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Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Ind. Decisions - Porter County Court decides email spam suit

Thanks to the Porter County Superior Court for sending this March 6, 2006 opinion by Judge David L. Chidester, Div. 4, in the case of Moseley v. America Online [note: file repaired].

Moseley contracted with Godaddy.com to host his website, sportsonlyauction.com. He also sent email from the site at the rate of 15,000 spam emails a day. AOL blocked his spam:

In its capacity as an ISP, AOL blacklisted the Plaintiff by threatening Godaddy.com that AOL would refuse to let any Godaddy email pass through its servers, clearly a threat to Godaddy’s network.

Plaintiff claims that this act of blacklisting amounts to tortious interference of the contract between Plaintiff and Godaddy, and the resulting shutdown of Plaintiff’s website by Godaddy resulted in loss of business and goodwill.

Plaintiff sued AOL for the tortious interference of his contract with Godaddy and in a separate action under 64D04-0508-SC-4356, entitled Howard Mosely versus Godaddy.com, filed suit against his domain registrar for breach of contract.

My favorite part of the opinion is footnote 1:
Use of the term “spam” as Internet jargon for seemingly ubiquitous junk email arose out of a skit by the British comedy troupe Monty Python, in which a waitress can offer a patron no
single menu item that does not include spam: “Well, there’s spam, egg, sausage, and spam.”As additional items of spam are ordered, the name of the menu item grows, i.e. spam, spam, spam, spam, eggs. See also: Kadow’s Internet Dictionary, at www.msg.net/kadow/answers.html. Washington v. Hackel, 143 Wn.2d 824, 24 P.3d 404 (Wash.), cert. denied, 534 U.S. 997 (2001).
The Court's opinion concluded that "because as a matter of contract, and because AOL has statutory immunity from the claims presented by Plaintiff, judgment is entered for Defendant."

Posted by Marcia Oddi on March 7, 2006 01:27 PM
Posted to Ind. Trial Ct. Decisions