Habeas Settles Another Affiliate Spam Suit

Anti-spam company Habeas, which hopes to fight spam through copyright and trademark law, announced a settlement in its month-old suit against affiliate network Intermark Media, after the company fingered a customer Habeas accuses of infringing on its trademark.

Habeas dropped its claims against Syosset, N.Y.-based InterMark Media and its subsidiary Avalend, which Habeas had accused of abetting the violation of its trademark in an email campaign run by one of its affiliates. Intermark had denied the charges, with its chief executive expressing no knowledge of Habeas.

Instead, Habeas has turned its legal sights on William Carson, an Avalend affiliate marketer based in Weston, Fla., who is accused of sending out unsolicited commercial bulk email bearing Habeas’ trademark.

Habeas was founded last August with a novel approach to fighting the spam epidemic. Habeas includes a copyrighted haiku poem, known as a warrant mark, in email headers. With the Habeas service, emailers must agree to abide by Habeas’ email rules to send out mailings with the Habeas warrant.

Habeas claims Carson’s company, Marketing Masters, sent a number of emails with the Habeas poem used to evade spam filters.

Avalend agreed to terminate Carson’s account and cut off affiliates that violates Habeas’ trademark in spam and freeze their accounts.

Attempts to reach Carson were unsuccessful.

Anne Mitchell, chief executive of Habeas, has said this type of lawsuit often names third-party providers in order to free them from legally binding privacy restrictions against revealing information about their users.

Earlier this month, Habeas settled its legal claims against another affiliate provider, ClickBank, after it agreed to cooperate in ferreting out spammers from its network.

In addition to the suit against Carson, Habeas has pending claims against two other email marketers, Dale Heller and Stan Stuchinski.