From: Steve Linford Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email Subject: The Thrashing of ESpammersAmerica Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2003 16:12:42 +0100 Organization: The Spamhaus Project Message-ID: User-Agent: MT-NewsWatcher/3.3b1 (PPC Mac OS X) X-Complaints-To: abuse@supernews.com Lines: 60 As PC World says today: "Antispam activists have won a major battle. Now they have to figure out how to pay for it". Although there's a cost, that must not overshadow the significant win we got by default that has left the Boca spam gang barred from suing us again and left us with no restrictions whatsoever to carry on doing exactly what we do (and now with precedent). Being dismissed "with prejudice" means that all the arguments were given to us and all of the spammers' arguments (every single one) were therefore denied. This includes "interrupting and blocking the Internet traffic of lawful businesses and individuals: Denied", "Plaintiff claims damages from blocking: Denied", "Plaintiff alleges Libel: Denied", etc. Nor indeed will any spammers try suing us again after the very public fiasco Marin's junior ambulance-chaser endured up against the Wellborn & Butler, LLC law firm. Felstein had a near-death experience when he realized we were going for full discovery on the spammers behind EMA, their tax records for the last 5 years, their contracts with ISPs, everything. 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. You can well imagine that when Marin, Hirsh, Richter, Hardigree, Battles, 'Penis-Pump' Thau and the other Boca Raton spammers realized that with this lawsuit Felstein had implicated them all by refusing to say which one of them was behind it, and had opened up all Boca Raton spam outfits to discovery subpoenas that would end their spam outfits, 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". But, although delighted with the technical outcome, we're left with the costs of having had to defend the bogus lawsuit, as the Florida legal system does not grant costs to the winner even in cases where lawsuits are as fraudulent as this one clearly was. We are now going to appeal to Internet users to donate to our legal fund - which they can do via the SpamCon Foundation web site at: http://www.spamcon.org/legalfund/ The amount we need to cover is not what was publicized, it's far less and a good amount of it has already been donated to SpamCon by generous Internet users. On notice of the dismissal, the Wellborn & Butler, LLC law firm immediately dropped their fees by $40,000 so our real costs now are very substantially less and we believe donations from Internet users will cover them. If so, then we won't incur a monetary loss to dampen what was a most excellent thrashing of ESpammersAmerica by our lawyer Pete Wellborn III, described perfectly by one observer as: "Watching Pete Wellborn deal with EMA is like watching a fish-shoot in a barrel". Only in this case, we had to pay a ticket to watch. -- Steve Linford The Spamhaus Project http://www.spamhaus.org