrialists. 200 years ago with big farmers vs small farmers. 300 years ago with big guns vs small guns.
Don't pretend this to be the disease of the 21st century just because we're using the law instead of money or guns. And then again, the laws have always been bent by the guys in charge.

While i don't approve of it, it seems to be the nature of the human beast. It's amazing how we haven't exterminated ourselves.

As a side note : i find the way Berlusconi is CEO of Italy far more frightening than what the US is doing. After all, we europeans excpect US politicians to be puppets in the hands of the big corporations. But Berlusconi is a whole other matter.

Re:It's a sad fact of modern life...

[Rick.C]

Let's face it-- if you run a small and/or non-profit site, and if some company or businessperson with lots of money (or even a moderate amount of money) makes a credible threat to send in the lawyers, you're at least as likely as not to give in to their pressure. It's simple survival instinct-- no one wants to get sued, especially (A) in this economy and (B) by someone with much fatter coffers than themselves.

The issue here is your "comfort zone." If you, a geek, start talking tech in a threatening way to your techno-phobe neighbor, he's not going to argue with you or try to fight back. He's out of his element. Same with a geek who is being intimidated by someone who is law-savvy. We tend to cringe, apologize and hope they go away. The fact that they might be able to hurt us financially makes us take their threats seriously. If they did the same thing to a lawyer they would probably get a far different response.

Think about it - you and you neighbor have a little spat about a fence or a barking dog or something. You threaten to "route his Roadrunner connection through your proxy sniffer and VPN his DoS to every kiddie-porn site in the country." Imagine the expression on his face. What are his options? Hire a techie to defend himself? That costs money. He doesn't even understand what you said, except that it sounds bad and you sound serious. He's gonna fold.

What we really need to do to stop this legal-bullying is to get more familiar with the law.

Re:It's a sad fact of modern life...

[CausticWindow]

If this is indeed how americans view their legal system, then I think it's time for them (you) to do something to change it.

It's one thing that your only measure of quality of life is wealth, another one entirely that relative amount of money is the only thing separating right from wrong. While the judicial system is no absolute in right vs. wrong in theory, it is in practice.