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Now It's the Spammers Who're Suing
Posted by James Grimmelmann on Thursday, April 24 @ 11:56:38 EDT News
A coalition of spammers, called Emarketers America, have filed suit against various anti-spam groups, including Spews.Org and The Spamhaus Project. The complaint alleges all sorts of fun torts, including libel and conversion.

Conversion? That's right, conversion. Instant analysis inside.

As the complaint says:

[The defendants] have intentionally blocklisted and filtered in order to purposefully take away certain Internet Protocol addresses and servers, which are the property of the Plaintiff.
The libel count is "better," in the sense that it stays far enough away from specific facts to avoid getting into trouble making embarassing technical mistakes. Instead, it tracks the legal ingredients of libel, some of which will be mighty hard to prove. That "[IP addresses of spammers] were [not] of legitimate public concern" seems something of a stretch.

I'm not sure what to make of "Invasion of Privacy by Public Disclosure of Private Facts." The complaint, in complaining about their disclosure, refers to these "facts" as "false statements," which would seem to undermine the whole claim. I suspect a word-processing cut-and-paste mistake.

Now, the "Intentional Interference with a Contract" one is a bit meatier. The idea here seems to be that the spam police went after Emarketers' ISPs (with allegedly false statements) and got them to breach their contracts with the spammers. The problem with this line of argument, though, is that it'll only stick if the ISPs actually breached their contracts. But if these contracts were standard ISP contracts, they probably had plenty of clauses listing the circumstances under which the ISPs could cut off service. Exercising your rights under a contract is not a "breach." More pragmatically, if the breach were really so clear, one would expect to see the ISPs joined as defendants.

There are also a couple of points that are familiar from the SearchKing v. Google case. There's the treatment of the demand for injunctive relief -- technically a remedy -- as though it were a separate cause of action. There's the claim of at least $75,000 in damages, which just happens to be the amount of damages you need to allege in order to get into federal court under these circumstances.

Speculation seems to be that this lawsuit was filed for harassment purposes and that it will be dropped after the defendants have gone to the expense of hiring lawyers but before they take discovery against the plaintiffs. Be that as it may, it raises interesting questions about the limits of self-help in responding to spam.

 
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Re: Now It's the Spammers Who're Suing (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Thursday, April 24 @ 21:45:51 EDT
Note that the web site of the Emarketers group presently contains only this line:

THIS PAGE HAS BEEN RE-DIRECTED FOR ABUSE / SPAM VIOLATIONS


[ Reply to This ]


Re: Now It's the Spammers Who're Suing (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Saturday, April 26 @ 08:39:15 EDT
Please note for the sake of further hilarity that Mr. Felstein, the apparently junior lawyer who brought forth the original suit, has applied for an emergency TRO:

http://ares.penguinhosting.net/~leftreveggplant/felstein/EmergencyMotionforTROPrelimInjunction.pdf

Which was summarily denied:

http://ares.penguinhosting.net/~leftreveggplant/felstein/TROdenied.pdf

Please note the footnote to the denial. Laugh. It's funny.

Yours Irrespectfully,
Rich Clark
aka The Left Reverend Egg Plant, ULC, CotSG


[ Reply to This ]


Re: Now It's the Spammers Who're Suing (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Saturday, April 26 @ 12:14:18 EDT
"Speculation seems to be that this lawsuit was filed for harassment purposes and that it will be dropped after the defendants have gone to the expense of hiring lawyers but before they take discovery against the plaintiffs."

That's assuming no counter-claim.


[ Reply to This ]


Re: Now It's the Spammers Who're Suing (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Tuesday, May 13 @ 08:48:39 EDT
I would like to note that *none* of the ISPS that have ever kicked Eddy Marin off have been served. I'd know if they had been. ;) Oh, the popcorn's out for this one...


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