circle.ch :: barratry - the offense of persistently instigating lawsuits

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2012-05-12T12:55:24

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02. September 2003

barratry - the offense of persistently instigating lawsuits
Law (wiki) - urs @ 11:17:21

Got across the word "barratry" [1] today. It is said to be

The practice of exciting and encouraging lawsuits and quarrels, typically groundless ones.

This has been a topic on Richard W.M. Jones [2] spam archive - currently at a size of 212 MB, while he got threatend to shut it - or parts of it - down.

The problem came from reporting spam in full context, which is basically not allowed, since also spam is copyrighted. Normally republishing is not permitted under the conditions of "fair use" if it is not for educational reasons [3]. Fair use means:

In its most general sense, a fair use is any copying of copyrighted material done for a limited and "transformative" purpose such as to comment upon, criticize or parody a copyrighted work.

So, the question arises if the fight against spam is to falling under one or more of these purposes. It is probably to affirm.

[1] http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=barratry
[2] http://www.annexia.org/spam/threat.msp
[3] http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/index.html