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Anti-Spammers Win Major Court Battle

Posted by CowboyNeal on Thu Oct 16, 2003 05:21 PM
from the truth-and-justice-and-stuff dept.
Spam Government The Courts News
Brian Bruns writes "Well, the antispammers have won a major battle against EMarketersAmerica.org (now offline, but mirror here). The judge involved with the case has dismissed the case with prejudice, which means that all of the spammers arguments were denied. The win is a big one for the antispam community." It's always good to see my inbox come out on the winning side of a court decision. Sounds like the case was fun to watch as well.
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  • What didn't help the spammers (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 16 2003, @05:22PM (#7234458)
    Was the lawyer constantly telling the judge he could lengthen his penis by 2-4 inches, and that he had the hottest underage beastality porn anywhere on the net.

    • Re:What didn't help the spammers (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Did anyone else go and sign up Mark Felstein and emarketersamerica.org in Boca Raton Florida for every possible free sample, spam, and random catalog list? I did...then I laughed my ass off after trying to get him a Depends sample...

      "you have already requested this sample..."

      for those who wish to know...

      admin@Emarketersamerica.org

      Mark E. Felstein
      Emarketersamerica.org
      555 South Federal Highway Suite 450
      Boca Raton, FL 33432
  • The judge involved ... has dismissed the case with prejudice, which means that all of the spammers arguments were denied.

    I guess there are some things in life that are just plain wrong.
    • The judge involved ... has dismissed the case with prejudice, which means that all of the spammers arguments were denied.

      The important bit is that it's with prejudice, which means that the judge not only ruled against the spammers but also ruled against their entire line of reasoning in a way that sets a precedent applicable to other cases.

        • Only in America can businesses violate privacy, conduct "business" with little or no regard for the consumer, and still be considered legit by a select few.

          Yes! In most places around the world, that's the government's job!

  • Donate to pay defendants' legal fees (Score:5, Informative)

    by gorbachev (512743) on Thursday October 16 2003, @05:24PM (#7234475) Homepage
    This victory is bitter sweet. While the judge did throw the case out completely, he didn't rule that the defendants' (anti-spammers) legal costs should be paid by the plaintiff (spammers).

    You can help by donating to the legal defense fund [spamcon.org] established by the SpamCon Foundation. The donations are tax deductible.

    Please do donate, if you have any to spare.

    Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers
  • "Our real costs are less than what are quoted, but we still need money."

    So what are the "real costs", then? How much do you currently have, and how much more do you require?

    "Give us money" will work a lot better with a real accounting of where said money is going....

  • Moo (Score:3, Insightful)

    by harikiri (211017) on Thursday October 16 2003, @05:24PM (#7234480)
    This is fantastic, but how long till the boca raton gang move to vietnam or somewhere similar to continue their "business".
    • Let 'em move to Vietnam. As soon as the authorities there realize that they're blocked from most of the net because of the behavior of a couple of shady foreigners, the spammers will have to flee for their lives.

      -jcr
    • I don't think they were actually shut down. They were the ones who filed the lawsuit; the outcome is that they lost the lawsuit and are barred from suing again.

      This means that the anti-spam outfit is free to continue blacklisting the spammers, but the spammers haven't actually been legally enjoined from continuing.

      The real gain, IMO, is that this case demonstrates that the legal mindset is strongly against spammers. It seems like a sort of litmus test to me -- not deciding so much as revealing -- and I'm

  • Legal Defense fund link (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 16 2003, @05:26PM (#7234494)
    Direct link to donating to their legal defense fund [spamcon.org]

  • The possible long term consquences (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MrLint (519792) on Thursday October 16 2003, @05:27PM (#7234506) Journal
    Let hope the spammers learn a very valuable lesson here. *do*not attempt to legitimize your crap, you will end up with discovery proceedings. This will ruin hem, and possibly get them killed. The shady operators they work for dont want to be found the ISPs the contract with dont want to be found. they dont want the systems they hack to be found, they dont want to get nailed for tax evasion. In short.. dont ever stand in front of a train again. Next time you are gonna get plowed down.
    • I'm glad that there's some headway in shutting these people down. I hate spam as much as anyone and I resent the fact that these people feel entitled to spam us.
      on the other hand, I'm afraid that down the line, some gov't or corp will use these rulings to stiffle legitimate email/free speach/ or whatever - DMCA anyone?
      I'm just concerned about the long-term legal tamifications of these actions. That's all.
      Or, I'm just catastrophizing - as usual.

