On February 4, 2015, the United States District Court for
the Fourth Circuit put what is hopefully the final nail in the coffin for Beyond
Systems and its “litigation as a business model” ISP business.
The Court affirmed the 2012 District Court Judgment which
had ended Beyond Systems’ lawsuit regarding alleged SPAM email it "received" regarding Kraft Foods’ Gevalia coffee.
The Court held that the District Court was correct that
Beyond Systems “consented to the harm it claims it suffered. . . . Beyond
Systems created fake e-mail addresses, solely for the purpose of gathering
spam, … it embedded these addresses in websites, … it increased its e-mail
storage capacity to retain huge volumes of spam, … by which it hoped to
increase its eventual recovery under anti-spam statutes.” The Court's opinion is here.
