Yet another ridiculous result of the US legal system: Spamhaus fined $11.7 million; won’t pay a dime reports the case of the heroic UK spam-fighting blacklist site Spamhaus, which was sued in the US by spammer e360. Spamhaus simply refused to participate and let e360 win a “default judgment,” since default judgments are not recognized in the UK. As Spamhaus notes:
Although meaningless for Spamhaus, which as a British organization not subject to Illinois court orders is listing … E360 … on its SBL spam blocklist as usual, the Illinois ruling shows that U.S. courts can be bamboozled by spammers with ease …. As spamming is illegal in the United Kingdom, an Illinois court ordering a British organization to stop blocking incoming Illinois spam in Britain goes contrary to U.K. law which orders all spammers to cease sending spam in the first place.
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It’s really amazing that the spammer managed to convince a judge that a UK organization was within his jurisdiction…
I wonder if anyone has told the judge that Spamhaus has no US presense?
“I wonder if anyone has told the judge that Spamhaus has no US presense?”
Quite likely, “e360″ merely pled that they did. Since Spamhouse didn’t respond, the court was required to accept the facts as alleged.
Such default judgments are more common than you might imagine. The only saving grace is that most jurisdictions allow you to challenge the jurisdiction of the initial court when the plaintiff tries to register the judgment in a foreign jurisdiction. In other words, even if Spamhouse has assets outside the UK, e360 will probably have a problem enforcing it.
All UK citizens now live under the cosh of the US legal system, wherever they live. After using legislation, supposedly rushed through the British Parliament by His Glorious Majesty Tony Blair to deal with terrorism, US judges can now drag Brits to the US whenever they feel like it, under whatever pretext they feel like, as here. I suppose its serves us British right, for having spawned the Federal US Government in the first place under that erstwhile British Army officer, George Washington, but if God truly is an Englishman, he must be going through a particularly masochistic phase. By the way, if you want Tony Blair, over there, please take him. However, if you do take him, be careful, because if you change your constitution to let Arnie run for the Republicans, expect Blair to run for the Democrats. He acts like King Louis XIVth over here. I’m sure he’ll feel quite at home becoming a Lincoln-style American Emperor.
I know this is late for the judgement, but I just learned of it due to the attempt of e360 to hijack the spamhaus domain. With that out of the way, it appears that spamhaus initially _did_ respond to the court, and then stopped responding, leading to a default judgment.
I believe that the jurisdictional hurdle was overcome when spamhaus responded initially.
Again, I believe that had they never responded that the court would not have proceeded with the case…but if anyone knows differently, please let me know.
Cheers,
Rich
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