  • Oh no! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane (209368) on Thursday October 16 2003, @05:29PM (#7234523)
    The penis enlargement pump they sold me worked so well I need the next size up. Where will I get one now? Oh well, I guess I'll use the lost pumping time to take care of that business opportunity in Nigeria ...
  • Oh no wonder all those spam cans were gone when I went to Safeway today...
  • I know that I'd love a @spamhaus.org address. I bet a spammer wouldn't touch one of those addresses with a 10' pole.

  • Literally ran for their lives... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by sssmashy (612587) on Thursday October 16 2003, @05:49PM (#7234663)

    Felstein, Marin & Co literally ran for their lives from our lawyer, they had a very close shave indeed and were extremely lucky the Judge accepted their pleas for dismissal.

    This may just be a pet peeve of mine, but why is it that so many educated people use the word "literally" when they mean precisely the opposite?

    The sentence conjures up images of screaming shysters fleeing desperately from the good guy's lawyer, who in a frenzy of righteous anger is attempting to chase them down and cut their throats. That may be how the judicial system works in Afghanistan, but not in America, the land of the Free and Non-Literal.

    • This may just be a pet peeve of mine, but why is it that so many educated people use the word "literally" when they mean precisely the opposite?

      The sentence conjures up images of screaming shysters fleeing desperately from the good guy's lawyer, who in a frenzy of righteous anger is attempting to chase them down and cut their throats. That may be how the judicial system works in Afghanistan, but not in America, the land of the Free and Non-Literal.

      You've obviously never seen a picture of Pete "Heads On P

  • This is a great one (Score:4, Funny)

    by Kelz (611260) on Thursday October 16 2003, @05:50PM (#7234670)
    Opt-in permission based email marketers have been blacklisted, harassed and threatened by anti-spammers---legitimate businesses wrongly pushed to the precipice of extinction. We need your help in keeping our industry vital by protecting email marketers.
    Taken straight from the EMA web site... these people must have a combined IQ that pines to be in triple-digits.
  • Could someone translate that newsgroup post into English? I'm sure it makes sense if you're deeply involved in the case, but if you're not it's a little on the opaque side of black.
  • Ok, I'm not a lawyer, and some of you may have heard me say this before. So, before you start blasting my idea (or praising it?), know that I dislike the DMCA as much as the next guy and that I am interested in feedback about the legal issues here.

    As I understand it, the DMCA makes it illegal to even try to circumvent any security system on a digital device. I define digital security systems (and I don't think I am alone) as any hardware or software that keeps private information inside of a system and un
  • The defendants are asking for donations to recover attorney's fees.

    New Business Plan:
    1. Get sued by spammer.
    2. ???
    3. Win case.
    4. Solicit donations from Internet to cover legal fees.
    5. Profit!

  • An idea.... Or maybe it already exists? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Bowie J. Poag (16898) on Thursday October 16 2003, @06:09PM (#7234796) Homepage


    Idea: Lets call it Spamster... a P2P trading system set up not for warez, but explicitly for spam exchange. I know, hold on, hold on. Hear me out:

    The instant you come across a piece of spam in your inbox, you can flag that piece of spam to be shared. Within a few minutes, a copy of that spam (and perhaps an MD5 fingerprint taken from random but non-specific strings extracted from the spam as well) is made available to everyone via P2P.

    Meanwhile, someone on the other side of the globe a few hours later fires up his email client. As part of checking his mail, his client links up with a P2P spam hub and compares suspect contents against the list of globally known spam archetypes.

    Or even more fun, have that process handled at the mailserver level. Constantly parse the spool, generaring MD5 checksums, and using those checksums as search criteria in Spamster.

