Anti-Spammers Win Major Court Battle

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.

What didn't help the spammers

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.

Extreme Prejudice

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.

Donate to pay defendants' legal fees

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

Give us money to cover our costs?

"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

This is fantastic, but how long till the boca raton gang move to vietnam or somewhere similar to continue their "business".

Legal Defense fund link

Direct link to donating to their legal defense fund [spamcon.org]

damn.

now where am i going to get my penis enlargement pills from?

The possible long term consquences

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.

Oh no!

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 ...

Extremism

The judge involved with the case has dismissed the case with prejudice

<dr evil>But was it, extreme prejudice?</dr evil>

background info?

Does anyone have any backgroundinfo on this case? The statement linked to in this slashdot article doesn't give any good details. What I can gather is the spammers tried sueing this guy for "interrupting and blocking the Internet
traffic of lawful businesses and individuals", "damages from blocking", and "Libel". It does not however say any of the things this person did to cause the spammers to sue.

This "press release" also seems very poorly written and not very professional. "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.

Marketing to the marketers?

Just use the attached form and return along with your membership dues.

I think that says enough about MarketersAmerica.org

In Pete We Trust

Take that EMA. It's a shame we can't hang spammers.

Where's the article?

The first link is dead.. and the supposed mirror takes you to a copy of the emarketersamerica.org site, which has NO INFO on the outcome of the court case.
A link to a copy of the actual article would be more helpful...

A Question

I imagine this question has already been answered, but I still wonder - what's the point, exactly, of spam? 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? And why do companies keep using spam for advertising? Is it so much more cost-effective to use brain-dead spamvertising over something actually thought-out?

Re:A Question

> 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.

Re:A Question

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.

oh...

Oh no wonder all those spam cans were gone when I went to Safeway today...

They should sell e-mail accounts!

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...

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.

Don't celebrate yet...

What level of court was this case tried at? I'm afraid the spammers could appeal to a higher court.

This is a great one

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.

Now offline, but mirror here...

Did Slashdot just crash a website BEFORE it had even linked to it or was that an edit?

What about the jobs they create for us?

The high energy blather at the EMarketersAmerica.Org website (as mirrored here [2mbit.com] includes this tidbit:

And, most importantly we create jobs!

Which, I suppose is true: I work for a medium sized University, and 4 of our 40+ employees in Info Services work at least part time on fighting spam. Of course we all overworked, so there would be other things for them to do.

But what about the tens of thousands of dollars we spend to keep our email systems able to store a dozen T-bytes of spam? That's important for the economy too, right?

Sort of like how criminals help the economy by necessatating prisons, hand cuffs, bullets for themselves and the police, etc.

Yeah, that's the ticket.

English translation?

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.

This is off topic

but recently I've started getting spam that looks like

<conspiracy theory> secret messages. They have wierd almost white words like moon, apocalypse, and kansas after large bold titles. </conspiracy theory>

Anybody else been getting these?

Oddly enough they tend to be the ones about keeping spam out of my email box.

DMCA Should help us here...

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 unwanted information and software (viruses, hackers, Trojan-horses and the like) outside of the system. In this case, my spam-blocking software can be considered a security measure. So then, any spammer that adds random characters, hides words in images or any other techniques to get through my blocking software is then intentionally circumventing my security software. If this is all true, then can't we persecute spammers on the bases of the DMCA. I think that this may lead to two benefits. First, we may be able to slow or stop spam in the US. Secondly, those that put the DMCA there in the first place (namely big businesses) would have a reason to fight the DMCA. So, where is the flaw in my logic here?

I have an idea

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!

Antispam propaganda.

The antispammers should send messages informing prople about their goals and that you should donate money etc. to random email adresses picked up by web sniffin bots. Yeah I think thats a great idea.

An idea.... Or maybe it already exists?

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..

Legitimate EMail Marketing?

