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."'"

Comments

Re:Alas,

[larry bagina]

Otherwise you could just take whatever GPL code you can find and say "They've given it away, so their revenue losses are $0 and there's no damages to pay".

That's right but you're still wrong as you can sue for specific performance. The court could order the violator to follow the terms of the GPL (ie, stop distributing or make the source code available).