This has nothing to do with network marketing directly, but it’s a problem that just keeps growing and interfering with your ability to build your business using email.

Spammers discovered long ago how to use the ignorance, inexperience, laziness and thoughtlessness of other people to build their illegal mailing lists.

They do it by starting all kinds of viral email messages — jokes, weird photos, cartoons, music clips, etc — that other people will mindlessly forward to their friends and colleagues, continually adding to the list of fresh, valid email addresses listed in that ever-expanding message.

The spammers can then harvest and add them to their own mailing lists — and sell them to other spammers.

What most people who forward messages so thoughtlessly fail to realize is that they expose themselves to prosecution and heavy fines for breaching most countries’ privacy laws.

Discover why — and how YOU can prevent it — here:

http://suckerbait.info/how-YOU-support-spammers

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Michael Stelzner has long been regarded as the #1 “go-to” guy for expertise on marketing using white papers, with very good reason. He’s savvy and talented. He gives advice that gets results.

For the past year he’s also been publishing outstanding content on using social media for marketing and business building in his excellent “Social Media Examiner” newsletter and blog.

If you’re using social media — including social bookmarking and social networking — signing up for Michael’s FREE newsletter (and visiting his super-useful blog) could be the best move you make in 2010.

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In a long-overdue step in the right direction, the California 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has declared the odious Amway/Quixtar dispute resolution process (and, because it forms part of the IBO Agreement, the entire IBO Agreement) procedurally and substantively “unconscionable”.

[Unconscionable: adjective — not right or reasonable : the unconscionable conduct of his son.
• unreasonably excessive : shareholders have had to wait an unconscionable time for the facts to be established.
ORIGIN mid 16th cent.: from un- 1 [not] + obsolete conscionable, from conscience (interpreted as a plural) + -able .

In other words, it’s a blatant abuse of the company’s superior negotiating position that stacks the process against the IBO and in the company’s favour. Download the court’s ruling here (PDF).

This is precisely the kind of abuse that I wrote about in my 2007 Insight Report “Is Network Marketing REALLY Dead? (Or does it just smell that way?)” — download your FREE copy from http://isitREALLYdead.com.

Visit Rod Cook’s MLM Watchdog Court Action directory for more information.

The US Patents Office has long been a standing joke around the world for awarding absurd patents that would be rejected out-of-hand in any other country. But now comes a new level of absurdity that’s directly targeting network marketing.

(One can only look forward to the day when some US-based opportunist applies for a patent on the process of breathing in and out sequentially. There seems little doubt that the drones at the US Patents Office will grant their application.)

Specialist MLM attorney, Gerald Nehra, reports today about lawsuits issued against several MLM companies for patent infringement, to wit, a patent on the process of rewarding channel partners for orders placed directly with a brand owner online.

In other words, if a distributor with an MLM company has customers who order directly from that company online, the distributor gets paid their entitlements on that sale.

Anywhere else, patents, copyrights, trade and service marks and design registrations are issued only for very specific implementations, not for ideas.

The US Patents Office is notorious for issuing patents that are, at best, questionable — like Amazon’s dubious patent on affiliate marketing. (Yes, Virginia, if you operate an affiliate program online you are probably in breach of Amazon’s absurd patent, at least in the USA. Fortunately, Amazon is not run by fools, so they’ve never attempted to enforce it.)

In any other country, patents offices consider issues like “prior art” — existing precedents — before even giving the time of day to a patent application. True to form, the US Patents Office appears to adopt the position that prior art, or state-of-the-art, is a separate legal issue that can be fought out in court by anyone taking exception to a patent being issued to some johnny-come-lately opportunist who tries to stake a claim to what others have been doing for years.

This is no different to the issuing of domain names in the USA. So domain squatting, hijacking and claim-jumping have been rife with US-based domain names from the beginning.

The ONLY real winners in these legal contests are the lawyers. These are battles that the combatants can barely afford to win, let alone lose. So how on earth does this kind of lunatic system come to be — or, worse still, allowed to continue to exist?

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