Slashdot Mirror
CA Appeals Court Upholds Spam Law
Joe Wagner writes: "Criminal penalties for spam, yeah baby! It has just been announced that California State's spam law has been ruled constitutional and valid by California Court of Appeal for the First District: '...we hold that section 17538.4 does not violate the dormant Commerce Clause [of the United States Constitution].' The actual ruling is here. Congratulations to Mark Ferguson and his lawyers (1, 2) for fighting it out for the rest of us..."
Lovely. Now that California has lead the way, when do you think other states will follow suit?
Is there actually a "spam lobby" anywhere that could prevent (read give money to) politicans from supporting or passing such bills in other states?
"Moving through the masses like a fish through water." syrup
"The statute defines "unsolicited e-mail documents" as "any e-mailed document or documents consisting of advertising material for the lease, sale, rental, gift offer, or other disposition of any realty, goods, services, or extension of credit" when the documents (a) are addressed to recipients who do not have existing business or personal relationships with the initiator and (b) were not sent at the request of or with the consent of the recipient."
Perhaps not plain english, but as close as legalese gets.
YES!!!
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
YOU TOO can prosecute all those pesky spammers. Just send $100 to this paypal account and we'll help you. If you don't want to press charges, just send an email to nothanks@prosecutespammersnow.BIZ and we won't press charges at this time.
(IANAL) When do I get my cut of the Civil Suit?
Obviously SOMEBODY is making $4000 every week while they sleep with Barely Legal Lolitas and loose weight.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
This law specifically ALLOWS spam to be sent. It just requires that spammers include a valid return email address and that they remove people from their list who want to be removed.
This is great?
It also only covers spammers who have their equipment located in California. All this means is that spammers will use mailservers in some other state or country.
The only good thing I see about this is that it requires the subject to have "ADV:" in it.
I expect absolutely no change in the amount of spam I get as a result of this law.
Yes, I hate spam.
However, do we really want a precedent of banning certain types of emails? As much as we don't like spammers, I would much rather have to delete "Increase your ejactulation by 581%" than to worry that an encrypted email transmission was deemed illegal.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
Are you sick of all of the SPAM that your receive in your email everyday. Well now there is something that you can do about it.
Our law firm will go after all of these hideous capitalist marketers...
To help our cause please forward this email to all of your friends and spread the word
Also be sure to tell them to vote no on the Congressional Act adding a tax to emails...
At the point of origin, or the destination.
And on behalf of some Canadians, I would love something like this to happen up hear.
Spammers would have you believe that other than your time for "just clicking delete", there's no cost to spam. However, since you and I and all spam victims pay a lot of the cost of spam before purchasing the spamvertised product, market forces on spam are seriously weakened, with respect to market forces on other forms of advertising (radio and Tee Vee broadcast, newspaper and magazine advertising, billboards, stock cars, product placement in movies). For all other forms of advertising, the advertiser pays for the ads up front, before the consumer buys the product. If the ad campaign sucks ("Ring Around the Collar!") or offends (Frito Bandito, anyone?) ad victims can choose to exert market forces on the advertiser. With respect to spam, victims have already paid more than their share of the ad costs before making a decision whether or not to buy the spamvertised product. Market forces apply only weakly to spam, thus requiring government intervention. Criminalizing spam is a step in the right direction.
Spammers are all thieves. Don't forget, don't let your legislator(s) forget it. Down with the DMA!
Indiana has a new "list" you can add your telephone number to to avoid any telemarketers (Well, 95% of telemarketers. Some groups aren't bound by it).
Maybe it's the first step to adding your e-mail to a "no spam" list. If they're doing it with etlemarketers, why NOT with mass e-mailers?
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
email from john@iz.cx with the following subject
$$ MAKE $$$$$ PROSECUTING SPAMMERS!!! $$
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
In a nutshell: If you have a previous relationship with a company/person, or if you request it. People can send you ads. However you can still send people unsolicited ads if you include the string 'ADV:' as the first four characters of the subjectline. If you are sending material that you have to be over 18 to possess, you have to have the string 'ADV:ADLT' as the first 8 characters of the subjectline. In all cases, you must include a way o remove yourself from the list.
No replies made to AC posts. Please log in.
What are the odds of getting someone big to do this, like Hotmail or AOL? Then we'll really see how against spam the big companies are.
