Slashdot Mirror
Spammers Sue Spam Victim For $4 Million
fronck writes "Self-declared anti-spammer Mark Mumma, a web hosting and email service provider, has apparently been sued for just under $4 million by cruise.com and their parent company Omega World Travel after they were ordered to stop sending him emails and comply with Oklahoma's CAN-SPAM act. Mumma intends to see the trial through court and meanwhile the spam continues unabated. More insight available at Ars Technica."
As the spammers have clearly identified themselves and their victim should have logs clearly showing their abuse he should counter sue them.
They have kindly set the level for the quantum of damages.
I find it hard to believe that there isn't another side to this tale.
That said, if the company *IS* prosecuting on those grounds, an out of court settlement involving some guys named Vinny is probably at least as effective.
W
They sue people to get them to give up. A lot of people don't have the time, money and/or will to fight someone in court, so they say "Sorry!" and go away.
If you read the article, or even the original posting, he's an anti-spammer. He has a website which talks about spam and how to avoid it. The spam industry doesn't like it. So they are suing him.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
They actually write real summaries that explain things. It's quite amazing compared to what we get here at Slashdot. Just go read their story and compare.
I LOVE living in a place that treats every lawsuit as if the defendant is guilty. For example, if i sue you over the rights to your property, even if I don't have ANY proof, I can prevent you from selling your home for as long as I can keep appealing the courts (hopefully) sane decision. Just think about what would happen if you were about to move and I did that. What if you were a corporation moving out of a factory building. The upkeep, the security risk, the TCO of the place could sink you if I kept you in court long enough. I hate that this country allows that sort of BS.
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
In the US, you can sue for anything at all, and this is what happenes when a company with money picks on someone who doesn't. Hmm.. who does this remind us of? ??AA anyone? The case would be thrown out of court in a heartbeat, but first it has to get there, and that means that Mark Mumma will first have to hire a lawyer (which he already has, according to TFA).
This is just another symptom of the twisted legal system that has been allowed to evolve in the US. When will legislators realize that it's time for serious legal reforms to end these types of frivolous, baseless lawsuits that are intended only to intimidate and harass?
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
I'm not sure whether he is profiting from sueing spammers (don't care - even if he is he's still doing us all a good service) but good on him, and I hope that he gets through the frivolous lawsuit and counterclaims.
I don't know about America, isn't it illegal to make such lawsuits?
Just like the judge smacked down the frivolous SCO lawsuit?
Just like the judge smacked down the suit against Oreo cookies making people fat?
must be an "any publicity is good publicity" because all it's telling me is to boycott cruise.com, and there are a lot of fellow slashdotters who would feel the same.
The spammer is suing this fellow for defamation for putting insulting remarks about them on his website. Clearly they're trying to both shut him up about their spamming operation and keep him from pursuing them in court for violating CAN-SPAM. This company will probably end up paying every cent of their victim's legal bills, and are only drawing attention to themselves. Pretty foolish, if you ask me.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
The headline from ARS Technica "Spammer sues anti-spammer for $4 million". The headline from Slashdot "Spammers Sue Spam Victim For $4 million".
And even in these cases, the bully gets away by declaring bankrupcy (effectively nullifying any judgement against them), dissolving the offending "corporate entity", and re-forming a little while later under a different name (using assets they manage to illegally hide before vanishing).
It's a nasty weapon which can be most effectively wielded by the nastiest creatures. Normal productive law-abiding citizens can only get shafted.
Kinda makes vigilantism look appealing, sometimes.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
No, not at all. But in SCO's case their assumption seems to have been that IBM wouldn't want to bother with a protracted legal case and would want to settle for less money that it would cost to defend themselves. That was the miscalculation. A sleazy outfit such as SCO never figured on IBM caring about their reputation in the marketplace, and so seems to have been caught off-guard by IBM's willingness to go the distance in erasing SCO from the face of the earth.
Sounds like this guy is being sued for being a bit of an ass.
He's right, of course, but he still sounds like a bit of an ass.
I know everyone in America is a victim, but doesn't this strain the definition. Getting an unwanted email hardly makes you a victim.
Where I live, people often put "no advertisements, please" signs on their doors if they don't want a heap of colorful waste paper on their front door carpet on a daily basis.
This case is the equivalent of those paper advertisers suing you for not accepting their carbage in your mailbox. How bold can the spammers get before somebody decides to destroy them once and for all? Can somebody soon paint ads on your house without your concent?
I'd like to donate few $ to Mumma to support his defence. Would be nice to see people joining me.
Andrew
Tougher to file for people to file Chapter 11. Not corporations, it is very easy to disolve a corporation after paying out all the revenue to employees, etc...
Someone put his email in the weekly newsletter box here here:
b ox@webguy.net
http://www.cruise.com/
And he couln't be bothered to remove himself with the link provided in the email (Subject: Weekly Cruise E-deals) here:
http://www.cruise.com/forms/emremove.asp?email=in
Instead he makes loud legal noises, and demands money from cruise.com for the emails he didn't bother to use the automated remove function and prefered the very unreliable ask the parent company to do it. They see the legal demand for money, and send it to there lawyers to handle, who sue him to get them off there case for being stupid, they add to the stupidity by sueing him for 4 milion.
Hopfully the judge will dismiss both parties actions and make them pay there own legal costs, and perhaps give them both a telling off for abusing the legal process to gain money or quash media attention.
That's irrelevant. The fact that the individuals violated Oklahoma's anti spam law, means that they are liable for that, and that case would still be litigated in Oklahoma.