It would be nice if they actually had legitimate email marketing but they use so many misleading tactics: fake return email, selling email addresses, spybots, etc. The 90%+ bad marketers give the "decent" email marketers a bad reputation but that's the lot they fall into now. One bad apple may ruin the whole bunch but MANY bad apples is...well...bad business.

Cut off their coke supply?

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

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.

What this means...

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. If the plaintiff/spammers decided to prematurely end their case and ask the court for dismissal, the court can dismiss with or without prejudice. Usually if the plaintiff has already dismissed once they will need the court's permission and the second dismissal will be with prejudice (and thus they cannot refile). However, if the case was dismissed by the defendants motion to dismiss, this decision has more significance. Essentially it would mean that the plaintiff failed to state a claim that they could recover on. This would indicate that the court felt that the spammer/plaintiff did not demonstrate sufficiently any injury that they could recover on. More likely (again, from my reading of the press release) it seems that the court granted summary judgment in favor of the defendants. This would hold much more significance, since the court would have determined that as a matter of law the plaintiff/spammers argument did not hold water.

While not precedent setting (since it is at the trial court level), the decision could be guiding for other courts, at least in that state. Additionally, if summary judgment were granted for the defendants, the argument they put forth could be adopted by others facing similar suits.

Anti-SLAPP Countersuit?

Does Florida have an anti-SLAPP statute? This case seems to cry out for an anti-SLAPP countersuit.

There are other ways to deal with spam.

This may be a victory for the anti-spammers, but at what cost (to use a cliche)? Why does the spam problem require government intervention? Almost every problem that has come up in recent history, particularly technical challenges, have been or can be solved with technical solutions or non-government practical solutions (like standards, etc). Natural language processing is getting better and better, and there are already spam-filtering solutions out there that do a pretty decent job. I use procmail, and I hardly ever lose a real email to the spam folder while only about 5% of the spam I get ever reaches my inbox, and that's only because I don't know how to write a regular expression to match "P'E.N^l'.S"E',N'.L,A-'.R%G`M~'E.N.,T" (I suppose I could try to use something like tr to get rid of non alpha-numerics, but...). There are much better systems out there than procmail.

This is definitely not a win for the first amendment or civil liberties. This is definitely not a win that is going to help keep the internet a free place.

I propose that there is a better way to direct all this vehement, foaming-at-the-mouth anger for spammers. Instead of trying to de-legalize spam, why couldn't ISP's each keep a do-not-spam list? If end users could authorize their ISP's to catch spam at the water's edge, so to speak, wouldn't that be a better solution for people who are so concerned with spam and still keep our freedoms intact?

Whats with the spin?

This was hardly the victory the anti-spammers (including myself) were hoping for.

I believe even cursory review of the court documents reveal that since the outset, this lawsuit was designed not to achieve victory in court but to harass the defendants and cause them to have to expend time and funds to fight it. There was absolutely 0 chance that they could have successfully argued that people maintaining lists of ip addresses of any sort could be held liable for jack squat.

Here are the facts: The judge granted the plaintiff motion to dismiss the case. Felchstein and the EMA desperately wanted to end this lawsuit before it went to discovery -- that could lead to the exposure of the members of the EMA, people who have very good reasons for staying hidden. The defendants did not obtain a judgement granting them legal fees, and now owe tens of thousands of dollars.

All of this means the lawsuit succeeded in every regard -- the antispammers time and money has been wasted, and the spammers are no worse off since Felchstein is in their pocket.

Extreme prejudice would've been nice

"So the judge ruled that life itself was in contempt of court, and duly confiscated it from all present." -Douglas Adams.

Butchering my article!

Thanks slashdot guys for butchering my article. Here is what was cut out:

The antispammers need serious help, their legal bills are huge. The legal funds are running dry at SpamCon. If you've wanted to donate some money to a good cause but haven't, now's your chance to help out!

http://www.spamcon.org/legalfund/ [spamcon.org]
Please donate!

If I'm not careful...