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
My friend has one of those fathers that left when he was a small kid and pops in once in while to give him a car, business, just sort of out of the blue.
/.ers can help me make the call on this.
Anyways we're going down to his house in bakersfield next week. Apparently his father has a T1 line going into a csu/dsu into a router on a pretty unsecured network into his house. All windows machines running IIS, can't remember the spam package he's using but here is the dilema I face, maybe my fellow
Up until last year I was a happily working dot com guy. Every company needed sysadmins so for a guy like me that understood tcp/ip networking and o/s installation it was great. Jobs were everywhere. Then I got laid off a week after buying my house. Been surviving, still got the house, but you just don't derive as much pleasure from life living day to day on ramen and cigarettes your bought scraping the change that fell out of people pockets from your couch.
His father wants our help. He know's I can help him convert everything over to BSD, which in itself would secure him a bit, get a firewall in place and a billing system. Currently he is making $2,500 a week net and has customers lined up out the door to use his spamming services.
My moral dilema is, do I help the guy to make a quick buck (which also makes the wife happy) or do I stick to my guns and say spam is wrong?
It's a really hard choice to make when you're faced with the reality of well.. reality. Bills don't pay themselves. I sometimes wonder if the goverment is lying about how bad it really is out here because I got 5 sysadmin friends in the bay area out of work now. 5 sysadmins that I personally know and hang out with. Their job hunts have been the same as mine for the last year, HR ppl just bringing you in for an interview so its "make busy" work.
I dunno, today might just be a weird day, its an odd coincidence that slash would be posting a story on this a week before i'm supposed to go help it.
Personally, I don't think this is much bigger than mail fraud. IMHO, Rather than criminalize sending unsolicited email, I would criminalize sending spam without an ADV: prefix or ADV ADULT: prefix.
This would effectively give them the freedom to send as much unsolicited junk to people who want it, and let us who don't want it to filter it out.
As far as regulating technology goes, I think there's bigger fish to fry. Here's some examples of how the FCC helps the communication monopolies keep thier monopolies...
UWB technology gets stuck in red tape
Roll your own DSL
My point: Communications and tech have been regulated for YEARS. So while you're pondering if criminalizing spam MAY set a bad precident, existing technology and communication monopolies are doing everything to criminalize and patent truely liberating technology (Ultra-Wide-Band) (DSL without the telcos): (That is before they figure out how to use it for thier own advantage)
...and that's just one very small facit of the problem...
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Read it. The law says that spammers have to provide an "opt-out" address, and users have to send their real email addresses to them, the spammers.
Duh.
So now the spammers will have a list of valid, guaranteed active email accounts. To sell, which is what opt-out addresses in spam are for. Not to opt out, but to verify that they're real.
And since this is a state law, the spammer can get away with this by being out of state. Not that spammers ever care about the law. The law merely encourages users to ACT LIKE IDIOTS and send real email addresses to spammers who will then use them as verified, premium spambait!
Hormel Food Corporation, which debuted its Spam(R) luncheon meat in 1937, has dropped any defensiveness about this use of the term and now celebrates its product with a website . . . . [Citations.]" (Heckel, supra, 24 P.3d at p. 406, fn. 1.)
Does that mean /. can use the old Spam logo again?
(only partially kidding...)
The court has said that when you mail, you have a duty to figure out in advance what state the mailbox you're mailing to is in, and then find out the e-mail laws of that state and obey them.
Yikes! That's not at all the way E-mail works. You often have no idea what state the other guy's mailbox is in, and it's a pain, or impossible, to find out in many cases.
You may cheer that this law puts this burden on senders of UCE, but the reality is that if this decision stands, you are letting all states put whatever rules they care to pass on E-mail, and putting a duty on everybody to know all the laws and know the state they are mailing.
To add insult to injury, this law defines new syntax for the Subject header! The government should not be defining the forms of e-mail headers. The IETF does that. This is also compelled speech and apparently the defendant didn't even bring that issue up.
Less you think I'm defending spam, you can read my essay on the insidious evil of spam to find out the contrary.
But we must fight spam the right way, and setting precedents like this is a dark day for e-mail and the internet in general.
