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Spammer That Sued Spamhaus Now Sued for Spamming
Dave Q. Lintard writes with a link to The Register's coverage of a suit against the spammer that sued Spamhaus. e360 Insight, as the company is known, is accused of using a botnet and compromised headers to get their 'advertising' into the mailboxes of the claimant. These are also the folks that tried to get the Illinois courts to suspend SpamHaus's domain registration when they wouldn't play by e 360's rules. 'e360 Insight sued Spamhaus after the anti-spam organisation blacklisted its domains over alleged spamming. In a default ruling made by an Illinois court in September 2006, Spamhaus was ordered to pay $11.7m in compensation to e360 Insight, pull the organisation's listing, and post a notice stating that it was wrong to say e360 Insight was involved in sending junk mail. UK-based Spamhaus did not defend the case and the ruling was made in its absence.'
He wins, gets a judgment that sends the fuckers into bankruptcy, someone buys the judgement against Spamhaus from the recievers for $1, and donates it to Spamhaus.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
If a party doesn't show up to a court date and defend itself, the judge has to rule for the plaintiff. It's the law. Enforcing that decision is of course a different thing as spamhaus is still online.
TFsummary failed to mention this.
That might well be the law. It might be relevant to this case too, if Illinois courts had jurisdiction over the UK.
Only three things are certain; death, taxes, and apocryphal quotations - Ben Franklin.
It was a *default ruling* - Spamhaus didn't have anyone show up for the trial, so they lost by default, and I'm pretty sure the judge didn't have much choice in that regard.
I can certainly *understand* Spamhaus, of course; if somebody sued me in another country, I wouldn't fly there just to attend a trial, either, and I'd certainly ignore the verdict (why do they think they'd have jurisdiction over me, anyway?), but the rules are still the rules, and the judge just did what the rules said, so don't blame him.
butter the donkey
And the day that Illinois courts have jurisdiction in the UK we'll start throwing tea (or should that be Starbucks coffee) into the harbour.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
I thought the fun thing about Common Law is judges are allowed to make it up as they go? The Judge could have, in absentia, still found for Spamhaus and sentenced the Spammers to death by hanging. It would have been worth it to see the look on their faces. :-)
It would have of course been overturned on appeal. Maybe.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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That might all well be true BUT the U.S. courts can do all they want, Spamhaus are in the UK. And are literally outside of the jurisdiction of the US court. No one should be forced to travel to another country just to say they don't work in that country.
Surely when the writ (or whatever it is called) was registered, the address of the people they were suing (the UK) should have made it clear that they were trying to sue someone they had no right to. IMHO a court system shouldn't process a litigation without an address of the defendant in the jurisdiction of the court system.
If this were really happening, what would you think?
I hate spammers, I think Spamhaus is fantastic. But it doesn't change the situation at hand, which is that there is potentially or allegedly illegal activity going on in servers located within the U.S. Someone is liable for it, and most likely it's the individuals operating those server. The problem is (for e360 anyway) there are hundreds if not thousands of them, and they can't be bothered with that many individual lawsuits. So, they went straight for the company causing them problems, and fell flat on their faces while doing it. I guess you can get mad at the U.S. court for it "thinking" that it had jurisdiction over a foreign company, but that's just the way the system works. As I said before, at the face, it appears that some illegal activity is happening on servers located in the U.S. Someone in the U.S. is liable for that, and e360 alleged that it was Spamhaus. Be mad that Spamhaus acted like retards over the whole thing, not at the courts for doing their job. Otherwise you've just got your sights on the wrong target, just like e360 did. I think a much bigger issue, one that's actually worth getting pissed off about anyway, is that the activity in question (blocking spammers) is actually possibly illegal in the U.S. The most fantastic part about all of it, is that it isn't in the U.K.
