Court sides with alleged "vacation" spammer
From the "Stranger than Fiction Files" comes this "genius" court ruling.

When antispam activist Mark Mumma received unsolicited e-mails advertising cruise vacations two years ago, he posted a report on his Web site and threatened to sue Omega World Travel.

But Mumma met with an unpleasant surprise: He was the one sued in federal court by Omega World Travel and its subsidiary Cruise.com, which demanded $3.8 million in damages for defamation. Mumma, who owns Oklahoma-based MummaGraphics and runs a one-man Web design and hosting shop at Webguy.com, filed counterclaims against the companies and CEO Gloria Bohan.

The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals sided with the alleged spammers. In a little-noticed opinion issued in mid-November, a three-judge panel acknowledged the e-mail messages in question may have included a false Internet address and a nonworking "From:" address, but concluded that they nevertheless were permitted under the federal antispam law known as the Can-Spam Act.

"The Can-Spam Act preempts MummaGraphics' claims under Oklahoma's statutes," Judge James Harvie Wilkinson III wrote in an opinion published November 17 (click here for PDF).

Read all about it here, courtesy of CNET.com:

Eric