Copyright law is the 500-pound gorilla of the online world; increasingly, that world is being shaped by copyright, rather than vice versa. Intellectual propertly law is so much stronger than any other legal or technological control that it's being asked to do all sorts of heavy lifting it was never designed to handle. Case in point: the eternal arms race between spammers and anti-spam activists has broken out in fresh battles on the copyright front.
In this corner, in the blue trunks, we have Habeas, which is selling a copyright-based anti-spam solution. Using the "patent-pending Sender Warranted Email (SM) system," Habeas is creating the ultimate whitelist . . . which boils down to a set of custom headers containing a message whose copyright Habeas retains. Mail a message with those headers without Habeas's permission and you're infringing copyright, which lets Habeas go after you for the big bucks. The business model gives a royalty-free license to use the headers to individuals; commerical opt-in lists (subject to verification by Habeas) pay a fee.
And in the opposite corner, in the red trunks, we have "Legalservicesdp," a spammer who wrote in to the Great Spam Archive to complain that an email was being published without the permission of the copyright holder. Interestingly, that particular email dated to 1997 and does indeed bear a copyright notice. The complaint wasn't exactly polished; it remains to be seen whether a more formal cease-and-desist letter or a lawsuit will follow.
Word of the day (from the Great Spam Archive's reply): barratry, which Dictionary.com defines as "The offense of persistently instigating lawsuits, typically groundless ones."