...I'm going to fiddle around and never reply to those offers to lengthen my penis 2-3 inches and increase its girth by an appreciable amount.

I'm such a procrastinator; I always say I'll "get around to it eventually," and many times I never do and the opportunity passes.

One fine day I'm going to wake up, decide it's time to upgrade my Schwanzstucker from Vienna Sausage to Bratwurst, and then realize that the channel to the product that will help me realize my dream is DRIED UP by these infernal meddlers, the anti-Spammers!

I can't wait

until California's anti-spam laws go into effect. I will live in the house that spam built.

And, since IAL, my attorney's fees will be substantially lower.

Spammer are the bad guys....

... that does not make antispammers automatically right. I do not like spam anymore than anyone else: it is a nuisance: However it is not the spammers that lead to my outgoing email not being delivered. It took me a full day to realise because a lot was not being bounced back, simply disappearing leaving me under the impression it had been delivered. When Yahoo bounced back an email with an explanation as to why, then I discovered that my ISP had been blacklisted for having an open relay. The cure was worse than the disease. Email is vital to a lot of us and stopping spam in a way that also cuts of tens of thousands of innocent people each time is too drastic: OK, I just switched to web mail, but the average user would not know what to do (e.g. my father assumed his Yahoo web mail would have been blocked as well becaue it ultiamtely went through the same ISP: not everyone understands that http is not smtp). Blacklists also favour larger ISPs . Small ISPs are causally blacklsited, on the other hand very few people would dare block a major ISP (say AOL) whatever they did.

Damn!

Life's been pretty good recently. I've been losing pounds of fat, erasing those annoying stretch marks, and growing a massive pair--all while asleep or showering, thanks to these great herbal HGH patches that Jenny Gorman wrote me about. I get to sleep a lot more now, too, thanks to the one-hunnert-percent American doctor who prescribed me this nifty hillbilly heroin via e-mail. Shipped it FedEx overnight and in complete confidence, too. Gracias, Luciano Lane!!

I do enjoy waking up sometimes, though, now that my husband has turned into a frisky devil thanks to the one-hunnert-percent genuine generic sildenafil citrate he bought online via the Internet. He says the pump gizmo has done him a world of good, too. And he's even friskier since he's improved the gas mileage of our car by 27%. Makes him real happy.

It's so nice not to worry about working, although I was just accorded a one-hunnert-percent genuine MBA by the non-accredited university of my choice! We're just sitting back and letting those dollars roll in from all the great investment tips and free U.S. grants you never have to pay back. If I ever need a little extra cash--say to order a few cheap toner cartridges or take a quick Florida vacation, I just call all those companies that are anxious to pay me for my opinions. I have a *lot* of opinions.

All of this has now been put in jeopardy due to the anti-spamming advocacy of this organization. You should all stop it before you ruin our ideal lifestyle.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go apply for a second mortgage on our house. I want to get it done before this lovely Vicodin makes me fall asle

Mark Felstein's "history of substance abuse"

Mark E. Felstein was denied admission [state.ny.us] to the New York state board on the grounds of "misconduct in college, history of substance abuse, criminal record and lack of candor since college concerning such matters"

Virus pause

Anybody notice the pause in the Sobig series of viruses? Maybe they paused to see how this would turn out. Now that it's gone badly, we may just see some more Sobig viruses released.

Re:Offline

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.

Re:There goes the economy

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.

Re:Offline

Why'd their website go offline? Anyone know why?

Because the "EMA" was a shell - it's only reason to exist was to bring this lawsuit. This was in an attempt to hide the identities of the spammers who were behind it.

Now that they've been so thoroughly trashed, there is no reason to continue paying for hosting.

Re:Hopefully...

I'll start to see spam decrease in some of my other inboxes. No matter how much anti spam software you have, it still creeps in. Hopefully, with the outcome of this court battle, spam will start to die. DIE SPAM, DIE!

The Spam, The?