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Beating the Spam Merchants
Crowbraid writes: "Well-written column by Margie Boule from the Portland Oregonian about an individual who got tired of getting spam,
sued the company for $25 an email, and won." See also Bennett Haselton's anti-spam page, where he has details on "pursuing the anti-spam lawsuits on four separate fronts." (Those lawsuits were mentioned a few months back.)
On a few occasions, they say they've even managed to successfully claim their fee.
Laugh all you want, but some folks actually have principles, beleive in them, and are offended that some who should also have them do not.
It was the principle of the thing. And with the law on his side, he quite deservingly won. And now that 'Goliath' got hit back, maybe 'Goliath' will start considering having some principles too. It's less expensive than offending folks by breaking the law.
It is the small persons equalizer for corprate greed. Basically you can force a large company to show up and spend money on their lawyers, while you just show up and tell the judge what happened.
Used it twice, one time my bank was cashing my car payment checks, but not crediting my loan... Needless to say when they threatened to take my car away, I filled suit. Long story short, they paid up rather than spend the money on lawyers (which they would have lost anyway)
The other time it was my wifes employer not doing the right things with her termination... Got the district manager and ourselves infront of a mediator and a deal was struck...
You won't get rich with small claims court (I think it only covers up to 1,500 maybe 2,500) but it is very simple to file and win a reasonable case
The fundamental change that the Internet introduced was the economic fact that sending n pieces of email took the same effort as sending 1. The fact that this essentially puts the cost (storage, bandwidth, attention, etc) onto the recipient distorts the incentive for posting which consequently leads to spam. This is the old story of privatise the benefits and socialise the losses.
... if the email wasn't worth their time, then they would "charge" the sender a small amount. If the free market worked, then advertisers would figure out the cost of your attention (especially if they lumped their mistakes) and be more selective in their branding activities (as well as reduce visual pollution). However, because the consumer doesn't have any expectation of privacy, much less opinion as to their preferences, B2C cheerfully ignore these minor details in their belief that buying xxx will solve your worries.
The book EarthWeb (see http://www.baen.com/blurbs/067157809X.htm, http://www.the-earthweb.com/) had a good idea in that people could set a threshold
Marketing is a necessary evil but the economic costs should be bourne by the originators (whoch have control over quantity) rather than the public at large. How much do you value your attention (and thus time)?
LL
I love stories like this where the individual triumphs over evil.
;-)
In the State of Washington you can sue for up to $250.00 per spam. Spam is defined as unrequested commercial bulk email that has either a misleading subject line and/or invalid return address.
The real problem with trying to collect is that most spammers make it VERY difficult to trace the email back. They may bounce it off of an open relay or use stolen accounts and they almost always use a false return address.
You can usually find the domain that the email came from by looking at the header information but if they bounced it off of an open relay in China it may not do you any good.
Really, the only ones that you should try to go after should be the ones that are stupid enough to provide you with real information in the body of the letter that will allow you to track them down.
Most of the time the spammer wants one thing: Your money. So he may give an 800 number or a web page URL. If you can convince him that you need his real address to send him money the may provided it and you can send him a subpoena instead.
Some spammers will try to get your credit card number. Once they have it you may find yourself the unwilling donator of a brand new laptop or some other piece of property that the spammer can sell on the black market.
Never, never, never, give a spammer your credit card number.
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
Being careful about who and how you reveal your email address to is a good and effective idea to prevent spam, but eventually the spammers may find you with their equivalent of a dictionary attack. They will try variations of common names and initials on your domain mail server until they have a list of valid ones. This is sometimes how they get an address, even if you have been careful, especially if you are in one of the popular mail services (@hotmail.com, etc.)
Such as web archives of mailing lists for opensource projects? It must be nice to sit there handing out advice and calling people idiots when you never contribute to the community.
Most of the spam I get is at an address harvested from mailing list archives for GCC, Doxygen, and few other much smaller projects. Does that mean I'm an idiot? If you think so, perhaps you shouldn't be using these programs (after all, an idiot has contributed to them).
Does that mean I'm going to stop sending mail to a public mailing list? No, because as much as I'd like to reduce the amount of spam I get, I'd much rather see improved software.
Suing spammers is being an idiot? Huh?
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)