Old-time spammer suing to expunge record of past deeds

By Cory Doctorow at 1:30 am Tuesday, Nov 8

Jerry Reynolds is a paleospammer who focused on flooding Usenet newsgroups with porn-spam half a decade ago. He's since moved onto other things, and as a means of cleaning up his history, he's suing Usenet posters who outed him for spamming their newsgroups.

The thing that is so despicable about this is not that he was once the biggest spammer and has moved on to other sorts of (legitimate?) business, but rather, that he would use the courts to have a few pieces of information about his old spam work removed, as if he were trying to rewrite history and squash people's rights to free speech. He was tracked as a spammer early in the 90's, but hit a peak in 1997 with porn spam, at least as far as UUNet / Usenet was concerned. He actually helped kill that community by turning it into a garbage heap for spam. And now he wants to evade responsibility for it. And in the process, cost Ritz and Falk a lot of money and time, defending the truth. Disgusting!

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