Man wins spam lawsuit

Spammers beware! In what could be a landmark decision, a UK court has ordered in favour of the defendant Nigel Roberts who had sued Media Logistics for sending unsolicited commercial email into his account. The defendant claimed that he received upto 300 messages per day, which required him to dedicate time and money to filter the junk from genuine mail.

As users of email on the Internet are aware, unsolicited commercial email, commonly referred to as "spam", is a major problem haunting their inboxes. An estimated 65 percent of global e-mail traffic is attributed to spam alone, causing billions of dollars worth of damages in manhours and CPU cycles to process and filter them. Although most email accounts offer spam protection, spammers have always been staying one step ahead.

The European Union's 2002 Directive on Privacy and Telecommunications gives everyone the right to seek damages against originators of unwanted email, fax or text messages. This court ruling ordered the plaintiff to pay �300, since the defendant had claimed only that amount to qualify it as a small claim.

If a similar law is passed in the major countries across the world, the problem of spam may be reduced by a significant amount. However,there might be legal glitches about the applicability of a country's law if either the defendant or the plaintiff is from another country. In Nigel Roberts' case, both of them were from UK.

Law banning violent video games blocked

Do you think playing 'Half Life' or 'Quake 3 Arena' will turn your fourteen-year-old into a killer? U.S. District Judge Ronald Whyte does not think so. A court order has been issued which nullifies a law that sought to ban retailers from renting or selling violent video games to minors, set to be effective from January 1.

The judge said that the proposed law violates free speech rights provided by the Constitution and that there was not sufficient evidence to suggest that violent video games made the little kids into psychopathic killers.

There has been much debate recently on the effect of violent video games on the minds of children of impressionable age. It has been argued that such games do promote mental imbalance in children who played them for long periods, while the counter argument runs that games reflect only the violence they see in the real world, nothing more. Many of the recently released games do contain extremely violent scenes where players are required to kill or blast off or chop enemies into pieces for gaining valuable points or to advance to the next level.

Impossible is nothing

It is not every marketing campaign that really makes me think about the power of human determination and will, but this one surely does. Adidas launched their 'Impossible is nothing' campaign in 2004, and being more than a product pusher, the campaign struck well with the audience because it carried a message that everyone of us wants to believe; that there is nothing really impossible if you truly dare to strive for it.

“Impossible is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they’ve been given than to explore the power they have to change it. Impossible is not fact. It’s an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration. It’s a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is Nothing.”

Get more info on this great campaign here

File sharing system haunts owners

The Sherman Networks executives who founded the Kazaa peer to peer filesharing system may face jail sentences after an Australian cout found them in contempt. The court said that the defendants failed to implement certain filtering technologies which the court had ordered with a December deadline to help prevent rampant piracy in the music industry.

Coinciding with this judgement, new research shows that illegal file sharing has fallen considerably for the first time since RIAA began its fight against music piracy on the Internet. The NIPD Group says that there is a remarkable 11 percent drop in the filesharing system which users use to trade music using popular networks like Kazaa and Gnutella.

Browser war heats up with Mozilla 1.5

If surfing the Net has become a pain in the neck with spyware, viruses and trojans all seeping in through your browser and wrecking your harddisk, you will love this news. The Mozilla Foundation has just announced the release the latest version of their browser, Firefox 1.5. The Open Source browser boasts of loads of new features, faster and more secure browsing and a more user-friendly interface.

Mozilla Firefox is the closest competitor of Microsoft's omni-present Internet Explorer and has been gaining new grounds with its downloads clocking 100 million just recently. The new version of the browser, in addition to the above features, also has integrated search functionality and stronger security features. Firefox is also the first browser to meet US Federal Government requirements that computer software be easily accessible to physically challenged users. It also has an auto update feature that notifies the user when updates are available to be installed.

You can download Firefox with Google Toolbar here.