Anti-Spam Lawyer Loses Appeal, and His Possessions

Techdirt is reporting that one particularly rabid anti-spam fighter has not only lost his case, but most of his worldly possessions as well. James Gordon tried to set himself up as an ISP to get around the conventions of the CAN SPAM act in order to set up a litigation house designed to sue companies that spam. Unfortunately a judge did not take kindly to this trick and ordered him to pay $110,000 to the firm he was suing, a decision that was not only upheld on appeal but accompanied by some very unkind words trying to shut down litigation mills like his. "But, perhaps even more fascinating is that the guy, James Gordon, didn't just lose the lawsuit, it appears he lost most of his possessions as well. Remember that ruling telling him to pay the $110k to Virtumundo? He refused. The company sent the debt to a collections agency, but told Gordon they'd call off the collections agency if he dropped the appeal. Gordon didn't."

Comments

Morton's Fork

[plover]

I'm not sure who to be cheering for on this one: the barrator or the spammer. Who should we revile more? Dante reserved the fifth pouch of the Eighth Circle of Hell for barrators, but he says nothing at all about spammers.

Re:Morton's Fork

[argent]

Spam isn't a technical problem, it's a social problem. EVERY communication channel that gets created, gets abused by people like this until the law comes down on them to stop it. Whether it's email spam or loudspeaker trucks, it's the same problem.

Re:Morton's Fork

[whoever57]

I'm not sure who to be cheering for on this one: the barrator or the spammer. Who should we revile more?

I can answer the question on whom we should revile more: the politicians who passed anti-spam laws that effectively protect the spammers.

Re:Morton's Fork

[swillden]

Spam isn't a technical problem, it's a social problem. EVERY communication channel that gets created, gets abused by people like this until the law comes down on them to stop it. Whether it's email spam or loudspeaker trucks, it's the same problem.

The technical part of the problem is that there's no way to enforce a legal solution.

Re:Morton's Fork

[m.ducharme]

How many lawyers do you personally know? I'm curious. I am currently working as a summer student at a law firm, and before that I worked as a clerk at an Insurance Defence firm, and when I go to school in the fall, all my teachers will be lawyers. So I'd say, guessing roughly, that I've met and talked to maybe 30-50 real, live, practicing or teaching lawyers (some practice as well as teach), and I have to tell you, out of all of them, there's only one that I suspect is possibly a sociopath. The rest are hard-working, honest people with varying degrees of ethical awareness, mostly fairly developed senses of ethical awareness. They take legal aid cases because their clients can't afford representation, or they mount Charter challenges to challenge overzealous cops or bad laws, they draw up wills, guide clients through divorces, and do the paperwork for your house sale. They teach business law, commercial law, and yes, ethics. Only a small portion do what you think of as "unethical" lawyering, and most of those know that there is ethical value in the work they do, and they care about that value, a great deal.

I think you don't understand the ethics of lawyering very well. The lawyers who chase ambulances are also the lawyers who keep corporations from completely neglecting quality control, and who keep insurance companies paying out settlements. Also, you mentioned criminal lawyers who defend clients that they know are guilty. You look at this and you see a lawyer who's protecting a criminal from being punished, and you think the lawyer is a slimeball. But that lawyer understands that when you have an adversarial system, every single person accused of a crime deserves a vigorous defence. Good criminal lawyers keep prosecutors honest, and they protect people from the much greater power of the state. If someone is guilty of a crime, but they get off because the prosecutor didn't build a good case, or because the cops roughed the guy up too much down at the station, then next time, the cops will know not to beat the shit out of prisoners, and prosecutors will know to do a good job instead of a sloppy mess of a prosecution.

As for the DA who prosecutes showy cases to help him at election time: well I'm a Canadian and I can't get over that you people in the US elect your prosecutors (and judges, for that matter). That seems wrong to me. You elect your government officials, as you should, a democracy is the worst form of government except for all the other forms; but there's room in the system for unelected professionals whose job is to protect people from the tyrrany of the majority, and lawyers, prosecutors and judges can fill that role well. But whatever, that's the system you have chosen for yourselves, and it works best when "slimeball" criminal attorneys can go all-out for their clients. It doesn't look pretty, but for the most part it works, and the people who make up the system know that what looks unethical to most people may be necessary to preserve the best parts of the system.

Re:Morton's Fork

[argent]

The technical part of the problem is that there's no way to enforce a legal solution.

Follow the lead of the TCPA and allow EVERYONE to take spammers to court, instead of this corrupt law that only permits ISPs to do so, and spam would stop in short order.

Re:Morton's Fork

[Supurcell]

It's funny for those of us who've never seen it before...

For everyone else, it's just spam.

Why not the same for the MAFIAA?

[Dr_Art]

Why don't the MPAA/RIAA (MAFIAA) get the same treatment as this lawyer? Of course, this is a rhetorical question...

Re:Wait, why 'haha'?

[jjohnson]

Because, like a patent troll, Gordon wasn't trying to eliminate spam, he was trying to profit off laws against spam that might allow him to sue--a professional litigant. There's two ./ hot buttons here: spam and abusing the courts. It's a tale of a bunch of shitty people being shitty each other, and we're the one's footing the bill for the judge who has to oversee it all, and the courtroom and clerks they're using.

Not many ./ers are capable of understanding that sometimes bad people (Gordon) do good things (fight spam) for the wrong reasons (personal profit) at a cost to us all (tying up the court system). It's 'haha' because someone who thought he was gaming the system got busted.

Re:abuse of the obvious

[shentino]

Imposing a cost on sending of email is not going to work.

You forget that many times spammers are criminals using botnets composed of hijacked machines, whose innocent owners would wind up paying the price while the spammer cheerfully pays his chump change to the botnet operator.

My favorite solution consists of the following:

1. Widespread adoption of SPF/DomainKeys to
2. Allow anyone to sue a spammer and not just an ISP
3. Make it illegal for credit card companies to process payments for spammed products.

On the whole, politics will probably make 3 the steepest uphill battle. I'm sure the credit card companies are well represented at DC.