This lawsuit is more intended to make the owners of cruise.com appear to be victimized, that's all there is to it. It's a fairly common move in litigation of this nature, and it rarely works out in the spammer's favour. Usually these things get dismissed from court.
That only checks if the address is valid. Do NOT click those. If you do, you get more spam.
Well, as one who puts up with spam-fax 'cause we can't use anonymous call blocking, and who deletes lotsa spam from my inbox just to FIND my mail, I'm actually glad someone has found a way to profit from spam at the expense of the spammers.
Even if Mr. Mummers does engage in suing spammers on a regular basis, and even if he makes a tidy living from it, this doesn't mean his suit is without merit. Unless he's abusing the law or the system (impossible for us to know without all the facts on hand), more power to him...
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
I agree with you wholeheartedly.
However, when you start to play the litigation game, you have to be prepared for the possibility that the other side will fight back. If you make a lot of threats of litigation, expecting everyone to just cave and give you a few grand to "go away," you have to expect someone (even someone who is clearly "in the wrong") to fight back.
No, really! I'm one of the *good* lawyers!
Create a black webpage, with black background, and all text, links, and viewed links as black.
In clear, concise, plain English, post said e-mail address with explicit instructions that no commercial interest may send you unsolicited e-mails, nor will the owner of the address ever opt-in to any mailing list.
Make sure you link to this black page from someplace else, so the web bots can find it.
When spam arrives, give them ONE CHANCE to follow the law and their own printed disclosure to remove you from their lists. Save all spam and spam removal requests as evidence.
1. Post e-mail
2. Unsubscribe
3. Sue
4. PROFIT!!!!
You never expect irony, do you?
Want to be a professional wrestler? Visit www.iyfwrestling.com
@iyfwrestling
Let's put this in terms we can understand:
"The shoddy state of software today will last for as long as we have programmers. Because, after all, it's not in their interest for this state of affairs to end. If software becomes reliable, they're out of a job."
If someone were to come on Slashdot and say this, a few people would loudly agree with them and quickly get modded -1 Troll. A lot more people would accuse them of being arrogant, closedminded and just generally stupid. Of course many--most!--programmers want reliable software. The benefits to us of reliable software are myriad and manifold. No more calls at 2am on a Sunday because the server crashed. No more scouring BUGTRAQ looking for the next exploit we have to defend against. No more wondering whether the software flying the airplane we're riding on was written by lowest-bidders working in Bangalore.
The benefits to programmers from reliable software are so clear, so obvious, that we would laugh at anyone who seriously proposed that we deliberately kept software unreliable.
And yet, the instant you say lawyers are deliberately keeping the legal system difficult, people nod their heads understandingly and compliment you on your wisdom.
The benefits to a clean, efficient system of law are so huge and so obvious that, without exception, every single lawyer I know--and I know quite a lot of them--is an advocate for streamlining the legal system.
The problem is that society is huge. The machinery of government is truly gargantuan. These enormous edifices of government were put in place for a reason: because as obnoxious as they are, they're a lot better than what came before. (Take the Voting Rights Act as an example. It's a colossal piece of legislation and is a constant pain in the ass during election years. But it's a lot better than Jim Crow.)
So the problem Congress faces is, how do they pare government down and streamline it without returning us to the Bad Old Days we're trying so hard to avoid?
This is a tough, tough problem--all the moreso since the law is, almost by definition, a safety-critical system.
Imagine that you're given 100 million lines of source code. You're told, "Here. A lot of people are unhappy with it and they want major change right now. Oh, and while you're trying to strip out a few million lines and reduce bugcount, our coders are going to continue to write code to adjust to the ever-changing needs of our clients. Finally, remember that any bug you introduce has the potential to affect billions of people worldwide. Have a nice day!"
Please, try looking at the problem as a pragmatist and a realist, not with the simple and sophomoric eyes of a cheap cynic. The world is more complex, and a far richer place, than can ever be sufficiently explained with cheap cynicism.
One of the functions of the legal system is to separate legitimate claims from bogus claims. But, to do so, the case has to be filed--it has to enter the system.
You apparently would like the verification to happen before the case gets to the legal system at all. How would you propose doing that? What new mechanism will investigate each claim for merit? And if it occurs at no cost to either party, who will pay for it?
It's easy to complain when you don't have to think too hard. But the fact is our legal system does very complex and difficult things, and for the most part does them very well.
I think what's important to note here, is the following:
"The trial lawyers, being a very powerful lobby, have consistently opposed the idea"
As long as lobbies such as this are permitted to exist, the general public a large is always going to get the shaft...
Those entities with time and money to burn are always going to forge alliances with those who possess little to no moral or ethical values and are only motivated by how much money they can put in their pocket.
If this were not the case, our public airwaves would not be polluted with the stupid pointless marketing of legal firms willing to file suit at the drop of a hat.
Just my $.02
Utter nonsense. There have been a dozen major breakthroughs that have impacted life expectancy far more than an Orio might. In the last 100 years, we have wiped out childhood diseases such as polio, TB, mumps. We have learned how disease and viri spread, and how to control them. Everyone has fridges/freezers to keep food fresh and unspoiled. All of these advances would have a far greater impact on life expectancies than the 5/10 years you might lose through bad diet. Remember, 100 years ago, if all your kids lived to 18 years old it would be an unheard-of miracle. Nowadays, losing just one child is a major event.
One thing the US isn't #1 in is coming up with Ridiculous ranking systems which punish anyone who isn't spending money on items in the publishers agenda.
The U.S. does have the best Health System in the world, and no one is denied access to it because of inability to pay.
The Cuba line is a dead give-away as to the mindset of those who published the list.