Law Firm Takes On Spammer
from the go-for-it dept
Recently a spammer attacked Techdirt by spamming an unknown number of people and the bastards had the gall to include a Techdirt URL in the subject line and a screenshot of Techdirt within the email (even though they were advertising something that had nothing to do with Techdirt). To say it made me angry would be something of an understatement. I sent it on to Techdirt's lawyers who basically said that any lawsuit would be very costly, and unlikely to be worth it. I'm still angry about the whole thing. But that experience makes me even happier when I see people going after spammers. The latest is that Morrison & Foerster, California's largest law firm (and owners of the wonderful mofo.com domain) are suing a company they claim spammed them over 6,000 times. The accused company, Etracks.com, says that someone at the law firm put their names on the list setting up a legitimate "business relationship".
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Mis-statement or serious legal loophole?
From the article, a quote from Etracks' lawyer: "I suspect what's happened here is that Morrison & Foerster employees have either at work or at home gotten on to some of these Web sites and registered there," Wilson said. "When and if they did that they created a business relationship with our clients and authorized the sending of e-mail to that domain."
I've got to find out whether this is really Etracks' policy -- I can't belive that any relatively mainstream marketing company (even a gray-market email marketing company) would propose that that a "registration" by a single user would create a business relationship with every single user at that domain. Sure, they'll spam any address they can get, but most of these companies just apologize and claim some sort of not-to-be-repeated error when caught out this badly.
...that's just utterly insane...one AOL user neglects to un-check a "yes, please sell my email address to anyone who will buy it" box, therefore your company has established a business relationship with any sucker who gets an @aol.com email address?
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The wisdom of
However, I do have to thank Etracks for their bonehead move, it may result in stronger antispam laws.
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Also interesting
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