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A new twist on the anti-spam fight
Posted by Kevin Chen on Sunday, April 06 @ 04:07:53 EDT Trademark
Habeas is suing some Internet marketers for trademark violation and breach of contract. The first lawsuit is against Avalend, a financial services and mortgage refinancing company based in Massapequa, New York, and its sister company, Intermark Media. The second lawsuit is against Dale Heller, Stan Stuchinski (BigDogSecrets.com), and Clickbank, a division of Boise, Idaho-based Keynetics, Inc.

Habeas works by inserting trademarked haiku that allows email systems to identify it as non-spam. These phrases are recognized by Spam Assassin, Mail Filters, Mail Shell, I Hate Spam among others. The company had threatened to sue any spammer who used those trademarked lines. Looks like they're carrying out their threat.

ZDNet has more on the lawsuit here.
Habeas also has a press release about it here
 
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Why not copyright? (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Sunday, April 06 @ 16:24:51 EDT
Why not also (or only) use copyright law to enforce the "proper" use of the haiku? Is there something about using it as a trademark which would be stronger than claiming copyright infringement (assuming the license doesn't allow that usage)?


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Re: A new twist on the anti-spam fight (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Monday, April 07 @ 13:49:48 EDT
I don't think the Habeas poetry works very well, given that the "boost" it gives to a message is only -6.4 points. A spammer could get that much by using (or faking) the gnus mailer. You can see the whole list of scores at spamassassin.org [spamassassin.org]. In fact, as I wrote in a /. post [slashdot.org], it is possible to get a -45 bonus without using the Habeas trademarks. Most spam that I receive is in the 10 to 20 range, so just a few of those good tests would be sufficient to push them back into the "ham" range.


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