This is an amazingly clever legal hack to deal with spammers and the problems of false positives with automatic spam scanners. Anne Mitchell, ex of MAPS has copyrighted (and trademarked, and patented) a haiku. She’ll let anyone who isn’t a spammer include it in their headers. And she’ll go after spammers that do include it with the full armoury of the intellectual property legal framework. She’s taking them down for breach of her haiku, not their spamming practice! I don’t know whether it’ll work, but it’s the the cleverest use of IP law I’ve seen since the GPL.
I’ve written up the story as a news item, as per my grand writing project. If you want to forward this link around, you might want to link directly to that. (This one’s in the style of Wired News, trivia fans: a fair amount of presumed knowledge, slightly informal style, standard US news piece packaging. Wired update their site at about 3AM PST, so don’t be surprised if there’s an equivalent, but better researched piece, over there by the time you read this.)
I *knew* spam and haiku were interlinked somehow.
Oh, and by the way – I originally got this from the astounding TBTF Irregulars mailing list.