Dan writes: > Regarding a "passport" mechanism, have you > taken a look at www.habeas.com? Habeas represents one of the most egregious perversions of trademark and copyright law that I've ever encountered. Their copyright and trademark claims are invalid prima facie, and they hope to get their way by intimidation and distortion of the law to their ends. I cannot condone this, as it dramatically erodes the foundations of intellectual property law. Copyright law was intended to protect real, creative, original, non-trivial works of the mind for the benefit of their creators--and not as a techno-gadget to prevent spam. Trademark law was intended to protect the commercial value and goodwill of creative, real, original, non-trivial identifying marks for specific products and services--and not as a techno-gadget to prevent spam. I've love to see Habeas lose a couple of lawsuits. They are setting a very unhealthy precedent. > Specifically, they offer such a "this is not spam" > warrant mark, and the pricing for individuals is > free. If I see that warrant mark on my incoming mail, I'll bounce it. > The trick is that they use copyright and trademark law > as the enforcement mechanism. That's just it: it's a trick, and a glaring abuse of intellectual property law. Incidentally, the name of my domain is a service mark, and so any e-mail coming to me from Habeas is an infringement on my service mark, since it will contain the name of my domain. You can't argue with this, since it is no less stupid than the premise conjured up by Habeas.