Slashdot Mirror
Class Action Lawsuit Against Spammer
sfjoe writes "California-based spammer eTracks is being sued by the law firm, Morrison and Foerster (who have a very cool homepage). M & F's press release says they are "...seeking other relief, including attorneys' fees and statutorily authorized damages of $50 for each email delivered in violation of the law, up to $25,000 per day".
California's anti-spam law has already held up under appeals court scrutiny so this may very well be a major setback to the spam industry."
I think spammers should be forced to pay by donating an organ for each
forged header.
sales@etracks.comc ks.com
staffhelp@etracks.com
busdev@etracks.com
email_removal@response.etra
isp@etracks.com
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
Not to be confused with Mark A. Fry & Associates.
There are specific laws in most states against sending spam with forged headers.
These people are not legitimate marketers. They collect names, that much is probably legal, but the illegal part comes when they commit computer trespass, exploiting poorly configured servers, and signing the mail with fraudulent return addresses.
If these crimes take place in other countries, it may be legal, but it is illegal in most of the united states. VA has a personal juristiction clause in the law. If you spam here, then you do business here, you come to court here.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
[snip]Morrison & Foerster employs approximately 1,000 attorneys and 1,350 non-attorney staff in 18 offices worldwide. [/snip]
/. read slashdot. I know I get a kick when the company I work for or related subjects are news posts.
[snip] Morrison & Foerster was named by Fortune Magazine in its first list of 100 Best Companies to Work for in America. [/snip]
Thats alot of desktop computers and servers for a company, Always wondered how many people from the companies in articles on
Come on MoFo IT/IS guys, post some replys!
How about because spammers take up network resources and user time without being asked to, without being authorized to, and without yielding benefit? It costs a spammer essentially nothing to send an email that will consume perhaps thousands of dollars in lost bandwidth, CPU cycles, and user effort. The cost is not borne by the instigator, but by the unwilling recipient.
Let's say I decided to drop by your house every day and scrawl an ad (or an offensive message) in chalk on the sidewalk. It's easy enough to erase -- just a little water spilled over it. Is it OK, then? What if I decided to do this every day to every house in your neighborhood? What if I got the chalk by, say, dropping by the local public school and absconding with it?
And I don't know what a good anti-spam law would be, but I wish to death that people would stop acting as if it were a priori impossible to write one without somehow opening up all imaginable governmental ills. Good laws do exist, though it's fashionable on slashdot to pretend they don't. A targetted law helping to assign some economic cost to sending spam would help restore the operation of normal market forces. Not all slopes are slippery.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Here's the quick and dirty as to why many of the slashdot community have a violent hatred toward spammers: We run mail servers.
:)
I run vectorstar.net, a free hosting service. I would easily wager that greater than 90% of the mail that wriggles through to our users is spam. Thus, 90% of my mail-related disk space and 90% of my mail server processing goes to handling unwanted, unnecessary spam. That's the difference between being able to run a Pentium 100 server or a PIII-1ghz server. Thus, it costs me a LOT of money to deal with spam mail.
The same situation falls true for the majority of businesses. Their mail servers handle far more spam than they do valid email. It leads to serious expenditures on mail server hardware, (in some companies) software, and staff to maintain the servers.
So that's why we hate spam with a passion.
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
"Even after receiving formal notice of Morrison & Foerster's policy against spam, Etracks has sent at least 6,500 unsolicited email advertisements to Morrison & Foerster's California users."
So, my mail server I pay by the byte. Why should I pay for any spam, even the headers? If I'm forced to stop because of that, aren't they inhibiting my First Amendment rights?
Read the law. The mail:
Must be labeled advertisement
Must have valid contact information
Must not have forged headers
Must cease mailing upon request How is any of that against the First Amendment?
The reason people spam is that the cost is low, even in the worst case.
Spammer's worst case just got much worse.
If spamming becomes a risky, possibly very expensive proposition, the big spamhauses could be in trouble. They've got deep enough pockets to be hurt badly by such a suit. Bad news for them; good news for the rest of the Net.
Sadly, it's probably not much of a threat to spammers in China, Russia, etc.
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Spam has rendered my hotmail address absolutely useless. I've had that address for around 4.5 years, now. It was a nice address. It was easy to remember, because it was my name@hotmail.com. No numbers, no funky underscoring, banging, etc. It was simple, elegant, and nobody ever forgot it. (My name@biggest free e-mail provider.com).
