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

People do this for Faxes too

[erroneus]

The anti-spam-fax law allows for individuals to sue for damages and so many people have set up fax lines and started collecting faxes and collecting money. I don't know if that is still going on or not, but I heard some people made it a full-time living.

The CAN SPAM act is another problem in that individuals are not allowed to sue. The ISPs are the ones who are eligible for that. This part of the law needs to change. While allowing individuals to sue might be a bit too much for some litigation-happy individuals to resist, I think it might be fair enough to allow domain holders and mail hosts to sue under the CAN SPAM act. I say this because I own three domains and would be happy to file a legal action or two except for the fact that the amount of spam I receive is pretty low at the moment... and by low, I mean one or two every two or three days. (Thank you greylisting! Say that "it won't work" all you like, but the results speak differently.)

Should setting up shop in order to take advantage of a law against spamming be allowed? HELL YES it should! The opposite is certainly true and acceptable -- for business to have laws written to their advantage. Is the a provision in the CAN SPAM act that says you can't do this? Is there any law, federal or state, that says you can't do this? The bottom line is that someone set up a "honey net" for profit via the judicial system. Perhaps its the perceived abuse of the judicial system that is the issue?

Re:People do this for Faxes too

[flonker]

I wonder if a "real" ISP would be able to partner with a spam-fighter to allow them to fight the good fight. I'm sure within half a dozen phone calls, you'd fine one that was willing to lend you their name. I'd suggest looking at the list of registered ISPs at the Copyright office - http://www.copyright.gov/onlinesp/list/index.html as they're likely to have all of the other bases covered already.

Re:The appeals court made a really biased decision

[lalena]

14 years ago I purchased a .com for my last name. I was able to get myFirstName@myLastName.com as my email address. How cool is that. Then the spam started (before good filtering). I was getting 1-2 GB of spam a day. My email file (BSD Unix) was open for write 24/7. I could never connect with my email client to download any emails. I'm not even sure if good filtering would have done any good. My hosting company couldn't figure out how to close the email account without closing the my user account (same name) that ran the web site. I basically had to telnet in and VI the file several times a week to delete everything to keep under my account's disk space quota. Also realize that domains still cost $70/year and hosting wasn't cheap back then either.
Spam can really cost someone money even if they aren't an ISP. I eventually had to change hosting companies just to kill that email address. To this day I can't use that address. Even with modern email filters, enough crap would get through to make it not worth using. I'm now using a gmail account.