E360’s Linhardt Denies Dropping Anti-Spam Suit
Contrary to reports circulating among anti-spammers, e360 Insight’s chief executive Dave Linhardt claims he has not dropped his lawsuit against members of the Nanae online discussion group.
According to Linhardt, he’s simply switching venues.
“We discovered that one of the vigilantes lives in Illinois,” he said in an e-mail exchange with this publication earlier today. “Therefore, we are required to file in state court. So we removed our initial filing in federal court and are re-filing in state court.”
Apparently, no one showed up from either side of the dispute in federal court yesterday and Linhardt’s lawyers called to say they were withdrawing.
Linhardt said he plans to re-file the same suit against all the original defendants in state court, and add one more: Bill Silverstein, an anti-spammer who sued Linhardt in California last month in retaliation for the e-mail marketer’s original suit against members of Nanae.
It is unclear why Linhardt has stopped pursuing the out-of-state defendants in federal court.
In a lawsuit filed in Illinois federal court on March 7, Linhardt claimed some of e360’s e-mail was blocked and the company lost business as a result of comments Nanae participants made in the online discussion forum.
Linhardt sought a court order barring the defendants from calling his company a spammer on Nanae, and asked for more than $75,000 in damages.
Named in the original suit were Mark Ferguson, Susan Wilson, also known as Susan Gunn, Tim Skirvin, Kelly Chien, an unknown person who goes by Fudo, and an unknown person who goes by Morely Dotes.
The dispute is part of an ongoing legal battle Linhardt is having with anti-spammers in general. He sued Spamhaus last year claiming the blacklisting concern wrongly accused his company of sending unsolicited bulk commercial e-mail and caused many of his outbound massages to be blocked.
Linhardt won an $11.7 million default judgment against Spamhaus in September when representatives of the blacklister failed to show up and defend themselves in court.
Spamhaus refused to abide by the ruling, claiming the Illinois federal court has no jurisdiction over the UK-based organization. Spamhaus and Linhardt are still battling it out in court and on the Internet.
