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NY AG Sues MonsterHut Over Marketing Spam
Ian Hill writes: "This BBC article tells how NY State Attorney Elliot Spitzer has sued marketing firm MonsterHut.com over "millions" of unsolicited e-mails. He claims MonsterHut.com falsely told its clients that e-mails sent on their behalf were sent to addresses who registered themselves as interested parties. Also at question is how exactly these addresses were collected." eviljim adds a link to a press release from New York's Attorney General and a reminder of how MonsterHut was disconnected from their ISP.
i have a yahoo account, get about 5 spam emails a day, and forward most of them right on to the FTC. not sure if they're actually doing anything, but it makes me feel good :)
and my inbox remains relatively free of spam.
Did you even read the article? Hell, did you read the synopsis?
The answer is obviously no.
There's nothing about creating anti-spam laws. It's about prosecuting someone under existing fraud and consumer protection laws.
You want technical solutions? Sure, whatever. They don't work. They'll never work. There will always be open relays out there to abuse, and even if you block them the bandwidth is being consumed. So you haven't solved the problem - you've just masked it.
The only hope is to use existing, rock-solid laws such as those stated above, to prosecute spammers into oblivion. If successful, MonsterHut is facing several billion dollars in fines, and I seriously doubt that the CEO or CTO will be able to hide behind the corporate veil on this one. Push them out of the US and other leading countries and they'll wind up with no bandwidth to do this kind of thing. Then your technical solutions can come to bear - countries without laws? Blackhole them. Then they'll pass laws and throw out the spammers, or relegate themselves to the 19th century.
Government is supposed to look out for it's citizens. This is a fine example of it doing exactly that instead of protecting the corporate entity.
If I can prove that you are costing me money to receive the email (e.g. - I pay to get email to my cellphone, I have download caps, etc.) then a class action suit could probably be levied against you for any number of things - from the junk fax law all the way down to improper seizure of chattel (which goes all the way back to the Magna Carta for precedent I believe!).
Now if you provide a removal procedure it's another ball of wax. And the one issue that may need a law is selling my personal data (e.g. - email) without my permission. Until more states/countries get opt-in laws (as opposed to opt-out) then that's probably legal. And slimy. But SPAM is slimy in the first place.