Now, however, I receive about 20 spam a day to that address. I miss messages that I should be receiving. After going two months while travelling without internet access, I returned to discover nothing *but* spam in my inbox -- hotmail had automatically deleted the older messages on the assumption that I would want to keep the newer ones.
Now, my hotmail block-list is full, and I have about another 200 addresses I would like to add to it. I cannot use that account, because it is now fundamentally useless. And spammers don't cost me money?
Spammers cost money everytime they send an ad that a distracted person clicks on, and gets shipped off to a porn site. That red-flags the corporate internet policy manager or whoever, who has to then go TALK to that employee about their going to a porn site. Sure, they just show the spam and say "Oops". It costs both of those people at least half an hour, though, and at $100 an hour, that's an expensive piece of e-mail.
The bandwidth used is not inconsiderable, either, particularly for people who are using dial-up accounts in regions where they pay-by-minute.
Spam is hardly a victimless crime, it's just a stupid one, and it's all opportunity or possible cost, so it's hard to really say "oh, that cost us money". It definitely costs money. It cost me my fucking hotmail account, and discarded my lengthy correspondence with folk hero Donovan, for Chrissakes.
Bah.
l
There's a subtle difference here, if I remember the bizarre laws in the US concerning the US Postal Service...
When a spammer abuses the network and your email account, he/she/it is NOT paying for the distribution, and is, in a way, "tresspassing" on your "property"...
If I recall correctly (I may not), in some bizarre, technical, legal way, "your" mailbox (the physical one that the USPS delivers to) is ACTUALLY the property of the USPS (not sure how this works exactly, but I THINK this is law so as to put the Big Guns of the Federal Government behind dealing with illegal abuses of the Postal Service, rather than having to rely on individuals to report and accuse abusers). If this is true, then when a junkmailer pays the post office to deliver a bunch of crap to your address, it's only (again, in a technical, legal sort of way) the USPS' resources that are being used, not "yours".
I may be totally off base here - if somebody with a better understanding of USPS-related law is reading this, I'd love a clarification...
At any rate, the summary is that with junkmail, the junkmailer is covering the bulk of the cost to deliver, while with spam, the ISP's and recipients are covering the bulk of the costs. (Looked at another way - you don't pay the USPS to RECEIVE mail, so you're not really losing anything. You DO pay your ISP to recieve E-mail [as part of the cost of the rest of the ISP service] so receiving email does actually cost you something, even if it's a tiny amount.)
Besides, paper is recyclable (though I suppose electrons are, too, come to think of it...)
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Regarding "I think spammers should be forced to pay by donating an organ for each forged header."
Who would want an organ from a spammer in them? I'd sooner trust an organ from a pig, at least it's a mammal.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
They are cool, not clueless. Vince Flanders of webpagesthatsuck.com related how he (or an acquaintance) emailed them, in essence,
"Um, Mr. Morrison & Foerster, are you aware your URL, mofo.com, is, well, kindof obscene?"
Their PR person replied, basically, "Yes, we're aware of that. We're cultivating an image of a firm you don't want to mess with."
Given that, I will heed their advice and not mess with them. :)
Fight for your right to read books!
Wow, what a day. Today I found out that a good friend of mine just started working for a Spammer. I genuinely don't know how I feel about this -- he's part of the fucking problem!!!
Anyways, the info he told me about their first spam run:
400 web page hits per day pre-spam
500K emails sent out (on behalf of a client)
192K hits to client's webpage after that
only 400 "take me off this list" messages
*sigh*
So I guess it works.
This lawsuit made it onto NPR tonight... I was rather amused by one spam executive saying the mail was not "unsolicited" because many users give their names to mailing lists when registering for products... "without knowing it" (exact quote... forgive the lack of attribution, but I'm sure someone can dig up an NPR transcript for around 6:45 PM EST on 15 March 2002).
My question then is this: how is the mail not unsolicited if the user doesn't know he's soliciting?
Plato's Socrates might argue, of course, following the Meno, that the user's psyche solicited e-mail advertisements before birth and merely forgot about his solicitation upon entering the world. Perhaps he would demonstrate this by having an uneducated slave register software and sign up to be notified of special offers that might be of interest to him... but then the Athenians forced Socrates to drink hemlock precisely because they didn't want to put up with that kind of nonsense.