The World According to Nick
My take on Software, Technology, Politics, and anything else I feel like talking about.
Monday, January 17, 2005

I Hate Spammers Too 

But I don't think this is actually legally binding:

Anti-spammers have a new weapon in their arms race with the spammers. A robot recently rummaged through Mike Wendland's website, harvesting email addresses to spam. But, as a participant of Project Honeypot, Wendland was prepared with an anti-spam honeypot. (Project Honeypot is coordinated by Matthew Prince, CEO of unspam.)
...
The model license is meant to provide Project Honeypot's participants with effective legal remedies against harvesters. The last provision lets the Project's participants haul harvesters from anywhere in the country into the participant's local courts. This is both convenient and more economical for the Project's participants, and may put a harvesting company at a considerable disadvantage by forcing it to litigate in a distant court.

You can view a sample of the generated web page here, which looks like a legally binding license. A license is really just a contract... so does this web page work as a legitimate contract, binding the creator of the spider to it's terms? Granted I'm not a lawyer, but I did take a Business Law in college, and we did talk about contract law, so here is my take. This is not legally binding for at least one reason (and probably more).

A contract requires both an offer and acceptance of that offer. These are two distinct entities. The maker of this contract is stating that merely reading the offer (the web page itself) denotes acceptance of its terms. This is like a software manufacturer placing its license agreement inside of a sealed package, and then in the agreement saying that breaking the seal binds you to its terms. In order to even get to the agreement, you have to have agreed to it. It's a catch 22.

By doing this, the maker of the web page is not offering any consideration for the contract, which would seemingly make it invalid. I hate spammers as much as the next guy, but I don't think that this agreement is actually legally enforceable as claimed by Security Focus. With that said, using this as a tool to find spammers and block them seems to be a good idea. Using this type of webpage as a tool to drag them into a specific court would seem foolhardy. Any lawyers out there with a more informed opinion then mine?

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About Me



Name: Nick
Home: Wauwatosa, WI, United States

I'm a Software Consultant in the Milwaukee area. Among various geeky pursuits, I'm also an amateur triathlete, and enjoy rock climbing. I also like to think I'm a political pundit.


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