California had another spam law which wasn't so bad because the recipient had to notify, thus making it clear what state they were in.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Because of this:
Or, in CyberPromo vs. AOL:Or CompuServe vs. Cyberpromo/Sanford Wallace
Leaving aside the fact that the First Amendment is a constraint on Congress, not private operators, it seems clear that commercial speech is (rightfully) not protected to the same extent as expressive speech.If I want to set up a stand on my front lawn and tell everybody about how great my penis enlargement system works, I can .. because I have free speech. If I want to promote my penis enlargement system on my Web page, I can .. because I have free speech. If I want to rent a hotel convention center and hold a series of meetings raving about the effectiveness of my penis enlargement system, I can .. because, well, you get the idea. Spammers have, and always have had the right to free speech. You are going one step further by claiming that massive (and often distributed) attacks on open relays and ill-prepared ISPs constitutes "speech." I must admit that this is one of the more puzzling arguments I've heard in favor of spammers.
.. not just from a bandwidth perspective, but from the perspective of computational resources as well. Back then, stories about these ISPs closing up shop were a dime a dozen.
.. when was the last time that you took a piece of "fucking C++ source code", purchased a list of 20 million email addresses from some promoter, sniffed out an open mail relay on some poor boob's network, and unleashed a bulk mailer bot to share your "speech" with the world? You're missing the point. Nobody is saying "MAKE MONEY FAST!!" isn't speech that is subject to First Amendment protection. What is being said is that the method of delivery is illegal. A spammer has no more right to steal the resources of others to mailbomb millions of people than I have to break into your house while you're sleeping and try to sell you a can of oven cleaner.
I realize that the days of the "Mom and Pop" ISP have pretty much gone the way of the dodo, but back in the mid-1990s there were quite a few of them. Unfortunately, many of these ISPs (which were pretty bandwidth limited and served a relatively small amount of users) were put out of business because of the overhead effects of spammers
This isn't to say I don't like spam, but if fucking C++ source code can be considered speech, why isn't "Do you want a longer penis?"
I'm starting to suspect that I've been trolled here, but assuming you're serious
Maybe the guy selling penis enlargment sauce really feels deeply about it and wants the world to know how truly great his product is.
Great! Then he can set up a stand on his lawn, put up an advertisement on his Web page, or put on a convention at his local Holiday Inn. Nobody is saying he doesn't have a right to promote his product. What people are saying is that there are some methods that cannot be used to do so. This has been true in the past, and it is true today.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
the california law is a well written law that explicitly defines what the law means when IT refers to spam.
And surprisingly, the way the law defines spam is how most of us would want it defined.
Please be very carefull when contacting politicians about spam laws that you states/country defines it they way California does, otherwise it could be twisted pretty badly.
Its a tough thing, for me spam is an ad for business. But I would hate a law to stiffle free speech.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Dude,
Everybody has to make a living. Everybody has to live with there own conscience. What are you asking for?
If you want someone to tell you its okay to send out spam, well try again. SPAM is wrong because you are basically syphoning off the system. This guy's dad makes a few bucks in a morally negligent way. It does create hard currency, but it won't do anything for your conscience or your resume, and chances are you will always regret working there.
If you have a conscience. Many people don't. Perhaps you are one of them. In which case, go help the spam guy. Its easy to rationalize. Hey! If not you someone else, right?
But this is a decision you need to make and no one else. Asking slashdot for advice is about as predictable as asking. "I was installing an OS on my PC, and was wondering whether I should use Windows or FreeBSD. What do you think?"
Anyway, good luck, and please take me off any lists you might come in contact with.
www.avacal.com -- the home page of pete shaw
Although I fully sympathize with your plight, being in the middle of the same thing myself, the long-term consequences are far more dire.
Taking the job is a black mark that will follow you for the rest of your professional life. No one that you'd actually want to work for will knowingly hire a spammer. Your employment options will be forever limited to spammers and spam-friendly organizations. You will also not be able to reveal the nature of your employment to your friends, for fear of their reaction.
If you simply fail to mention that piece of your employment history on future resumes, you'll still have a curious gap that future employers will ask about.
A quick trip through mythological or Biblical references will show you this is how Evil traditionally works: Wait for a moment of supreme weakness, then make the victim an Offer He Can't Refuse.
Ultimately, as an earlier poster pointed out, you are the final arbiter of your own ethics and what you think you can live with. But if you want my opinion, I recommend avoiding the Faustian Bargain. The long-term costs to your professional career are simply too high.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions