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*** Billion-Dollar Lawsuit Targets Big Spammers ***

News Factor -- 05/01/2007
Unspam Technologies has filed a billion-dollar lawsuit against
"John Doe" spammers for violating the CAN-SPAM Act and the
Virginia Computer Crimes Act.

Unspam filed the suit in the Eastern District of Virginia on behalf of
members of Project Honey Pot, a distributed, open-source project
that aims to help Web site administrators track, stop, and prosecute
spammers. The suit seeks damages for spam and e-mail address
harvesting targeting the project's members. Harvesting is the use
of spidering programs to trawl the Internet for e-mail addresses
that can be added to spammer lists.

The suit was filed against the entire universe of John Doe defendants
using any of the 2,593,657 IP addresses captured by Project Honey Pot
over the past two years. Project Honey Pot was launched by Unspam
and has thousands of members around the world.

A Legal Milestone

This suit represents the first time U.S. law has been used to
challenge the practice of e-mail harvesting, a practice for which
CAN-SPAM imposes penalties. While harvesting is the primary
way spammers build their e-mail lists, without the data gathered
by Project Honey Pot it has been a challenge for anyone to bring
a suit against harvesters.

John Levine, cochair of the Internet Research Task Force's antispam
research group and author of "Internet for Dummies," said the lawsuit
might be successful. "Project Honey Pot is taking advantage of a piece
of the CAN-SPAM Act that says you can't scrape addresses off Web sites
and send them spam if the Web site contains language prohibiting
scraping and if the spam is otherwise illegal," Levine explained.

Matthew Prince, cofounder of Project Honey Pot and CEO of Unspam
Technologies, said the group's members have one thing in common:
They all want spam to stop. Aided by the vast amount of data its
community of volunteers has helped gather, as well as the top legal
minds in the antispam world, he asserted, Project Honey Pot is bringing
this fight to the spammers. "This suit will make them slither out from
under the rocks where they're hiding," Prince said in a statement.

Potent Legal Firepower

Jon Praed of the Internet Law Group, a Washington, D.C.-based firm,
is representing Project Honey Pot in the suit. Praed and his firm have
headed some of the leading antispam prosecutions, including Verizon
Online v. Alan Ralsky, AOL v. CN Productions, and AOL v. Cyber
Entertainment Network. According to Praed, Project Honey Pot's
community-based approach has been critical to developing a suit
of this scope.

"It is important to remember that this is a group of volunteers who have
pooled their resources in order to gather the data necessary to go after
the worst spammers in the world. This is literally the Internet community
as a whole standing up and saying, 'We're sick of spam, and it's high time
we do something about it!'" Praed said in a statement. Praed issued a
warning to those who have engaged in spamming or harvesting in the
past two years and quipped, "you should sleep a little less well tonight."

Unspam has reported that the number of e-mail scrapers is relatively
small, so if the lawsuit is successful, it could put a stop to a few of them.

"This suit could wind up reducing the volume of spam we're getting
because it would put a few of these guys out of business and scare
the rest of them," Levine concluded.
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