Poetry as the ultimate anti-spam weapon?

Anne Mitchell, a California attorney, has come up with a novel way to beat spam. Well, actually, a haiku way: Embed a copyrighted haiku in the headers of legitimate e-mail. Any spammers that get caught with the haiku in their messages can then be sued up the wazoo for copyright infringement.

Um, yeah, but as Cory Doctory notes:

Spammers are already engaged in fraud, for the most part. Nigerian letter scams, Ponzi schemes, illegal pornography -- they're already illegal! Spam doesn't flourish because we lack the legal framework to attack spammers.

Plus, he adds, who is Mitchell to decide what is and isn't "legitimate?"

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