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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.
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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?
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.
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!
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.