Slashdot Mirror
Judge Rules That I Own Slashdot
So I returned to the e-mail, which began, "Dear Webmaster". Scrolling through it, I found the part that I was looking for (I munged the sender's URL slightly, to avoid crashing the poor guy's server from all the traffic I'm sure he's already getting):
As you know, reciprocal linking benefits both of us by raising our search rankings and generating more traffic to both of our sites. Please post a link to my site as follows:
Title: Work At Home Business Opportunities | Online Career Training
URL: http://www.theeashblahblah.com/
Description: Your Source, and Resource for starting a Home Business, or Growing the One You're In.
Of course I am always interested in growing the business that I'm in, which is why I served him with papers a few days later under RCW 19.190, the Washington anti-spam law which prohibits e-mails with a "false or misleading subject line".
OK, technically at this point suing spammers in Small Claims is really more of a hobby. I still think that the real future of spammer-suing is in federal court, if you can amass enough damages against a particular company to reach the threshold of $75,000 to bring a federal lawsuit. The idea is not to go after the bottom-feeders who are sending the actual spams from their Mom's basement, but to follow the money and see who is ultimately buying the leads. You can respond to mortgage spams by entering a drop-box phone number and a made-up name, waiting to see who calls you, and then telling them that the person who sold them that lead is generating them illegally and that they shouldn't buy leads from them any more. Next I'll probably try responding to some ads for pills or other shady products by using a temporary one-time-use credit card number that's only authorized up to the amount of the purchase, to see which companies are doing the sales on the back end. (The checkout forms for those pill-hawking pages rarely say the name of the company that will end up on your statement, but the charge on your card has to be from someone.) The only types of spam I can think of where "following the money" wouldn't work, would be pump-and-dump stock spams -- in that case, the beneficiary could be anyone holding stock in the company. The SEC can freeze trading in stocks that are promoted in pump-and-dump but it's still no guarantee of catching the guilty party -- even someone who buys a lot of the company might just be an "innocent" third party who knows it's a scam but hopes to cash in on the price spike (although FAQs suggest that this strategy doesn't work). But for other types of spam, it's already been well documented how you can track it to the financiers without even trying to identify the actual person who pressed "Send".
Of course there's another reason why you'd rather be in federal court. Small Claims anti-spammer cases may not shed a lot of light on the economics behind spam, but they are instructive for what to expect if you ever appear before a District Court judge for any other reason. In this trial, heard by Judge Judith Eiler on November 5, 2007, the defendant telephoned in to the court hearing and said several times that this was a "personal e-mail from me to him" and should be exempt from the anti-spam laws. I said that I didn't think an e-mail with the subject "Link exchange with your site http://slashdot.org" could be considered "personal" since nobody who knew me would think that was my website, and in any case, personal e-mails tend not to start with "Dear Webmaster". But Judge Eiler ruled that this was a personal e-mail after all:
"Um, spam, these are anti-spam laws, which imply that they are mail just sent out in huge bulks, which would be the antithesis of a personal e-mail. And here he puts his name, in fact this is the person that you directly sued rather than somebody that's in a corporation or a company. The court does think that there's some indication that this is a personal-type e-mail. While it may have gone out to a number of people, it doesn't have quite the earmarks."