    Net result: The instant a piece of spam in sent, the clock starts ticking. Within a matter of minutes, that piece of spam is now indexed, and known to mail clients worldwide.

    Benefits: In order to defeat the process, spam would need to be sufficiently random in it's content to overcome multiple fingerprint runs.. Something that would next to impossible (or one hell of a headache) for any would-be spammer to attempt.

    Downsides: Net congestion.

    Hmmmm..

      • Hah, shit, I didn't think about that -- But wait -- Wouldn't the model still compensate for that?

        After all, arent the most _popular_ files the most _widespread_ fles? Suppose you flagged a piece of legitimate mail as spam. It would not propogate as quickly if only a handful of people declared it as spam. If thousands of people declare it as spam, its then its that much bigger of a target.

        MD5 fingerprinting of distilled spam fragments may be the way to go -- at least that way, you have some method of iden
  • you can just imagine how fast Eddy stopped Foolstein's coke supply and you can imagine the yell of "Get us out of this _fast_ you a**hole". -- from the article.

    BAD LAWYER, no drugs! Between that, the 'near death experience' and 'literally ran for their lives' comments, this article paints a very amusing picture of coked out lawyers being chased and shot at by the Spam Mafia. I'm sure it didn't happen quite that way, but I can dream, can't I?

  • Thats not what it means (Score:3, Informative)

    by ghostrider_one (182445) on Thursday October 16 2003, @06:24PM (#7234967)
    1. The judge dismissed the lawsuit because EMarketersAmerica asked the judge to dismiss it (ie they abandoned the lawsuit which they themselves filed, supposedly because of lack of funds).
    2. The dismissal "with prejudice" means that EMarketersAmerica cannot refile the lawsuit against the defendants at a later date.
      It does NOT mean that the judge rejected the basis for EMarketersAmerica's case, and it definately does not (as Steve Linford from Spamhaus claims) set a precedent in their favour. If some other (better funded) spammer decided to sue them tomorrow for the same causes of action, the dismissal of this lawsuit would have zero effect on that case.
  • Well, the antispammers have won a major battle against EMarketersAmerica.org (now offline, but mirror here). The judge involved with the case has dismissed the case with prejudice, which means that all of the spammers arguments were denied. The win is a big one for the antispam community."

    First off, let me begin with a disclaimer - that article is not even the slightest bit clear, so the following is based on what I think happened.

    It's not necessarily true that all the spammers arguments were denied
    • No, he's calling the *spammers" attorney a "junior ambulance-chaser." Try reading the message a little more carefully.

      -jcr
    • "Nor indeed will any spammers try suing us again after the very public fiasco Marin's junior ambulance-chaser endured..." So he's calling his lawyer who saved his ass an "ambulance chaser". jeebus. this guy is probably in ass in real life.

      Marin is the spammer, right? The "ambulance chaser" would therefore be the lawyer that lost, not the one that saved the anti-spammer's ass.

    • No, he's calling the lawyer who brought the SLAPP suit against the anti-spammers an idiot.

      Read some of the stuff at http://bruce.pennypacker.org/SLAPP/ [pennypacker.org] if you want to see just HOW much of an idiot. The defendant's response [pennypacker.org] is amusing. You don't get to LAUGH at legal papers every day.

    • I'm not so sure I would call it a formal press release...you won't generally find press releases posted on a newsgroup. It looks like it was meant as a informal "hey guys, didja hear what happened..." newsgroup post.
    • a good question... sadly "someone" must be buying "something" from these spammers for them to keep doing this. And even if the ratio is .0001% you still are getting FREE marketing to millions of people - most of which just delete your email (very few actually are able to find who you are and take you to court) and occasionally some buy apparently.

        • all that needs to happen is the spammers need to convince the companies

          Exactly right. The big spammers are rarely ever selling anything themselves except spam. All they need to do is tell a company that their ad will reach 24 million potential customers a day.

          Then add "if even 1/2 of one percent buy your $29.95 product, that would be millions of dollars worth of sales." The company owner's eyes gloss over while they dream of being rich and sign the check to the spammer.

