All Things Digital

The only difference between Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang’s latest all-hands memo and the last one he broadcast is that “Carl Icahn” has been substituted for “Microsoft” (MSFT). Other than that, it’s another tired restatement of the capitalization-free “try not to get too preoccupied with the ongoing assault on our company” missives that Yang has issued at least twice before.

Anyway, here it is in all its keep-your-head- in-the-sand glory.

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The hammer has fallen once again on Stanford “Spamford” Wallace. A federal judge in Los Angeles yesterday awarded MySpace a $230 million judgment against Wallace who, with partner Walter Rines, broadcast some 730,000 junk messages to MySpace members in October of 2006.

The judgment is believed to be the largest anti-spam award to date. Not that it really matters, because MySpace (NWS) is unlikely to collect it. Wallace–who was by some estimates responsible for 80% of the spam on the Net back in his heyday–has rarely paid the judgments against him. Moreover, he has a bad habit of disappearing at the first sign of legal trouble.

And that appears to be exactly what he’s done here. Because the $230 million award given MySpace in this case is a default judgment meted out after Wallace failed to appear in court. “It is … a defendant’s responsibility to respond to discovery, obey court orders and avoid dilatory tactics,” the court wrote in its order. “Taking all of the above factors into account, a default is appropriate. The court finds that Wallace’s noncompliance is due to willfulness, fault or bad faith. … Wallace has had every opportunity to avoid the sanction of default. (He) has never provided any explanation for his behavior to the court.”

If the Motion Picture Association of America is so intent on shuttering BitTorrent trackers, perhaps it should set its sites on the really big offenders, like say … Google (GOOG). It’s going to have to sooner or later, because some day there won’t be any smaller operations left for it to sue.

After a prolonged, and quite nasty, legal battle with the MPAA, TorrentSpy is shutting down. “The legal climate in the USA for copyright, privacy of search requests and links to torrent files in search results is simply too hostile,” reads a statement posted to the site’s front page by founder Justin Bunnell. “We spent the last two years, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, defending the rights of our users and ourselves… [W]e now feel compelled to provide the ultimate method of privacy protection for our users–permanent shutdown.”