On Sun, 14 Mar 2004, Dr. Jeffrey Race wrote: > On Sat, 13 Mar 2004 17:03:14 -0500 (EST), Dean Anderson wrote: > > >No such thing was ever found. And just the opposite was proved to you in > >Exactis V. MAPS. That lawsuit was settled out of court, > > Dean you have expressed your case well but in the end you must agree > none of this is persuasive because the case was never litigated on > its merits.
The principle defense was resolved before trial. MAPS only defense (First Amendment Privilege) was rejected before trial. The Court in the Temporary Restraining Order accepted the validity of the case presented by Exactis if all the facts were true. MAPS didn't contest any of the facts--they were all true. Another telling feature is the chastisement of MAPS attorney. With a set of uncontested facts, and no defense, what remains of that case is purely procedure and final judgement, which must then involve the court in the messy business of calculating awards and issuing injunctive orders. > We have only "he said, she said"; maybe MAPS folded for > lack of money or some other reason unrelated to the merits; happens > all the time. No, that isn't the case, as can be seen from the records and transcripts in the Lawsuit. It is true that one cannot cite a finding in Exactis V. MAPS, because a _judgement_ was not made, and so will not appear in any legal record, however, it is not the case that we don't have any clue about the merits of the argument. There were definite legal decisions made, and the unusual act of chastising MAPS lawyer. > I have been hoping for this issue to be litigated to a judgment but > this has not happened to my knowledge. Only 1% of cases filed are ever brought to trial. Lawyers are expected to resolve frivolous disputes. Truly frivolous claims do not even make it to a filing in most cases. Most disputes are resolved this way: http://info.av8.net/spamstuff/verio-demand.pdf Followed by a post by Mr. Guilmette: http://info.av8.net/spamstuff/RFG-Verio-Email > It may be significant (someone who knows more correct me) that even > though there is more blocking now than then, no one affected has ever > seen fit to sue on like grounds since them. Please correct me if I am > wrong. There is substantially less blocking now by "respectable" blacklists. MAPS has not blocked any commercial entity since this lawsuit. Even the current complaint about Vixie doesn't involve MAPS, but Vixie's _personal_ blacklist. Vixie is offering SORBS service via ISC.ORG, while trying to pretend that he has no association with SORBS. SORBS is ostensibly located in Australia, by Matthew Sullivan, and adminstrator with the University of Queensland. Sullivan claims to have no assets. Indeed, the blacklist proponents have taken to trying to create "lawsuit free", or "lawsuit difficult" sites by locating them in remote countries, and by having poor people who have no assets assume legal responsibility for them. Of course, as Joe Praad (attorney who has represented AOL in spam suits) has shown, this is no protection from the law. But Mr. Guilmette then goes on in another message to say that the law is not going to be on the side of blacklists (quite obviously) ========================= "MAPS has proven that the legal threat (against DNSbls) cannot be con- fronted directly or frontally. Any half-way competent General in this battle should take from this the obvious lesson that flanking maneuvers are clearly better than frontal assults in such contexts. Meanwhile, my encounter with Verio Corporate Counsel has illustrated, I believe, that it is possible to generate negative PR for lawsuit-happy companies whose total costs will exceed the costs of just fixing their spam prob- lems. This is a profoundly Good Thing, because in the long run, costs (as measured in dollars, yen, rubles, sheckels, rupies, whatever) are the _only_ thing that most corporations care about, and as the case of Verio illustrates[2], it doesn't take them long to understand that they cannot win the game when it is played this way." ========================= The whole message at http://info.av8.net/spamstuff/RFG-Law-no-good-email pretty much lays out what the current strategy of the radicals has been. They hope that by having poor people assume legal responsibility for the illegal behavior, that they can impose costs on corporations who will have to pursue the unlawful behavior, but will be unable to recover their costs from poor people. The radical anti-spammer are nothing but a pack of liars and hypocrits promoting lies and conducting mailbombing attacks. It is not a far stretch to suspect that they are also the ones responsible for the viruses that are mailbombing millions of people with billions of messages. Dean Anderson CEO Av8 Internet, Inc
