Following up on the case we mentioned yesterday, a Maryland court ruled a notorious spammer may remain outed:
- An Internet site that provides personal information about an alleged purveyor of mass e-mail is not harassment and does not need to be removed, a Maryland district court judge ruled yesterday.
Francis Uy, a tech specialist at Johns Hopkins University, posted the site to expose the activities of George A. Moore Jr., owner of Maryland Internet Marketing Inc. in Linthicum. Moore, whose company sells nutritional weight-loss products, such as Fat-N-Emy and Extreme Colon Cleanser, has been identified by spam-tracking organizations as a leading spammer.
Uy’s site encourages people to sue spammers under Maryland’s anti-spam law, and it includes Moore’s address and telephone number, which Moore claimed led to harassment by anti-spam vigilantes. Threatening phone calls were left on his answering machine, and he received dozens of products in the mail that he never ordered, including about 200 unwanted magazines and catalogues, he charged. [Washington Post]
Weep, spammer, weep. The court ruled there was no evidence that Uy had harassed Moore directly. Uy ended with this bold statement:
- “George tried to send me a message, and wanted to make an example of me,” he wrote. “Instead I had a message for him: Every time you try to mess with me, I will post it on the ‘Net, and more people will learn about you. I don’t encourage harassment against you, and I don’t need to. The facts speak quite loudly enough. Your best option is to crawl back under a rock and suck it up, or move to some state other than the one I live in.”
Boo-yaa.