Veteran Spam Plaintiff Abandons Spam Lawsuit — Asis Internet v. Subscriberbase

[Post by Venkat]

Asis Internet Servs. v. Subscriberbase, 2010 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 93518 (N.D. Cal. Sept. 8, 2010).

Asis is a veteran spam plaintiff, whose lawsuits have generated a fair amount of blog fodder. (See, for example, posts here, here, and here, discussing Asis lawsuits.) In May of this year, it suffered a bit of a setback when a federal court awarded approximately $800,000 in attorneys’ fees against it: “CAN-SPAM Plaintiff Slammed With $800K Attorney Fee Award.”

It had at least one spam lawsuit ongoing at the time, and it recently moved to dismiss its lawsuit against Subscriberbase with prejudice. The court granted the motion, but retained jurisdiction over the lawsuit, in case Subscriberbase (the defendant in this lawsuit) wanted to argue that Asis’s litigation was “abusive.” We’ll see what happens in this case, but this certainly seems like the end of the road for Asis’s litigation efforts. It acknowledged the $800,000 attorneys’ fees award against it and argued that it “can no longer afford to prosecute the [lawsuit against Subscriberbase],” because the attorneys’ fees award previously assessed against Asis “threatens to place Asis in either bankruptcy or corporate dissolution.”

Another plaintiff (represented by the same lawyers) did not move to dismiss and presumably will continue to prosecute the case.