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)."
These are either the coolest lawyers in the world or most clueless.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
It looks like Morrison and Foerster is suing on its own behalf rather than some other party, and that the spammer had continued to spam even after being warned.
:)
Oops. So when can we expect a) spammers filtering to avoid spamming law firms, and b) law firms offering e-mail aliasing to avoid the spammers?
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
...and win my case? I receive about 3 ads for penis enlargement a day even if I am from the opposite sex.
PPA, the girl next door.
-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking.
Who's the hitech private dick thats a sex machine to all the chicks?
-Mofo!
Who won't let you down when there's spam all around?
-Mofo!
You damn right.
That mofo is one bad mutha-
-Shut your mouth!
I'm just talkin' about Morrison and Foerster.
-We can can dig it!
D
The first, last, and only tech news site on the net
From the eTracks homepage:
Not only is your target moving...It's picking up speed.
Now I wonder why that is. Could it be that your "target" is trying to not receive your fucking worthles spam? Perhaps they are satisfied with their penis size? Maybe they don't want to about losing 150 pounds in three days? Perhaps the Ladies Quilting Club down at the retirement center isn't interested in tight teen anal sex?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
As a collective sigh of longing sounds over the internet the unthinkable has happened. The slashdot community has fallen in love with a law firm.
Teamwork is a bunch of people doing what I tell them.
I would like to announce that I am sueing Slashdot $50 for each troll post I read each day up to a max of $25,000.
.. That Timothy posted the origial article.. maybe someone should lay off the booze before lunch? ;}
Original story here.
Morrison and Foerster's URL is www.mofo.com.
B-),
Ellen
mods metamodded as "Unfair"
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.)
mofo is known (in the North Cali legal community anyway) as a very progressive firm. they go out of their way to hire people of color, women, and handicapped folks, and take on many pro-bono cases that require a large investment. they also take "principle" cases - those cases that can likely result in a beneficial precendent but may not be profitable for the plaintiff.
so it's not surprising to me that they would expand that social-cause reach to technology too, in the legal realm.
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?
Spam laws
Especially
Summary of US State spam laws
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
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.
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...
There are many reasons to stop the spammers through legislation. People here have mentioned some good ones: Freeloaders using bandwidth and other people's mail servers. I have a friend who runs a small ISP in Mexico. Some spammer used his mail server (it was set for open relay) to send out a bunch of spam.
This guy didn't want to run an ISP. He had to. He had an internet cafe and the only ISP in town shutdown, so he bought them out so he could keep his internet cafe going, his only source of income. He's not real technical. Enough to run the cafe, but the ISP was a big hurdle for him. I'm just trying to explain the reason for the open relay.
Now, after this spammer used his open relay, his mail server (and all of his clients) suddenly became blacklisted, and he was unable to send ANY e-mail. He fixed the problem, but the incident cost him dearly.
So, there's another reason. Here's another: I have TONS of stuff filtering spam. I still get tons of it every day that doesn't get filtered. So I'm constantly adding new addresses and stuff to my filters. This takes my time, not a lot, but let's say a few minutes a day. My work time. Time I could be using to be more productive at my job. This hurts my company. Multiply that by everyone in the world who has e-mail, and you start to get an idea of the scope of productivity that's lost each day because of this crap.
What right do they have to use up the bandwidth and services we pay for? What right do they have to interefere with my productivity at work? If you can justify this and other issues that others have raised, you might have a case, but I doubt you'll be able to.
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.
So have you read the mail headers and determined that these spams indeed came from Yahoo or Hotmail? The From: address means nothing. The only thing you can trust are the headers. Most all of the spam that claims to come from these services is sent from somewhere else. Think about it. How long would it take to send 100,000 spams through a Web interface when you're limited to something like 25-50 addresses at a time? Not to mention that each and every one is going to be tagged with the spammer's computer's IP. Hotmail even uses a header called X-Originating-IP so you can't miss it.
If you want a good tutorial on how to read headers, go here. It's a bit dated, but it will give you a good foundation on what headers mean.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
... by suing spammers.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Third time's the charm, right?
While I have enjoyed this story every time that is was posted...
1 Another Go At Making Spam Cost Money by timothy with 81 comments on Tuesday April 09, @04:23PM
2 Class Action Lawsuit Against Spammer by CmdrTaco with 299 comments on Friday March 15, @04:24PM
3 MoFo Sues Spammer by timothy with 17 comments on Thursday March 14, @07:36PM
...there's a lot of other spam news out there that we could be reading. Check out http://spam.abuse.net for a variety of exciting, spam-related news and information, such as:
RULINGS IN INTEL V. HAMIDI BULK-EMAIL CASE (California Supreme Court agrees to hear Intel V. Hamidi).
Or you could read this story again...whatever... =)
* * *
It is a dada story -- it has no moral.