Habeas Inc. is working to filter spam from your mailbox through an aggressive strategy based on standard copyright and trademark law. Through the company's licensing agreement, you are allowed to insert a copyrighted haiku into the headers of your email, notifying the recipient that the mail is not spam. Anyone who uses the haiku in violation of the license will soon find a crack team of attack lawyers beating down their door. Plus, when copyright expires, they can just select a new haiku. Damages could be pretty substantial: lost profits, profits of the infringer, court costs, and statutory damages of up to $150,000 for willful infringement -- and that's just for the copyrighted poem. Willful use of a counterfeit mark could bring damages of up to $1M per mark.

The service is free for individuals (!) and one cent per email for bulk-mailers that send to verified opt-in lists (like the very important updates I receive from Neiman Marcus). Unfortunately, they don't make it very easy for individual users to encode the headers or sort them properly. For the idea to really work, it's got to catch on. And for that, it's got to be easy. Plug-ins for every major email software would need to be distributed and webmail providers would have to reconfigure their interfaces to allow x-header filtering. It's not like configuring Outlook to prioritize mail based on the header is terribly difficult, it's just that non-technophiles really don't like fiddling with their email settings.

Fortunately, the system works with other types of email filtering, like the new Bayesian spam filtering rules that have been in the news recently, so you can sign up for haiku-mail without abandoning your other email filtering strategies. It's something to keep an eye on!