One of the top spammers in the world (or should that be “bottom”) is a simpering mouthbreather named Scott Richter. Scotty is a criminal-for-hire who is paid by other criminals to violate your rights. If you have an email address, you have probably already been serial raped by Scott Richter. And now this lowlife shitbag is abusing the American legal system, arguing that he has the Constitutional right to continue his criminal activities. He’s suing SpamCop and their parent company IronPort, claiming they infringe on his right to “conduct business” by providing free access to public information for purposes of self defense.
SpamCop runs a blocklist of spam sources, provided free of charge to users and ISPs who wish to protect their bandwidth and resources from being stolen by scum like Scott Richter. When someone recieves spam from Scott and reports the crime to SpamCop, his network is temporarily added to the blocklist and an optional report can be sent to his hosting providers alerting them to his theft of services and violation of their policies. His spams get blocked and Scott can’t make as much blood money. His entire business model is founded on forcing you to recieve email you did not ask for and do not want. And apparently Scott takes issue with SpamCop protecting the identities of the victims, claiming that he can’t stop spamming them until he knows who he’s spamming. This is known in anti-spam circles as “listwashing,” when you simply remove the addresses of complainers so you don’t lose your hosting and can keep spamming everyone else. It’s not an acceptable opt-out mechanism.
Here’s an idea for you Scott: don’t spam anyone. Stop invading the inboxes of millions of innocent victims and all of your troubles will go away. Stop lying and quietly go out of business. Or, failing that, please die a horrible agonizing death. That would be acceptable too. Preferably something involving an acetylene torch, a vat of sulfuric acid, and an enema kit.
But Scotty is a criminal, and criminals by definition are not honest about what they do for a living. Scott actually has the audacity to claim that you asked to recieve messages about penis enlargement and get-rich-quick scams. His skewed definition of “opt in” simply means you neglected to “opt out” after he bought or stole your email address. Hence, he swears that he does not send spam. Scott Richter is a lying scumbag.
Now some extremely dense and clue-deficient judge has granted Scott (the criminal) a temporary restraining order preventing SpamCop (the good guys) from listing his servers while his frivolous lawsuit ties up the court system and wastes tax dollars.
I have to assume that the timing of this pathetic lawsuit is tied to the fact that IronPort only acquired SpamCop a matter of weeks ago, and prior to that it was an independent non-profit operation. But now that SpamCop has some money to go after, out come the lawyers. I’m sure Scotty’s not at all interested in real justice (he’s a criminal, remember) he just wants to cost IronPort some money and maybe even get an out-of-court settlement. I hope this goes to trial and Scott’s spam operation gets thoroughly investigated. I’ll get a good laugh when he attempts to prove to a jury that I granted explicit permission for him to send me this garbage.
Update 5/13/04 : – The aforementioned judge has acquired a clue and dissolved the restraining order.
Update 8/9/05: – A year later and Scott Richter is now billed as a “former Spam King”. He was de-listed from ROKSO in July 05 and settled with Microsoft for $7M in August.
When somebody asserts something, it’s up to him to prove this assertion. I mean, if Scott Richter pretends each user has asked to receive the spam, he must prove it for EVERY single email address he owns/stoled/bought among the 250 millions ones that he has in his files. It’s not easy to do. Richter’s case is like Al Capone’s : we must find the right angle of attack.
Michel, you’re exactly correct. The burden of proof lies with the party claiming a proposition is true. Snotty Scotty says I opted in, but he can’t prove it in a court of law.
Scott’s proposition can only be considered true if his skewed definition of “opt-in” is accepted. He says that you opted in when he opted you in, and you confirmed your opt-in status by failing to opt-out. If a judge accepts that definition, Scotty wins.
Of course the major flaw here is that his definition still does not include any actual permission. I never actually ASKED to receive his spam. Unfortunately, the US CAN-SPAM law does not require the spammer to obtain permission, so Scott is technically abiding by that law.
The law does, however, forbid automated harvesting of email addresses, and Scott is gleefully breaking that. The address he’s spamming has appeared in a few public places (like on this very site) so I can’t be sure where he harvested it. So we’re pretty much at stalemate.
This particular suit against SpamCop, however, is just flat-out asinine. There is no law anywhere that says an ISP cannot block whatever email they choose, nor any law forcing a blacklister to reveal the identities of the complainants. Scott Richter is a lying scumbag.