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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."
The judge will hopefully smack this one down. If the company doesn't like the CAN-SPAM act, they should appeal whatever case they lost against it, not go and sue the guy who reported them to the cops.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
A common tactic nowadays. Take someone to court even on a frivolous charge, knowing they can't afford to play the legal game. This works until someone takes the bluff and says, "OK, buddy, I'll see you in court and I intend to make you lose, and lose badly." For that you need a deep-heeled "victim," precisely the type that tends not to get sued in these sort of situations.
But every now and then a bully miscalculates, as we saw with SCO versus IBM. So what we need is for someone with bucks to take on these spamming sleazes, point out they are misusing the law with these abusive lawsuits, and knock them off their high horse.
Interesting stuff at the very end of the emediawire article.
Copied:
SUEaSpammer.com and SUEDbySPAMMERS.com are trademarks of MummaGraphics, Inc. Cruise.com is a registered trademark of Omega World Travel, Inc.
MummaGraphics, Inc., founded in 1993, is a provider of Internet web hosting and web site design services and has begun directing its energies to curbing unwanted junk email, a/k/a. spam. MummaGraphics began suing spammers in August 2004 and intends to file several more lawsuits in the future. MummaGraphics, Inc. is currently undefeated in court.
How the hell do spammers get rights like this to be able to sue someone who asks from them to stop sending stuff to him? I mean, can't we make a do not spam list like the do not call list. Or are the telemarketers going to use this as presidence and start calling me agian?
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Mumma wrote it. Why did he make a press release? By the way, eMediaWire is owned by PR Web, and is a site where anyone can issue a press release. For instance this is the latest from my hosting network. Just for instance. My instinct is to blow off anything on PR Web as crap.
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IANAFL
Some countries control frivolous lawsuits by making the loser pay the court fees on both sides. In the US that is considered a violation of due process, so it genrally isnt done, though a judge can order it. Thus, frivoulous lawsuits can be filed fairly readily.
I believe I read somewhere that the Supreme Court ruled it is ok to use a trademark as long as it is not associated with financial gain. Can't find the link right now but it had to do with how sites similar to the corporate hate sites got away with it.
I'm a virgo and on Slashdot. Coincidence? Yes.
I know it makes great rhetoric, but your statement is wrong. Whether you choose to believe it or not, there are standards that lawsuits must meet in order to go forward. You must have some cause for action to file a suit. If, as you say, you have no proof, the suit will be dimissed, end of story.
Understand that when you talk this way about the court system, you are playing a hand that the biggest, most well-funded business interests in the country have dealt you. They would like nothing more than to convince everyone that our court system is irrevocably broken and lawsuits need to be limited. In the end the beneficiaries of such a movement are big manufacturers, big insurance, etc. Don't be a sheep--find out more about the legal system.
Apart from cruse.com isn't part of the spam industury, before the lawsuit the only thing they did wrong is not send emails saying 'Someone at 192.0.34.166 entered your email to signup to our weekly email of curse prices, if you wish to sign up please click here, if not ignore this email or click here' before adding people to the list.
2) Sending to the same address, attach a large video clip. Larger the better.
3) Send that big ole attachment, and when the spam server auto-replies to it's own e-mail address, see what happens when that giant file bounces around and duplicates inside its own server.
(I don't know much about IP spoofing, so I'm sure that would help as well)
I did it once to a very annoying spammer, and received no more, at least of that spam.
You never expect irony, do you?
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According to the plaintiffs, the defendant (mumma) called them on the phone (specifically their legal department) and asked to opt out. When they asked for his email address, he refused to give it to them telling them to go to his site to find out what it is. I don't know about you, but that doesn't sound like an "Opt-out" scenario to me. If he wasn't even willing to give his email address to them to have it removed, that sounds to me like he was attempting to defraud the spammers. Much like the old auto insurance scam where someone pulls in front of your car and then slams on the breaks to get you to rear-end them. He has to prove that they have another method for getting email addresses for their "e-deals" other than the opt-in section of their website. If he can't do that, then their case against him is pretty solid. He opted in, he refused to opt-out, therefore they can still send him email.
I realize that this may be a very unpopular opinion on slashdot, but If half the things they allege in their suit are true, this guy is about as unscrupulous as most spammers. Companies aren't the only ones that can bring frivolous lawsuits in an attempt to get the other side to settle rather than go to trial. Of course, we probably don't have all the facts from either side, so the truth is likely somewhere in the middle.
