You could almost predict this one coming: a group of spammers, including porn, penis enlargement, and Viagra spammers, has gotten together and slapped a sizeable number of individuals and spam-fighting groups with a lawsuit aimed at ordering them to stop blocking the spam.
The April 14 lawsuit seeks $75 million in damages plus interest and costs, according to the London Register. One of the charges: invasion of privacy, along with "blacklisting IP addresses of the plaintiffs," publishing false information, libel, and intentional interference with contracts.
And guess who's the leader of the anti-anti-spam pack in this case? Mark E. Felstein, the attorney for "notorious spammer" Eddy Marin, the Register said, who set up a "front" called EmarketersAmerica.org. But don't bother going to their Website just yet - an attempt to do just that by AVN Online on April 23 sent us, instead, to GoDaddy.com, a domain name registrar which showed EmarketersAmerica.org as "coming soon."
One of the anti-spam groups targeted by the lawsuit is Spamhaus Project, a British group which has compiled among other things a registry of known spam operations with extensive enough documentation about Marin's activities over the years. Describing him and his wife, Kim, as "some of the biggest spammers in the United States," responsible for "millions of spam e-mails, years of spam abuse," the page includes details about Marin's earlier bids to stop Spamhaus Project and another British group, Spews.org (for Spam Prevention Early Warning System), from stopping him and his fellow spammers.
"Spammers will try anything," Spamhaus Project spokesman Steve Linford told the Register, dismissing the spammers' suit as having no real merit. "These lawsuits are intended to tie you up in defending it, wasting time and money." But he added that the timing of the lawsuit - half a month before the Federal Trade Commission begins a spam conference which some think might provoke federal legislation, since its findings will be reported to Congress, according to the FTC - was no coincidence.
Nor was Linford surprised that the suit originated in Florida, Marin's home turf, a state with laws weak enough that spammers get little more than a slap on the wrist when caught, the Register noted. "Florida," Linford told the paper, "has become the world's spam capital."
