Slashdot Mirror
Another Go At Making Spam Cost Money
wario78 writes: "The BBC is running a story about the law firm Morrison and Foerster which is claiming damages against the spam company Etracks based in California. They are asking for $50 in damages for each spam they receive, up to the maximum of $25,000 per day. Nice to see a lawyer doing something community-oriented for a change (even if they are just trying to make a profit from it)."
.. That Timothy posted the origial article.. maybe someone should lay off the booze before lunch? ;}
Original story here.
Case 1 can cost people money
Case 2 does not cost people money
Case 3 does not cost people money
(Indirect costs, such as increased garbage taxes don't count.)
Disclaimer: I am not trolling, I really feel this way.
The internet has always been self policing. Why should we treat SPAM differently than the rest of email? Yes it sucks, but we can always filter it. We do not need legislation to save the inbox. We need common sense. Legislation is only going to make the internet more of a 'policed state.' I feel as if it cannot be said enough, the internet is not owned by the US and it will only lead to problems if goverments are brought in for annoying crap like spammers.
No I am not a spammer.
Yes I hate spam with a passion.
However, the more geeks want rules to govern the internet, the more the other laws (as well as shit like this) will be passed and upheld.
Stop this crap now.
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
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Is it too much to ask for people to drop the incessant lawyer bashing? Lawyers as a group spend a lot of time working on "community-oriented" work. They are expected to devote at least part of their time and effort doing pro bono work, i.e. representing cases in the public interest, frequently for people who otherwise couldn't afford representation. The law is one of the last careers where this is an ordinary expectation.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
So as long as I state it ahead of time I can charge a $50 unsolicited viewing fee for every advertisement broadcast to my television. Or for every piece of junk mail sent to my house (via post)? Or for every one of those little fliers I get under my windshield wiper when I park?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I thought making profits was all lawyers ever did!
Let's see how your opinion of lawyers changes after someone wrongs you and you have to take them to court.
Lawyers are not all evil because they charge money for their services when they can.
I cannot find the exact numbers, but i have seen before on slashdot posts in which ISP employees will detail exactly how much bandwidth, how much server performance, and how much time spent by salaried employees in administration, cleanup, and emailing abuse@ accounts costs just to deal with spam, and they are staggering.
What you have to realize is that what looks like seven or so emails in your mailbox is actually a hailstorm. Spammers don't just email people.. they do some kind of nasty stuff. They abuse misconfigurations and in the worst cases attempt to hack things; they fake return addresses, leaving abuse@yahoo.com to deal with the fact that several thousand people just got a piece of spam from what claimed to be "asdfaf@yahoo.com" when asdfaf@yahoo.com does not exist; they send screwy, difficult to deal with headers; they load down every machine in the routing path between them and your mailbox; they do things like bomb mail servers with dictionary attacks, attempting to email every word in the dictionary @yourdomain.tld. Some small percentage of those will hit valid accounts; most will just create horrible messes, waste resourses, and clog up processing queues.
Spam is a nightmare that you simply cannot understand the magnitude of unless you administrate a mail server. If the costs spam creates at the recieving and routing ends were paid by the spammers, spamming would be an effectively impossible to pay for enterprise.
When was the last time Pizza Hut put 140 door hanger flyers on your door knob in one day? When was the last time you had to buy extra gas just so your car could handle driving around with 140 flyers under the wiper? Different, no, just apples and oranges.
Sick of stupidity? http://www.patentlystupid.com
You can sue in small claims, that is true.
You can win, in fact if the spammer fails to show you will win by default. That's usually the outcome you will be hoping for.
So now you have a judgement for $5.00. What do you think will happen next? Think the court will enforce the judgment? Think again. Think the court will garnish the spammer's wages? Think again. Small claims court has not the time nor the resources to enforce the judgments they render. You still have to run around with your piece of paper signed by the judge and try to get the system to enforce it. Eventually, after many months of trying, you might be able to get an arrest warrant for your spammer. Then you can begin trying to get the police to arrest him. How high on the list of priorities do you think warrants for delinquent $5 judgments stand?
Not very.
On the bright side, in states with anti-spam laws, you do not have to prove that spam has damaged you in order to prevail in court. The anti-spam laws generally make it easy to win your case, but they do nothing to help you enforce the judgment.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Why would they pay you anything?
They could sell email addresses to people and make a fortune. How much would you pay for an SPAM-free email address @mofo.com?
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
I'm I the only one who noticed this:
The San Francisco office of Morrison and Foerster, also known as MoFo
Sums up most law firms I know.
Seriously, I think it's great that somebody is finally going after those crooked spammers. I especialy hate the scams. Those are blatantly illeagal. I'm sure this shitty spam company sends out pyramid scheme scams and shit, so they could be sued for that, as well.
What we need is to have is a class action lawsuit against spammers on behalf of the people who fell for these scams. However, no matter what we do, there will always be spam. No way, no how, will we ever get rid of spam.
But in my special email account, the spike hay at charter dot net adress above, I never have gotten one spam. I just do a few simple things. When I have to give my email out to websites, I give them my hotmail account. But then if they are obviously going to use it to spam me, and they don't need to contact me, I give them a phony address and leave the little "Yes. I would like to recieve information about special offers from 3rd parties" box checked. I do this just to fsck up the spammer's mailing lists. I also set Opera to not accept 3rd party cookies, like DoubleClick. And I also run AdAware regularly. Some spyware can get your email.
Anyway, the golden rule for spam is to never, ever, ever, give out your email address. (except to colleagues, friends, family, of course)
BTW, could someone explain to me how on earth DoubleClick is legal? They never gave me a privacy statement. And, it violates the Children's Online Protection Act or whatever because they collect information about children uner 13.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
The reason that the law in Washington held up under appeals is because the law doesn't actually outlaw spam. What it outlaws is e-fraud. The subject line can not be misleading and the headers can not be forged or misleading.
Consider this. A couple of days ago, I received an email advertising renewmydomains.com. This domain has a whois record that is located in New York. The whois record does not have any identifiable info at all except for another domain name (globalinternic.com). When I checked the whois record, this domain has an address in Salem, OR. I wasn't sure who to sue, so I started checking for corporation records in OR and NY. Couldn't find any.
So in a last ditch effort, I went to both renewmydomains.com and globalinternic.com. Well, globalinternic.com seems to have been shut down for the most part. Renewmydomains.com is another story. Just out of curiosity, I tried to view the source on the page. I found out that the site was framed. Why would it be framed? Because the action is not to the same domain. It is to nudestardom.com.
This sounds like a porn name to me. It is also registered in CZ. Under these circumstances, how many of you would give up your credit card?
Anyways, there is no proof that there is a scam going on, but there is proof that they violated Washington State law.
That is what punitive damages are all about. The advertisers can not commit fraud without incurring costs. When the costs get high enough, the fraud will stop.
It would be relatively difficult to redesign the email protocol and get everyone in the bandwagon at this point. Redesigning it so as to get something new to be patented would be more problematic.
Of course, there is the big problem of prior art. I know this would be a "bad patent" on purpose, but "bad patents" without a lot of money behind them tend to be recognized as "bad" more quickly than is usual.
On the other hand, if you're willing to ignore the issues of prior art and take your chances, why not patent spam itself too? That way you get to sue spammers for patent infringement, not the violation of a license (which, without "damages", is likely to be resolved by revocation of the license, something corporate entities can play with easily).
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...