Recently someone harvested an email addy of mine for spam purposes, and have been sending me a nice, five-times-a-day reminder that they have MeDiCATion that I might want. :smack:
Now, the thing is, in order to get past filters, they have a nice big block of non-medical text at the end of the letter.
Said block of text is from one of the Lord of the Rings novels. It’s 100% definate. Names and everything. Now, I’m assuming these people don’t have the legal right to use these texts as part of their advertisements. Anyone know if there’s someone I could / should contact about getting these guys kicked in the delicates for copyright violation?
The spammer is probably already breaking numerous laws and running afoul of CAN-SPAM anyway - forged headers, misleading subject line, address harvesting…They’re not going to care about a little copyright lawsuit. Plus, they are probably based either in some country that doesn’t have very strict laws about such things, or routing through open proxies (in the aforementioned countries) so you’d have a real hard time finding them anyway.
The best thing you can do (apart from ignore / filter) is to report them to their upstream ISP. Probably nothing will happen. You can sign up for a free account at www.spamcop.com to help with the parsing of the headers. Even if the ISP cancels them, they will just spring up somewhere else; it’s like trying to kill off an ants’ nest with a magnifying glass, one ant at a time.