Spam King Celebrates Legal Wins Over MySpace

For those of you that missed the insanely huge (over-publicized) story of MySpace filing suit against Scott Richter back in January, here’s a little pre-blog warm-up…

Step One:
Watch this video and bathe in the douche baggery that is Scott Richter, AKA: The Spam King…

Step Two:
Wonder to yourself how I managed to put bathe, douche, and one of the biggest shit bags on the internet into the same sentence without disrupting the space-time continuum.

Step Three through Twenty-Six:

Get that mental image of Doc Brown out of your head.

Step Twenty-Seven:
Go read or reread this old blog entry of mine about MySpace filing suit against Scott.

“Based on [MySpace’s] track record of unrelenting incompetence and boneheaded moves, I find it unlikely that they’re really ready for this war.”

My predictions in that blog entry have proven to be dead accurate so far.

Step Twenty-Eight:
Ponder the notion of me being a time traveler like George Bush to explain away my ability to predict the future.

All caught up? Good. Now, let me explain what all the legal mumbo jumbo in them there fancy legal documents actually means…

The first document is the original suit filed by MySpace against Scott Richter, some LLCs he owns, and two cohorts: Yevgeniy Leschinskiy and Marat Nigmatzyanov. In it, MySpace laid out the basis of their suit, asked for a preliminary injunction banning Scott and gang from accessing MySpace - pending the trial by jury they “demanded”, and it listed the stuff they wanted.

The second document is the minutes from when MySpace’s case got tossed out of the legal system and their motion for a preliminary injunction was denied.

How in the hell did that happen?

If your legal team is every bit as competent as your security guys, just go ahead and firebomb the data centers you host out of. It’ll make this a lot quicker for all of us. - Me poking MySpace with a stick after finding spam sent from Tom’s account

Sadly, it appears that MySpace’s legal team is on par with their security guys…

From MySpace’s terms of service:
Either MySpace.com or you may demand that any dispute between MySpace.com and you about or involving the MySpace Services must be settled by arbitration utilizing the dispute resolution procedures of the American Arbitration Association (AAA) in Los Angeles…

For those of you that don’t know, arbitration is a way of handling legal disputes outside of the legal system. MySpace decided to file this suit instead of seeking relief via arbitration. So, Scott used MySpace’s own terms of service against them to force them out of the court system and into arbitration. MySpace cried like bitches about this and claimed that what Scott and gang had been doing was outside the scope of “MySpace Services” and therefore not bound by the governing terms. Too bad in the original suit, one of their claims was a breach of contract for violating said terms - the same terms they decided; in retrospect, to say Scott’s activities weren’t bound by.

Seeing the retardedness in this, MySpace dropped their breach of contract claim. At that point, they desperately wanted two things: to keep the suit alive and get that preliminary injunction banning Scott and his clowns from their site. Dropping their breach of contract claim and crying that Scott’s use of MySpace was outside the scope of “MySpace Services” didn’t hold any water though. Why? Because of the insanely broad language used in their terms of service defining “MySpace Services”…

The services offered by MySpace.com (”Myspace.com” or “we”) include the MySpace.com website (the “MySpace Website”), the MySpace.com Internet messaging service, and any other features, content, or applications offered from time to time by MySpace.com in connection with the MySpace Website (collectively, the “MySpace Services”).

Based on that sweeping language, Scott got his motion to compel arbitration granted. So, as of August 13, 2007 MySpace’s suit against Scott was officially tossed out of the court system. The court also denied their motion for a preliminary injunction against Scott.

MySpace - 0
Spam King - 2

I find all of this hilarious for a number of reasons…

1. When the story broke about MySpace filing suit against Scott, seemingly every news outlet in the universe ran big stories about it. They all praised MySpace for taking steps in the right direction as the MySpace crew pounded on their chests in ape-like fashion. Well, it’s nearly ninety days after the suit got tossed out and I’ve yet to see a single news outfit run a story about it. Hey CNN, where the fuck are you now?
2. The amount of ill-produced MySpace traffic being pumped through Scott’s CPA affiliate network didn’t exactly go down as a result of the lawsuit. Nice move on the plausible deniability angle. If the spam had completely stopped after the suit was filed, Scott wouldn’t be able to blame all those mysterious “rogue affiliates” (*extreme sarcasm*) he’s constantly working to remove from his network.
3. While everyone was acting as if it were a given that this would be a slam dunk lawsuit for MySpace, I was the only person who called bullshit…

Based on their track record of unrelenting incompetence and boneheaded moves, I find it unlikely that they’re really ready for this war.

And, I still stand by the brutal assessment I made back in January. Even if MySpace moves forward via arbitration (I’m not sure if they have / are), I seriously doubt they’ll emerge victoriously. They simply don’t have any ninjas on their team.

Lame Legal Disclaimer:
All of the evil evil bad bad things Scott may have done are just “alleged”. He’s not a spammer, he’s a “high volume email deployer”. lolz

New sites I’m addicted to:
The Spam Diaries and Spam Suite were invaluable when doing research for this blog entry.