          Besides, I suspect the call

    • Re:A Question (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Tackhead (54550) on Thursday October 16 2003, @05:56PM (#7234715)
      > The Spamhaus Project says that "90% of spam received by Internet users in North America and Europe is sent by a hard-core group of under 200 spam outfits." Yet these companies/individuals know that their marketing hardly ever works (what's the reply rate of spam? Something like .0001%?). So why do they keep coming to work? Are they idiots? Or just malignant bastards?

      The 200-odd spam kingpins are malignant bastards. They are not idiots.

      > And why do companies keep using spam for advertising?

      The customers of Eddy Marin and the 200-odd spam kingpins are both malignant bastards and idiots.

      If you hire Eddy Marin to spam for you, Eddy Marin makes money whether you make money or not. If you're an idiot and a malignant bastard, you'll hire an Ethikul E-Bidniz Murketeer to "help you get the message out to a 100% confirmed opt-in list of targets, the EEBM will gladly take your money and ruin your reputation (Ford, DaimlerChrysler, Martha Stewart Online).

      So yeah, that's why, even despite a near-zero response rate and the visceral hatred his marketing campaigns bring towards his customers, Eddy Marin gets up in the morning and goes to work.

    • Yet these companies/individuals know that their marketing hardly ever works (what's the reply rate of spam? Something like .0001%?). So why do they keep coming to work? Are they idiots?

      While 0.0001% would be a poor reply rate for conventional advertising, the internet offers an economy of scale that makes this a financially viable business as the commission from the one-in-a-million people who respond is enough to pay for the cost of delivery (plus profit).

      I submitted an article this week (rejected, of

    • Re:A Question (Score:4, Insightful)

      by schon (31600) on Thursday October 16 2003, @08:05PM (#7235836) Homepage
      So why do they keep coming to work? Are they idiots? Or just malignant bastards?

      Neither - they are con men.

      why do companies keep using spam for advertising?

      Take a look at some of the other replies to post, and you'll see why.. people see lots of spam, so they erroneously conclude that it works (after all, why would there be so much spam if it didn't work, they ask.)

      It's all because spammers are con artists. They convince the stupid people (companies) that they can make money.. the net result is that the spammers get money, the stupid people get hosed, and everybody else gets spam.

      The spammers then find another victim, and it all starts over again.
    • well, you see, its like this...Myself and some friends from UC Berkeley, MIT, and McGill up north used the nice wide OC and Tx connections at our school...for a DDoS

      Just kidding. I actually bombed 555 South Federal Highway, suite 450 Boca Raton Florida.
    • They are attempting to avoid Bayesian filters by including non-spam words as well as spam words. They are almost-white to avoid filters that (wisely) ignore completely white text.
    • "now where am i going to get my penis enlargement pills from?"

      Worse, where are you going to find a girl to impress with it once it's reached normal levels?

    • On April 14, 2003, EMarketersAmerica.Org, Inc. filed suit against SPEWS, The Spamhaus Project, Joker.com, and the individuals that hide behind these organizations as they endeavor to destroy our right to market via the Internet. To date they've been much louder then our industry.

      The spam industry has a *Chief Counsel* who doesn't know the difference between then and than.

      We continually invest in equipment, inventory and technology. And, most importantly we create jobs!

      Yeah, all those people writing s

    • A telemarketer pays the phone company for the phone call. Junk mail pays the USPS for the service of having the mail delivered. Outdoor advertising pays the property owner for the space. A magazine is compensated for the space on its pages, and a television network is compensated for the time slice in its broadcast.

      I and my ISP are the ones who pay for the bandwidth to deliver a spam e-mail message to me. Not the spammer.

      So they are, in fact, pulling out my credit card and billing me.
    • This may be a victory for the anti-spammers

      No, actually, it's a victory for pretty much everyone (except spammers.)

      but at what cost

      None - except the attorney fees.

      Why does the spam problem require government intervention?

      First of all, this is not government intervention. (the spammers asked the government for intervention to stop people from using those technological 'solutions' you desire so much, then tried to back out when they saw how fscked they were.)

      Second of all, it requires a social sol

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