They didn't, at least not in this case. Spamhaus requested that the case be handled by this court. They chould have let it go to any court, then argued that whichever court it was had no jurisdiction, or let the court decide whenever it was handed the case that it didn't have jurisdiction. But that's not what happened. By requesting a specific court, it appeared that Spamhaus was going to actually fight the merits of the case, which would have waved jurisdiction arguements. So, to any court handling the case at this point, it would appear that Spamhaus was going to accept U.S. jurisdiction. But Spamhaus was just moving it to a court that they knew didn't have jurisdiction so that they wouldn't even have to show. I don't know why they didn't just let it go to any court, state or federal, and then claim grounds of no jurisdiction. Maybe their lawyers thought they might run into trouble in U.S. federal courts or something, and thought they had better chances of going this route. Nevertheless, the decision was Spamhaus', not any judge with a "god" complex.
Spamhaus didn't pay, and nor will they.
e360 is a spammer, and they will never obtain judgment against Spamhaus in a UK court. (Because they are a spammer. So sue me, e360.)
"It doesn't cost enough, and it makes too much sense."
Wrong, language is merely a mode of transporting meaning. You understood, thus my language was sufficient.
It may not have been perfectly accurate, but I admitted the mistake in my previous post, so your making a further fuss of it is rather unwarranted. Furthermore, if you didn't care what I meant, why did you bother to correct it? You certainly could have been more kind or civil about it, or at the very least been constructive and offered the correct terminology. You over-reacted, you got called - get over yourself.
Re: Pointless name calling - Evidence: "I'd certainly call that person a moron!" I didn't say that you meant _I_ was a moron, I just said that calling names is pointless, and asked if you were finished. It really isn't that difficult to understand what my question meant, but perhaps I have been misled regarding your intellectual capacity.
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Our court systems have been jammed with bullshit since the day they allowed people to blame others for their own irresponsibility.
It's time to start holding people accountable for their own actions again. Stop the pandering. Stop the bullshit.
I am the one who filed suit against E360Insight and Linhardt.
Courts already ruled that spammers can be sued where the spam is received (known as the effects test from Calder v. Jones, 465 U.S. 783, 804 S. Ct. 1482). My successful brief agaainst a porn spammer is here.
Additionally, E360's sister business (http://www.bargaindepot.net) specifically programmed their web site to take orders from California (via drop down lists).
I don't think that any motion by them saying that there is no jurisdiction over them in Califonia, but they have jurisdiction over Spamhaus in the UK will pass either the smell test or the laugh test.
Fight Spammers!
If Spamhaus were worried that any of their people might get served in the US, they could have spent the $10,000 or so to have the suit tossed out on jurisdictional grounds.
Why? I suspect that Spamhaus has better things to spend $10,000 on than a lawyer's bill in another country.
If you were suddenly served with a summons to appear in court in Mogadishu, would you immediately hire a Somali lawyer and send him $10,000 to defend you? Or would you, like most of us, simply say, "Ridiculous!" and toss the paperwork into the trash.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Killing is worse than spamming.
That's arguable. In terms of aggregate life-minutes lost, spamming is probably a lot worse than a couple of killings.
(Take a 75 year lifespan, that's 60*24*365*75 = 39,420,000 minutes. Send enough spam that 10 million people spend 5 minutes each dealing with it, that's 50,000,000 minutes lost. And there's a lot more spam than that.)
-- Alastair
The Usenet newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email (aka, NANAE) is wonderful for watching E360INSIGHT's Lindtard CEO try and support their suit against Spamhaus, as well as read Spamhaus' Steve Linford rationally explain themselves. Various posters to that newsgroup have outed E360 for spams they have received in the past and present.
. pdf
Recently E360INSIGHT have filed a suit against those same people, likely for defamation (or libel, not sure). However it's worth noting that they feel they can use the law to suppress anyone who wishes to refer to them as spammers.
The old saying still rings true, that spam is continually being redefined by the spammers as "that which we do not do".
http://spamresource.googlepages.com/e360vFerguson
It's true no man is an island, but if you take a bunch of dead guys and tie 'em together, they make a good raft.
Quack, quack.
This statement requires substantiating evidence.
Here you go: http://www.spamsuite.com/files/e360vSpamhausNotice Removal.pdf
By submitting the notice of removal instead of a defence of no jurisdiction, Spamhaus shot themselves in the foot, and submitted by default to the jurisdiction of the Illinois court.