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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."'"
"The judges expressed surprise that a defendant would even bother to appeal a judgment as small as $27,000."
What exactly does that mean ? Litigation is so expensive that you should just pay up when somebody sues you
for thousands of dollars ? Is the court encouraging blackmail by lawsuit ??
Absolute statements are never true
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.
...Judge Posner is incorrect. One most certainly can "just come into a court with a fly-by-night, nothing company and say 'I've lost $130 million.'" That's the problem with the our legal system. Patent trolls do it all the time. One can bring suit for just about anything, against just about anyone. Happily, every once in a while a court will abandon protocol and call "bullshit" right up front. On that call, of course, His Honor is dead on. Hopefully, this frivolous action will cost the plaintiff and more importantly, his attorneys dearly.
It seems like there are dozens of these type of cases going on constantly. Corporate litigation is rife with abuse right now... this ought to be going on every day. I guess a lot of the integrity has been bought or bribed out of the system...
And yet, when Congress or whichever President discusses "tort reform" they mean making it harder for us actual human beings to sue when we are injured.
Similar to the upcoming US election results
SCO wasn't a scam. SCO was a legitimate company, with a very decent product and a large customer base, that was run into the ground by apparently-deranged corporate management.
For those keeping score at home, judge Posner is likely the best known and most highly regarded judge in America outside the Supreme Court. Getting publicly lambasted by Posner for incompetence does not bode well for any attorney's career.
It's not bias if it is a reaction to absurd behavior and arguments, as is the case here. This case is filled with plenty of absurdity and never should have been filed. The only reason why this case wasn't summarily dismissed at the outset is because Spamhaus didn't show up to court the first time around and got a default judgement issued against them. It has no merit and should have never been filed to begin with. Is it bias to call a spade a spade here?
But, what is interesting is the e360Insight, LLC, v. ChoicePoint Precision Marketing, LLC case. He sued them for providing them e-mail addresses for Ferguson, Ferron , and myself. Linhardt claimed he "licensed" our e-mail addresses from Choicepoint. However, Linhardt swore under oath (claimed in the case of Ferguson) with that Ferguson, Ferron, and I signed up with their partner. I am thinking that might apply in any further proceedings, if there are any.
Fight Spammers!
No. Because they didn't respond to the first case, they lost and now have to pay. What they are trying to do is get the payment as small as possible. $1 judgement usually means "You are right, but you have suffered no real damages but we have to award you something".
Judge's behavior does not indicate bias. e.g. your signature says you have the world's hardest puzzle game - that's free speech. But if you want to litigate, and base damages on your 'hardest puzzle game in the world', then you better be capable of showing that you have surveyed the world and have a reason to say it is the hardest.
This maybe biased (like the judge) but I think the spammer's argument has as much water as your signature.
SCO was /at one time/ a legitimate company. But it sold its major asset, and the shell was taken over by patent trolls. Since a company is nothing but a piece of paper, unlike humans, they can be converted from one use to a totally different one. WPP, the world largest advertising agency, descends from "Wire and Plastic Packging", a company which manufactured supermarket trollies. Nokia was once a forest products company, then sold rubber boots. 3M started out mining.
Consciousness is an illusion caused by an excess of self consciousness.
RIAA and the MPAA claim damages in the trillions, more than their industries have ever made. I don't recall hearing any judges berating them.
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.
Nintendo started making card games
No sig for the moment.
The OP is correct in the history of SCO. As Caldera, it was actually a Linux company. It wasn't until Darl McBride took over as CEO, renamed it, and decided the company's business would be litigation instead of making real products that doomed SCO.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Actually, they don't have to pay, because they're a British company and don't recognise the jurisdiction of the course to enforce these fees. That's why they withdrew in the first place, and only changed their mind when offered Pro Bono representation. In the UK, the sending of spam is illegal, so a British company cannot be sued for providing protection against something that would be illegal in the first place.
Since a company is nothing but a piece of paper, unlike humans, they can be converted from one use to a totally different one.
