Haiku Used to Fight Spam

In the early 2000s, companies like AOL partnered with Habeas, a firm that embedded short haiku poems into email headers as a digital authenticity marker. The poems acted as a form of copyright protection-if spammers copied them, Habeas could sue for copyright infringement instead of trying to fight on anti-spam laws alone. In one notable case, Habeas won a $100,000 judgment against a mass spammer who had illegally used its haiku.

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