DLTQ.org - by Raymond M. Kristiansen

Yesterday I received an e-mail from someone representing USAA, the American car insurance company. Apparently, one of my earlier test blogs had been heavily attacked by spam bots, and some of those spam comments claimed to have been written by "USAA" and talked about cheap car insurance.

I was quite surprised by this letter and the following correspondance. Are you breaking the law if you neglect to remove spam comments that might violate someone's intellectual property? Neglect is a key word here, and I do admit to not having removed the spam comments about USAA prior to their e-mail to me.

I find this episode at large a bit funny. There must be a zillion spam comments out there. Do companies like USAA go about dealing with every pesky comment that mentions "USAA"? Is this part of a larger strategy where they feel they need to protect their brand - and sending such individual emails to bloggers is part of their way of doing this?

I don't know where this will go from here, but I created a sub-blog for the issue. I deleted the spam comments, but might I potentially receive similar emails from the brand owners of viagra, phentermine and the such? If so, do I have to deal with every single such email? Perhaps I am legally responsible, according to some US law - and the server for this site is in fact in the USA. Would it be different if my server is in The Netherlands or Denmark?

Lots of questions, but I guess I will figure it out with time.

Aside from that, I am Really getting tired of all the spam comments I receive on my blogs. I might actually disable comments altogether, like several others do, but then again, that wouldn't be too constructive either.