IANAL... But I play one on
[paraphrasing]
Of course, as the article points out, none of this is actually illegal, even if it does make the victim look a bit less like a white knight.
Why does any of this make Mumma "look a bit less like a white night"?
This is exactly what these anti-spam laws were intended to do. Get individual people and companies to enforce the law instead of making the police/government enforce the law. The penalties allowed in the law are high enough to make it worth people's time to fight the spammers.
Forcing people to opt-out is a horrible idea because it does not scale. You can not require everyone to opt-out of every company in the US, let alone the world. Worse, spammers would just create a new "company" every time you opt-out of another one.
We want more people suing spammers, of all sorts. We want more people acting like Mumma.
The strangest part of this whole affair is that spamming ultimately originates as a form of advertising. [...] Instead of complying, the company is now going to try to sue his pants off to show him who's boss. Supposing in some bizarro world they win, and are granted permission to keep sending him ads? [...]
The point the spammer is trying to make is not that they have the right to send Mumma spam, but that they have the right to send everyone spam. If they concede this case to Mumma, they open themselves up to everyone they have spammed to drop by and ask to pay either the fine or to settle. They can't afford to pay the penalties for what they are doing, and if they stop spamming, they would have to compete against legitimate travel agents.SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
Possibly, possibly not. Wouldn't it be interesting to get the cruise.com side of the story? It would also be interesting to read the complaint, the links do not work for me.
Omega is a very large travel agency. There are two possible explanations for what is going on. Either the guy is a jerk or the Omega legal department are jerks, (or possibly both)
It certainly seems to be an unusual tactic for a large company to do this sort of thing.
The context that appears to be missed here is that Mummers makes money by bringing lawsuits against spammers. He had threatened a lawsuit himself.
It is not strange or unusual for a company that is threatened with a lawsuit to do some investigation of the person threatening the suit and then bring a pre-emptive suit against them.
Not all the people who bring anti-spam cases are whiter than white. some of the stuff that went on in Utah after their anti-spam law was passed was borderline criminal.
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Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
rent disputes in a couple of alrge cities do indeed work that way. In those cities you *can* stop paying rent, make up some phony excuse or allegation, and force a six month process.
:)
.
In other places it's not so easy
I handled an eviction in El Cajon, CA, in which the deadbeats had watched too many programs about San Francisco evictions.
There is a five day response period. They filed a "motion to quash service" on the grounds that "the process server is a suspected relative". That was enough to put it on the court calendar over a month away . . . (no judge looks at the answer; it just automatically schedules a hearing)
I went in and got an "order shortening time" for a hearing the next day to quash their motion. The judge agreed that it was silly. Normally they would have had five days from then to file an answer or be out. I argued that as a sanction for the frivolous filing, time should be shortened to answer. She gave them until 5:00 the next day.
They thought that they'd been ordered out, and were gone by then . .
hawk
They are provably not anything like a poison though. They have become a huge part of the US diet over the past 100 years. Our expected lifetime has grown over that time, and is greater than that of many places that don't use trans fats. If trans fats were all that bad, we'd have noticed many decades ago.
So don't be exaggerating to the point of dishonesty. Have a cookie.
There is power in numbers. That is why I post the information on spammers, so that others can sue.
By sharing information and working with others to sue spammers, we can put a dent in spam.
Fight Spammers!
Anyone else notice the BBB logo at the bottom of cruise.com's website?
I wonder if the BBB knows what's goin on here, and if they have any rules against unsolicited email. It might help Mumma's case if the BBB has logged any complaints against cruise.com for spamming.
-kidlinux.
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Yes, but I don't know that the defendant in this case has the requisite minimum contacts for the court to assert in personam jurisdiction over him.
Generally, a court may only assert jurisdiction over a defendant if that defendant has the requisite "minimum contacts" with the forum state. This may be satisfied in a number of ways, the most common of which are residency or doing business in the forum state. As far as I can tell, the only minimum contact I see is that he published the information in Virginia via his web site. I am not knowledgable in this area of law, so I have no idea if this is a good-enough minimum contact or if there is some other basis by which the court can assert personal jurisdiction over him.
Of course, if I were able to download the pleadings I might be able to tell you, but it appears as though they are unavailable at the moment.
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