mp3 here
Below is a copy of the e-mail that the judge was holding when she ruled that it "didn't have the earmarks" of a bulk e-mail:
To: bennett@peacefire.org Subject: Reminder: Link exchange with your site http://slashdot.org X-PHP-Script: www.theeashblahblah.com/linkmachine/auto.php for 87.102.22.100 Date: Wed, 12 Sep 2007 09:34:26 -0400 From: Roderick Eash Reply-to: reash@tconl.com Message-ID: X-Priority: 3 X-Mailer: PHPMailer [version 1.72] Errors-To: reash@tconl.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="b1_b43cabef83c9f9123db7a78ef9a73362" Dear Webmaster, My name is Roderick Eash, and I run the web site Work At Home Business Opportunities | Online Career Training: http://www.theeashblahblah.com/ The other day I wrote you to let you know I'm very interested in exchanging links. I'm sending this reminder in case you didn't receive my first letter. I've gone ahead and posted a link to your site, on this page: http://www.theeashblahblah.com/linkmachine/resources/resources_home_based_business_41.html As you know, reciprocal linking benefits both of us by raising our search rankings and generating more traffic to both of our sites. Please post a link to my site as follows: Title: Work At Home Business Opportunities | Online Career Training URL: http://www.theeashblahblah.com/ Description: Your Source, and Resource for starting a Home Business, or Growing the One You're In. Once you've posted the link, let me know the URL of the page that it's on, by entering it in this form: http://www.theeashblahblah.com/linkmachine/resources/link_exchange.php?ua=_ua9&site_index=MTg4MTgwMjc%3D You can also use that form to make changes to the text of the link to your site, if you'd like. Thank you very much, Roderick Eash
Every time I write about a spam case, I swear it's the last time. I wonder if judges read that and say to each other, "I'll bet we can get him to do it again." With this ruling, if the subject line "Link exchange with your site http://slashdot.org" is not "false or misleading", does that mean I can claim slashdot.org as my site after all?
So I don't think that suing spammers in Small Claims will make much difference in the long run. But the odds are that you might have a case come before a Distict Court judge at some point in your life. Consider that the same type of judge who thought the message above was a "personal e-mail", might someday be deciding whether you're responsible for $10,000 in damage to someone's car, or whether there is proof beyond a reasonable doubt that you were guilty of rape, or whether you get to keep custody of your child. There's no joke here, just something I thought you should keep in mind.
So I'm hardly a victim, but it could have been worse; I could have gotten a spam -- excuse me, a personal e-mail -- with a subject like "Your g1rl says you n3ed a b1gger m3mber". I would have been pissed if the judge had ruled that subject line was not misleading.
This article reads like most spam, very confusing and all over the place. What is the point?
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#1: thank you author, for providing a public service by going after these lowlifes
#2: somebody get Judge Judith Eiler's email address. make sure she's on lots of "personal e-mail" lists. if these seems unfair to the judge, hey, she's the one who ruled this crap isn't spam, it's personal
and come to think of it, she's right, it is personal. i take it personally the moron doesn't know obvious spam when it's in front of her face in a court of law. thereby emboldening the assholes who fill our inboxes with this crap every day, every minute, every hour, every second. the only cure is to give her an education in what she is woefully ignorant of. open the firehoses, fill her inbox with "personal e-mails"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This guy has posted before on slashdot. He is a regular and in general well liked if considered a bit weird, but on slashdot, that just proves you fit in.
He uses anti-spam laws introduced in recent years to sue those who sent him spam in court. He does this himself, in small claims court and represents himself. He has mixed results in this and publices this from time to time. Sometimes it gets dismissed by a judge who doesn't think anti-spam rules should exist, or a judge doesn't think people should be allowed to sue, or in the more hilarious cases a judge shows a mental grasp of the issue that would land a regular person in the looney bin. This case is one of them. If a normal person spouted the nonsense this bitch did she would be wearing a straight jacket.
Basically, the poster received a spam, that used some "personal" details. Apparently the judge is unaware that spam can be personalized. It gets a bit complicated (it always does when you try to figure out the resoaning of the insane) but apparently the fact that the email was signed with a name was part of why it could not have been spam.
The poster then makes a link himself, because the email was personal, that means the reference to him owning slashdot must be right, therefore slashdot belongs to him.
It is a bit of a leap, but makes for a nice headline.
But basically this is just an other episode of "The spammers I sue and the idiotic braindead judges that rule on them".
There really should be a system where judges are tested and if they fail a test case they should be fired and every case they judged re-evaluated.
