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Spamhaus to Ignore $11.7M Judgement
6031769 writes, "As reported on CNet, Spamhaus is choosing to ignore a judgement of $11.7M against them in an uncontested trial in an Illinois court. According to Spamhaus, the judgement has no impact on them, since they are a British organization." From the Spamhaus reply to the judgment: "Default judgments obtained in US county, state or federal courts have no validity in the UK and can not be enforced under the British legal system... As spamming is illegal in the UK, an Illinois court ordering a British organization to stop blocking incoming Illinois spam in Britain goes contrary to UK law which orders all spammers to cease sending spam in the first place."
"in an uncontested trial in an Illinois court."
It isn't an Illinois court, it's a federal district court that happens to be in Illinois.
Ehhh... not quite. See, e360insight is claiming that they're not a spammer, and thus their inclusion on the Spamhaus list is hurting their business, their image, is defamatory, and/or whatever else they think that they can get away with. And, because of this decision the (obviously clue-impaired) judge agreed with e360insight.
The analogy (with regards to your reference to Consumer Reports) would be if Consumer Reports published an opinion that a car company strongly disagreed with and believed was incorrect. You know, like saying "The new Ford SUV gets excellent mileage, considering it runs on the souls of orphaned children."
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
I would agree with you if they didn't reach into America, but on their site they say the following:
The Spamhaus Block List
The SBL is a realtime database of IP addresses of verified spam sources (including spammers, spam gangs and spam support services), maintained by the Spamhaus Project team and supplied as a free service to help email administrators better manage incoming email streams.
The SBL is queriable in realtime by mail systems thoughout the Internet, allowing email administrators to identify or block incoming connections from IP addresses involved in the sending of Unsolicited Bulk Email.
The SBL database is updated 24/7 by a dedicated international Spamhaus team (US, UK, NL, IT, CA, JP, CN) and is broadcast by 32 SBL zone mirror servers based in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, South Africa, Sweden, UK and USA.
Google cannot ignore the laws of the land where their servers are based, if they want to operate in foreign countries they should follow local laws.
liqbase
Google operate businesses in countries where they operate, so have to obey local laws as they can be punished. Services like spamhaus are not legally based in other countries so only have to obey their patron law.
Warhammer forums
The Natwest 3 concerns a criminal case. This is a civil case. There's no risk of extradiction.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Absolutely. There are cases in civil law where by *responding* in a certain way in a jurisdiction you actually are acknowledging the jurisdiction of that court.
My guess is their UK lawyer told them it was lower risk to just ignore the whole thing, default judgment and all, then to spend all the money on a US lawyer to contest the jurisdiction and run a chance that they could lose a real case.
Because this all happened in the second worst judicial hellhole in America.
What is a judicial hellhole you ask?
[quoted from the above link]
My last employer was one of the ten largest banks in the world. Our outbound SMTP servers where blacklisted by a "dedicated group of spam fighters" providing a blacklist service - SPEWS. I'm not sure how Spamhaus works, but I can tell you the SPEWS admins did not care much for our plight. They were chasing a particular spammer and to eliminate the problem they blocked a whole freaking subnet owned by MCI - we just happened to have our IPs in that subnet. I found that in this case, the blacklist admins were lazy (for blocking a whole subnet) and non-responsive (poor contact information is provided and pleas for removal where large ignored or flamed - following their procedure of posting in a forum to get removed). The whole process can be VERY frustrating.
Our saving grace was advising those email customers to drop SPEWS which 100% of them where willing to do.
As for this case, even though the "victim" is based in the US it really comes down to where the "crime" took place - on individual email servers using the Spamhaus BL around the world. I'm sure SH would argue in UK court that they offer a list, they don't enforce it and the onus lies on email administrators wherever they might be.
In the USA, each party pays their own costs no matter what happens. However, in the UK, if you file an action and it does not win, then you have to pay the costs for the other party. So, at the best, they can force them in the UK legal system, and because the spammer is not in the UK, they can seek the spammer puts up security for costs (to ensure they pay if they don't win). Thus the spammer would never touch the UK system as they would end up loosing the money they pay their lawyers, plus the cost for spamhaus to defend it.
ps... IANAL - anymore.
IANAL, the article doesn't have many details, and my legal knowledge on this matter consists solely of Wikipedia entries, but it appears they could have argued Tortious Interference which may qualify as Minimum Contacts giving the court Personal Jurisdiction. Among other things, Personal Jurisdiction is required for enforcement of foreign judgements.
Whew. Gotta love Wikipedia.
Rucker
It's an Illinois STATE court. A state court can't impose their ruling on anyone that's not actually inside their state.
The World's Worst Webcomic!
And because you can't extradite someone to face civil charges anyway.