So can people. And it honestly matters just as little if the mafia boss or drug lord did a honest day's work once before turning to crime, it's what they are now.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
From my viewpoint the judge was not biased against the plaintiff for who they represented; he was angry at them for shoddy legal work. Admonishing one side for not preparing well isn't new when it comes to the law. In essence, they are wasting his time and the court's time when the court could be hearing someone else who had prepared for their case. Remember this is the Court of Appeals. They should have had their case solid before going to trial as the District level.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I thought nothing companies were entitled to the same justice as the big shots. Isn't that much of the point of our judicial system?
That is an important thing to remind people of who support that "tort reform".
I'm a Canadian. Working in the USA I started to get a feeling why there are so many lawsuits. You go to work and it really is seen as a sort of individuals competitive duty to maintain their own safety standards. There is a desperation and lack of regard for safety rules unless they are legally mandated (and then they are enforced like crazy like putting baby warning stickers on every random plastic bag as if that would be helpful). So for a poor desperate worker without a safety net the options are go broke or sue. Most just go broke but an industrious few manage to sue. And nowhere in that process does common sense come in: why is this happening, how to resonably fix it. It's all just a war to cover your own ass.
Why is the USA so broken!?
Maybe something about Ayn Rand being the 2nd most influential book after The Bible!?
We should all watch the latest Adam Curtis documentaries!
Stupidity is its own reward.
Back in the 80s, 88-year-old Helen Hooven Santmyer published And Ladies Of The Club, a novel which became a New York Times best seller.*
Having the term of copyright extend past the author's death still makes sense, and doesn't violate the concept of "limited time". Publishers pay authors based on how much money they expect to make selling the book (or program or whatever.) Some of that money is an advance, and some of it's royalties as copies of the book get sold. Under the current system, the publisher makes a guess about how many copies they'll sell, and if it's enough to be worth publishing at all, they decide how much advance to pay you, and (if the book actually keeps selling), after the advance is paid off, they keep paying you royalties. If you die, well probably your spouse or kids get it, or your creditors or whatever.
If you're an 88-year-old author, and copyright ends when you die, a publisher is unlikely to be willing to risk publishing your book, because you might die in a year and they wouldn't make much money - if the book is selling well, other publishers could print their own copies and sell it (like the ebooks on Amazon which are often ripped off from still-living authors) - and if they do publish it, they're not going to give you much of an advance, and your kids aren't going to get royalties from the other publishers if you die.
(*Ok, technically she published it with a university press, sold a couple hundred copies mostly to libraries, and then somebody from a commercial publishing house saw it, thought it was great, and then she got the good publishing deal, and died a year or two later. So she did get a reasonable chunk of the royalties before she died, but the book stayed in print for a long time.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
As other people have pointed out, when Patent Trolls come to court saying that your misappropriation of their intellectual property cost them $130 million, it's not frivolous, because they're pointing at the $130 million you actually made, and saying it ought to belong to them. On the other hand, this spammer is coming into court, and saying "Judge, I coulda been a contender*, I coulda made'a 130 million dollars selling Nigerian Herbal Fake Viagra, but Spamhaus put me on their list, and now I'm just a bum!", and that's frivolous because all they can really demonstrate is that now they're just a bum.
The music industry is an intermediate case. They're the people who made hundreds of millions of dollars selling the public music from Britney Spears and N'Sync, so yeah, they coulda been a contender if you hadn't been sharing their music for free. On the other hand, just because Joe's Garage Metal Band really does have more talent than Britney, it's really dodgy to argue that they could have made $130m from the stuff you gave away without demonstrating that you'd given away 10 million copies, as opposed to the three copies that people actually downloaded that they don't have proof of.
(*Hey, it's fair use, don't sue me!)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Following your logic, a fixed definite copyright term makes more sense than one based on the author's span. If all works got a 30, 50, 70, whatever year copyright term, then some copyrights wouldn't be worth less due to a shorter duration. And determining whether a work is still under protection would be easy, as all you need to know is the publication date of the work.