[Am-info] Antispam company uses poetic license

[Erick Andrews]

Here's a new twist:
Put a trademark and poetry in your e-mail header and fight spam.

That's what one company is doing, although I think $200/year
a bit pricey.  MS has bought into it says the article.

See...

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/238/business/Antispam_company_uses_poetic_licenseP.shtml

Quote:

''Technical approaches to spam are fundamentally doomed, because basically there's no technical
 difference between mail you asked for and mail you didn't,'' said John Levine, author of ''The Internet for
 Dummies,'' and an adviser to Habeas. 

 So Mitchell aims to solve the problem through an approach that's light on fancy technology, but heavy on
 legal cunning. 

 Spam was recently banned in the European Union, but it's still legal in the United States. Efforts to pass a
 federal law against the practice have gone nowhere, as critics warn of possible violations of the First
 Amendment right of free speech. But America has strong laws against misuse of copyrighted materials or of
 registered trademarks. 

 Every e-mail message contains a ''header'' - a chunk of text that describes the source and destination of
 the message, the route it traveled to reach its destination, and other technical data. A subscriber to Habeas
 modifies e-mail software to add some additional text to the header. Part of it is written in the Japanese
 poetic style called haiku. Because the header now includes a creative work, its contents can be
 copyrighted. The header also contains a trademark belonging to Habeas. 

-- 
Erick Andrews