I was slightly surprised that Gordon was still pressing on with his case against Virtumundo. It seems that Mr. Gordon appealed, again, to the 9th circuit. James Samuel Gordon, Jr., appeals pro se from the district court’s summary judgment in his action alleging that defendant’s transmission of unsolicited commercial email or spam violated federal and state statutes. We have...
Boris Mizhen is once again on the wrong side of legal action. This time it’s not as simple as Microsoft suing him for creating hundreds of thousands of accounts to try and game the spam scoring system. Instead, he seems to have run afoul of the FTC. This case isn’t obviously about email, but the FTC alleges that companies under the “control or influence” of Boris set up a...
I was recently taken to task for claiming that unsolicited bulk email was spam. Spam is illegal and Spammers are criminal. Let’s not mess about with words here. Calling someone a spammer is inflamitory [sic]. I’m not arguing that sending unsolicited bulk email is anything other than bad. And that a lot of senders have a negative reaction to being called spammers. I’ve even had hate...
The EU has published consumer protection directives. Members states have 2 years to implement and enforce these directives. The interesting bit is this: 3) Banning pre-ticked boxes on websites When shopping online – for instance buying a plane ticket – you may be offered additional options during the purchase process, such as travel insurance or car rental. These additional services may be...
There used to be one thing you would inevitably see when having a heated discussion on the internet. At some point, someone would compare one of the participants with Hitler or the Nazi’s. That’s been a known “fact” on the internets since long before I joined. That rule was, of course, started in the days of Usenet, where it was difficult (if not impossible) to actually...
Today (well, actually tomorrow, but only because New Zealand is on the other side of the date line) the NZ Department of Internal Affairs added a 3rd statement of claim against Brendan Battles and IMG Marketing. This third claim brings the total possible fines to $2.1 million. Brendan is a long term spammer, who used to be in the US and moved to New Zealand in 2006. His presence in Auckland was...
On August 30, 2007 I wrote my very first blog post: 7th Circuit court ruling in e360 v. Spamhaus. Today, 4 years later (almost to the day) that case may finally be over. After a bench trial on the issue, the district court awarded e360 a mere $27,002, a far cry from the millions of dollars that e360 sought. Both parties have appealed. We conclude that the district court properly struck most of...
Venkat also commented on the Holomaxx v. MS/Y! ruling. As with blocking or filtering decisions targeted at malware or spyware, complaining that the ISP was improperly filtering bulk email (spam) is likely to fall on unsympathetic ears. It would take a lot for a court to allow a bulk emailer to conduct discovery on the filtering processes and metrics employed by an ISP. (Hence the rulings on a 12b...
Judge Fogel published his ruling in the two Holomaxx cases today. Defendant’s motion to dismiss having been granted, IT IS ORDERED AND ADJUDGED that Plaintiff’s complaint be dismissed without leave to amend and that the action be dismissed with prejudice. The full text of the rulings are available (Yahoo order, Microsoft order). There’s nothing very surprising here. The ISPs have immunity...
From Venkat at Eric Goldman’s blog we find the federal court has rejected an attempt to claim spam was “protected anonymous speech.”
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