And I couldn’t be happier. Here’s a link to the judgment (PDF File), which is posted on the Spamhaus web site. The final judgment: $3 to E360, costs for defending the lawsuit to Spamhaus.
In my personal and strongly-held opinion, Linhardt is a spammer, a liar, and something approximating a complete waste of protoplasm. Spamhaus is none of these things. Without them and other groups doing substantially similiar work to document where spam is coming from and provide people with a means to block it, spam would long since have killed off email as a viable means of communication. I would happily pay the $3 for Spamhaus myself. I hope that their pro-bono lawyers, Jenner & Block, go after Linhardt for every penny of the costs that they can legally recover.
The U.S. courts are insanely slow to deal with many civil issues, but they do get it right sometimes. This was one of those times. :-) Here are some other blogs on the subject:
- CircleID (Venkat Balasubramani): Seventh Circuit Awards e360 a Whopping $3 in Damages Against Spamhaus
- Spamtacular (Mickey Chandler): And the verdict is….
- Word to the Wise (Laura Atkins): Appeals court rules in e360 v. Spamhaus