Slashdot Mirror
Judges Berate Spammer For 'Incompetent' Litigation
An anonymous reader writes "Joseph Kish, attorney for alleged serial spamming firm e360, must have known he was in trouble when Judge Richard A. Posner interrupted him seconds into his opening statement to berate both Kish and his client. Kish was appearing before the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit to explain why his client was entitled to $27,000 from Spamhaus, a British anti-spam nonprofit. None of the judges on the appeals court panel seemed sympathetic to e360's argument, but Judge Posner did most of the talking. He spent fully two-thirds of Kish's 15-minute presentation demanding that Kish explain his client's methodology and lecturing him on its inadequacy. 'This is just totally irresponsible litigation,' he said. 'You can't just come into a court with a fly-by-night, nothing company and say "I've lost $130 million."'"
You can't just come into a court with a fly-by-night, nothing company and say "I've lost $130 million."'
Yeah, this would be like the music industry claiming to have lost many times their actual revenue due to filesharing - they'd be laughed out of court. Or their victim would be bankrupted. Something like that anyway.
Spamhaus is fighting this judgment for some of the same reasons IBM fought SCO -- if Spamhaus showed that it wouldn't defend itself against one spammer, them they'd be inundated by other spammers looking to kill Spamhaus through a thousand paper cuts (lawsuits.) Even if Spamhaus spent ten times the amount of the judgment on the appeal, if they win and it prevents a hundred other similar lawsuits it would be worth it.
In his original complaint http://www.spamsuite.com/webfm_send/357 the guy running E360 presented as fact, that Spamhaus had blocked at least 27,345,357 unique messages from E360.
This is like saying, oh, I killed 37 people (and here's a list of who I killed) and that's why the cops are ganging up on me so I'm suing them.