Woah, woah.

Okay, first up, I *did* interview Mitchell, and mentioned specifically: how are you supposed to stop Nigerian spammers. And it boiled down to this. If they can't get the legal sanction, it becomes a RBL blackhole database of haiku infringers. Which means that all the objections against MA apply, but no more.

Second - and I think the real Wired article made this clearer - the absence of the haiku isn't an indicator of spam. The *existence* of the haiku is a mark that it's someone is vouching that it's not spam.

There is no spam-filtering system that could possibly use this as a way of throwing away all other mails. You will never be in a position where you throw away all mails without the haiku. It will just be another score (+1.0 or whatever if it doesn't work, -1.0 if it does), another clue.

About the only truly novel dodgy thing in this scheme is the patent on the idea of using headers. The rest of it is just a debate over whether blackholes are bad (on which I think the court's still out), and whether copyright law is strong enough to catch spammers where every other law has failed.