And the award for the anti-spammer engaged in the most offensive drain on our judicial system goes to… drum roll please… James S. Gordon!!
Yes folks, it was close. Oklahoma anti-spammer and self-proclaimed tireless litigator Mark Mumma deserves honorable mention. But at least Mumma—who was on the smack-down end of a $2.5 million award earlier this month in a defamation suit brought by vacation marketer Omega World Travel—seemingly runs a legitimate business that generates money for performing actual services.
Not so with Gordon. Court records indicate he is a societal leech extraordinaire.
For background, a federal judge last week threw out a lawsuit Gordon brought against e-mail marketer Virtumundo. In his ruling, Judge John C. Coughenour of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle declared that Virtumundo could even recover legal fees, which indicates just how trivial the judge thought this action was.
For one thing, Gordon opted in to receive the e-mails and failed to use the opt-out mechanisms supplied in the subsequent messages, according to court records.
Also, during the trial it came out that Gordon’s sole source of income is from commercial e-mail disputes and that he’s cutting his friends in on the gig.
According to court transcripts, Gordon testified in January that his company Omni Innovations earned its first revenue in 2006—from the settlement of a dispute over commercial e-mail with a company called Collectibles Today.
Among the companies he is currently suing are BMG, software firm Ascentive, insurance company Inviva, online postage merchant Stamps.com and discounter SmartBargains. In the SmartBargains case alone, Gordon claims to have received 4,506 unsolicited e-mails and is seeking a judgment of just under $5 million.
Meanwhile, according to Derek Newman—the lawyer who represents the firms named above, and who has faced off with Gordon in the past—the anti-spammer’s settlement demands have been skyrocketing.
“The best that we got the plaintiffs to offer in this [Virtumundo] case was about six times what we had paid them in the past,” said Newman.
Gordon has testified that in 2006 he received no income that was not the result of a settlement of a dispute. He also testified that he has been filing lawsuits over commercial e-mail since at least 2003. He filed three in December of 2003, one against someone referred to in court transcripts as Mr. Hansson, one against American Homeowners Association and one against Commonwealth Marketing Group.
He also admitted that his “clients”—apparently people to whom he provides e-mail accounts—supply him with e-mails they deem are spam for him to use in his disputes and that they get an unspecified percentage of the settlements.
“In fact, I have one in my car right now,” he said, according to transcripts. When asked what he had “one” of, Gordon said: “A disk with tens of thousands of e-mails on it from a client.”
How many settlements he has reached and how much money he received is not part of the public record. And companies are understandably reluctant to talk. However, it seems Gordon and his cohorts had the potential for a pretty lucrative, relatively labor-free gig.
During the trial, Virtumundo’s lawyers claimed that it looked like Gordon was operating a spam racket, and that before starting an e-mail-lawsuit business, his sole source of income was state unemployment benefits.
Not true, claimed Gordon. He responded with a declaration claiming that he had received unemployment for just six months in 2003 and that previous to 2003 he had been gainfully employed. He also stated he was currently the owner of a company called Omni Innovations.
But wait: Wasn’t Omni’s first income generated in 2006 from the settlement of a legal dispute? So what exactly is Omni innovating?
Well, get this. According to Gordon’s court declaration, among Omni’s products is “The ‘Goal Gauge’ … a hand-held mechanical device, which will be converted to an electronic format. The device incorporates the critical success factors for goal accomplishment. Coupled with the proprietary ‘Failure Analysis’ system for human endeavors (as opposed to mechanical failure analysis and physics/engineering design analysis techniques and processes) our system can aid an individual in diagnosing why a goal was not accomplished using the ‘critical failure factors’ model.”
Wonder what Gordon’s Goal Gauge is telling him now? Hopefully there’s a setting that says: “Listen, loser: Until you get a job, you are a net negative on society. Please stop tying up our courts with your trivial nonsense. Oh, and tell your leech friends to get jobs, too.”
