After Joel's message and my own call to the agency, I am led to
believe that we must retaliate in the harshest way possible to
discourage further such abuse of the network.
 
My favorite comment from the person on the phone:  "We haven't
gotten into trouble yet!"
 
Suing the company would be an excellent precedent.  However, that will
take awhile and I do not know who has sufficient resources to dedicate
to this.
 
Here is some appropriate immediate action:
 
Post messages to your groups/lists asking users to help you.  Ask the
users to do the following:
 
    Contact John Petition by phone (212) 629-5261 or FAX 629-4762.
    (Note:  These are from the ad.  Can anyone suggest a better
    number to use?)  Tell John the following:
 
    o What he did was wrong.  People are very angry about what
      he did.
 
    o Because what he did was wrong, his message has already been
      removed from every single newsgroup.  They have also lost their
      connection to panix.com.
 
    o It cost hundreds of thousands of installations real money to
      receive his advertisement.
 
    o The ad was posted to moderated groups without authorization.
 
    o The ad was posted to many off-topic newsgroups.
 
    o Canter and Siegal are liars and charlatans.  Their book also
      contains lies.
 
    o There are many legitimate ways to advertise on the Internet, but
      Usenet is not one of them.
 
    o Most of the responses you will get through e-mail are from
      people who have absolutely no interest in your services.
 
    The most just thing to then do would be to have each person e-mail
    in a request for a packet, but to a ficticious address.  This will
    assure that the cost of reaching actual potential clients will be
    very high because of all the packets they mail to non-clients.  With
    the fictitious addresses, they will know that these were not
    received instead of thinking that they were successful because
    they got so many responses.
 
    Finally, contact PSI (does anyone have their number?) and ask them
    to remove sell.com from the net, as its owners clearly intend to
    encourage their owners to continue to abuse the network.
 
This immediate action should convince these people that what they are
doing is wrong.
 
Can anyone improve on this?  In particular, I would like good contact
information for publicity at the firm and for PSI.
 
                                        -Dan