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)."
One spammer got my attention by sending me the same mail multiple times.
:)
It took me half an hour to track down and mail the free web provider, the free mail provider, the free scripts provider, the (possibly) abused mail-relays etc etc.
Now the web-site is off-line and one by one (I hope) all his services will fail. Scripts will return errors, mailboxes will close and so on.
I guess that will p*ss that spammer off
Privacy is terrorism.
OK
it seems to me that we all just accept ads as "part of the way we live"
Each time I try to get education, entertainment,
or travel anywhere, I am bombarded with
unsolicited ads. ads that generally fuel the
out-of-control cosumerism all around us.
Read a magazine, get ads.
Watch the news on TV, get ads.
Walk down the street, get ads.
Read the newspaper, get ads.
Watch entertainment TV, get ads.
Even if I want to, I am FORCED to see ads. To be
programmed. (don't tell me to go live on an
island -- I don't want to do that either).
The thing I think is that we don't have to have it this way. I know its radical but imagine for a moment a world where there were no unsolicited ads . This is a real stretch -- many of the assumptions about normal life start to break down if you take this assumption and go with it. We DO have the technology to provide everyone all the information they could want whenever they want to buy something, yet we don't. We make all the businesses compete for visual and auditory bandwidth, annoying the he!l out of everyone.
thoughts?
This costs money!
Spammers freeload, use other people's (usually) accidentally open relays, take up bandwidth and waste time. It's extremely offensive, not opt-in, deceitful (NEVER click remove, they just sell the address) and mostly false advertising.
It is and should be legislated.
We should treat SPAM differently because it can, and probably will, cost the end-user a lot of money when he ends up paying for bandwidth use.
When I get snail-mail spam (not in caps because it's slightly less evil) I may have the inconvenience of picking it up, and then throwing it away, but I don't pay postage.
Unfortunately, in the Internet the receiver, and everyone in the middle, also pays in resources, and since most users pay for their bandwidth indirectly (and will soon pay directly), it increases the cost of Internet for the consumer. The consumer is paying to read ads he doesn't want to read in the first place and that are not subsidizing any service, and that's not good.
Imagine if you were forced to accept collect-calls and every single tele-marketer in the nation took advantage of that.
The Internet may be self-policing, but we still reserve the right to prosecute for "real world crimes". If a website systematically uses my credit card information for identity/credit fraud, I want them to be legally prosecuted, "filtering them" (not buying from them and spreading the word) is not enough.
SPAM should be treated just like having someone stealing your cable connection, electricity, water or other utilities. There are real-world, monetary damages, which may be small or may accumulate to something significant over time, but either way it's not legal and there may be some penalties involved.
The alternative is regulating through code, but redefining the email standard so as to avoid SPAM would be problematic and (at least the solutions that come to mind) possibly raise some privacy issues.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Could this same idea be applied to actually suing slashdot for willfull destruction. For example if slashdots with it's thousands of readers had a big link to the lawyer's website that caused it to crash due to high load, could they turn around and sue. There is a solid history of websites being swamped by readers after following a link to the point in nearly every story in which it occurs, many people have to poin out a cache at some location (usuall google.com) and ask if slashdot could even provide their own cache. That history could demonstrate prior knowledge of the chances of damaging the web site just by the sheer display of the web link. A few years ago a local radion station hid several $100 bills in books at a local public library as a promotional thing to 'encourage' people to visit. What did not expect was the mob of people that rushed the dorrs tearing apart books in search for the free money. They ended up having to pay for several thousand dollars in damage to the property.
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
Ben Livingston is a WA man that rountinely takes spammers to small claims court...and, get this...actually wins consistenly.
Check out his site that includes court documents, a FAQ on how to successfully sue spammers, and his past/current cases.
The most annoying thing that I receive is 4-5 cold sales calls a day. I have to screen all my calls now, just to get past the sales people selling me the latest and greatest technical infrastructure, or assembly language programmer, or hosting service in bora bora. STOP COLD CALLING!!!! Brian
The alternative is regulating through code, but redefining the email standard so as to avoid SPAM would be problematic
Hey maybe you're actually on to something. That just helped me brainstorm a crazy idea that might involve a GOOD use of software patents!
Redefine the e-mail standard in such a way that is PATENTED. I'm sure someone could think of a way to do that.
Then, grant everyone a free license to use the patent EXCEPT spammers! Of course, come up with a fairly good definition of spam that would include sending bulk e-mail to people you have no prior relationship with.
Then, when a spammer uses the new standard, clearly violating the patent, they can have the crap sued out of them!
What do you think???