If you wonder why the legal system is so screwed up, judges like this are the answer. The various lower courts rule so absurdly that they are pointless, you must appeal since if you lost it is most likely that it was a dumb idiotic decission. At least the higher court judges tend to be selected from the ones who weren't complete failures earlier in their career.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Are you stupid?
Yes, Haselton's address was the only this particular message was sent to. But it clearly came from an automated source. Do you honestly want spam legislation setup solely on the number of recipients? If so circumventing such laws would be trivial, spam is automated,it wouldn't take that that much effort to automate only putting one recipient on each message. I think a much better metric would be demonstrating that a given message was automated and unwanted. Anyone with half a bit of technical knowledge call instantly tell this was sent from an automated source, and I'd take the suit it self as good evidence it was an unwanted message.
A Free Market requires informed intelligent consumers, such people are rare, we're in trouble.
The judge ruled that this was personal email so that the case would end, and the submitter would go away.
So you're suggesting that the judge is corrupt and prejudicial and that this case was not decided on its merits.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
What I gather is this:
As a hobby, this guy sues spammers. On a particular case, he has an email he received from a spammer, which he submits as evidence. The judge rules that the email is personal, not spam. That email contains "Link exchange with your site http://slashdot.org/", and the submitter interprets the judge's ruling to extremes. The email referred to Slashdot as a site supposedly owned by the recipient, and was "personal" according to the judge, therefore the recipient must be the actual owner of Slashdot.
Ok, so the judge got it wrong. Probably was being stubborn about the mistake too, and refusing to fix it or listen to reason, or so I would guess. What to do now? Go public!
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Yeah, it was an interesting time in my house. My wife was recovering from knee surgery when I got the bill. So I couldn't quite fathom how in the build up to her surgery she had found the time, motivation, and drive to attempt to sue me...
/should/ have been sent on to the Medicare program. If it ever made it there, I have no idea.
Turns out that the State initiated the lawsuit on her behalf, and because of how the case was being handled, she had no legal authority to decline their offer to sue me. The money they were suing me for was to go to the State Children's slush fund, where it
The really entertaining part, is that even though the same State law that they sued us under specificly states that the mother of the child can not be held liable for the medicare expenses, the State was perfectly happy cashing the check from her for the full amount (I had just blown my checking account paying for her knee surgery). The State wanted it's money back, and the Judge was looking at either ignoring the laws and having an easy day, or considering the laws and creating ramifications for the State's child services agencies and Medicare recoupment.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
No, I think that is pretty obvious from the story. What the GP appears to be suggesting is that the judge's actions can be excused by the hackneyed old cry that our court system is too buried in lawsuits to expect any judge to have an iota of actual judgement left.
More like: non-lawyer with too much spare time files an inartful lawsuit, blames the judge for his incompetence, then posts about it on slashdot to drum up publicity for his internet site.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
Nope. It's similar to how all the high-UIDs come out to piss and moan about "teh MAFIAA", et al.
The low-UID people here tend to be real nerds, and enjoy talking about real nerd topics (something that Slashdot used to have a lot of), while the high-UIDs tend to be wannabes looking for free music, videos and affirmation.
Did you rtfa? The judge said clearly that this was not spam despite:
1. Being mailed using PHPMailer [version 1.72]
2. Addressing "Dear webmaster" about link exchange with "your site", slashdot
3. Providing links with GET url parameters to "linkmachine/resources/link_exchange.php"
And she even said that "real spam" implies mass mailing and is the "antithesis" of correspondence like this. Oh, also that he was suing an individual, not a big company or something (as though an individual is incapable of spam)
So yeah, maybe he did a poor job as auto lawyer, but look at what he was up against.
I think characterizing this judge as a moron is a fair assessment. Also, if you rtfa he's not downplaying this particular judge's ability to decide other types of cases, just that people in such positions of power are completely capable of making poor decisions that can wreck your life (and that this was not one), thereby exposing a weakness of the criminal justice system.