Details Of Australian Spam Lawsuit
from the sue-the-messenger! dept
A few weeks back we had mentioned that a spam company was suing an anti-spammer, but as more details come out about the case it gets even more disturbing. The spam company that is suing is upset that they were listed on the SPEWS blackhole list. The SPEWS list is run by a number of people who are completely unknown. There's no way to contact them, and no one knows who they are. They say that they put together the list for themselves, and post it to the internet so others can use it, if they want. However, the spam company isn't suing SPEWS (no one knows who they are). So, instead, they found some random guy who happened to complain about them on the internet and sued him instead. While SPEWS may have decided to block this spammer based on this one guy's website - no one knows for sure. The guy, Joey McNicol, had never ever heard of SPEWS until the case started.
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The SPEWS website is currently in Australia (previous hosters got sick of harassing phone calls, etc and asked (nicely) for SPEWS website to be moved to a new home).
There is some speculation that the spammers are really angling for an australian court to force SPEWS current website hoster to reveal all that he knows about the operation.
With any luck, the answer will be "not much", depending on how the data gets to the AU site.
Simliar cases have been filed around the world in the past, where the real purpose of the lawsuit is to draw out the identity of certain organisations by forcing witnesses to admit things on the stand, and the actual lawsuit was expected to be lost all along.
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