Anti-Spammers Win Major Court Battle

Brian Bruns writes "Well, the antispammers have won a major battle against EMarketersAmerica.org (now offline, but mirror here). The judge involved with the case has dismissed the case with prejudice, which means that all of the spammers arguments were denied. The win is a big one for the antispam community." It's always good to see my inbox come out on the winning side of a court decision. Sounds like the case was fun to watch as well.

Comments

Donate to pay defendants' legal fees

[gorbachev]

This victory is bitter sweet. While the judge did throw the case out completely, he didn't rule that the defendants' (anti-spammers) legal costs should be paid by the plaintiff (spammers).

You can help by donating to the legal defense fund established by the SpamCon Foundation. The donations are tax deductible.

Please do donate, if you have any to spare.

Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers

Legal Defense fund link

[Anonymous Coward]

Direct link to donating to their legal defense fund

Re:background info?

[Cirkit]

No, he's calling the lawyer who brought the SLAPP suit against the anti-spammers an idiot.

Read some of the stuff at http://bruce.pennypacker.org/SLAPP/ if you want to see just HOW much of an idiot. The defendant's response is amusing. You don't get to LAUGH at legal papers every day.

Re:Moo

[Pendersempai]

I don't think they were actually shut down. They were the ones who filed the lawsuit; the outcome is that they lost the lawsuit and are barred from suing again.

This means that the anti-spam outfit is free to continue blacklisting the spammers, but the spammers haven't actually been legally enjoined from continuing.

The real gain, IMO, is that this case demonstrates that the legal mindset is strongly against spammers. It seems like a sort of litmus test to me -- not deciding so much as revealing -- and I'm very happy to see the result.

Thats not what it means

[ghostrider_one]

1. The judge dismissed the lawsuit because EMarketersAmerica asked the judge to dismiss it (ie they abandoned the lawsuit which they themselves filed, supposedly because of lack of funds).
2. The dismissal "with prejudice" means that EMarketersAmerica cannot refile the lawsuit against the defendants at a later date.
   It does NOT mean that the judge rejected the basis for EMarketersAmerica's case, and it definately does not (as Steve Linford from Spamhaus claims) set a precedent in their favour. If some other (better funded) spammer decided to sue them tomorrow for the same causes of action, the dismissal of this lawsuit would have zero effect on that case.

Re:English translation?

[onomatomania]

Here's a copy of the original lawsuit which was filed by the world's most incompetant lawer, Mark Felstein who was hired by a bunch of Boca Raton chickenboner spammer scumbags, under the auspices of this "emarketersamerica" front. A summary of the charges is here. You can also read the defendant's item-by-item reply to the original complaint. It's quite funny, actually, and reminds me of IBM's response to SCO's bullshit where they basically state that every allegation is false to fact, other than the obvious, such as "IBM sells computers".

Except in this case, the spammer plaintifs were so incompetant that they couldn't even formulate a single complaint that had any basis in law. They also tried to file a temporary restraining order against spamhaus, which the Florida judge basically laughed at. The suit was really just a big case of harassment, and a ploy to somehow reveal the identity of the anonymous party[1] behind SPEWS -- which is not Steve Linford or Spamhaus, as a lot of these slashdot stories seem to imply. Spamhaus was just one of about 13 various mirrors that distributed the SPEWS DNS blocklist.

You can find more details here.

[1]<cough>Terry H. Gilsenan aka "Posopis Menaga" (pidgin for "postmaster")