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Spamming Gets Expensive in Utah and Ohio
bradipo writes "A large number of lawsuits have been filed against companies that have not complied with the anti-spam statute in Utah. I'm not sure how this will turn out, but it should be interesting nonetheless." And reader spoton writes "The governor of Ohio has signed into law a bill that allows internet subscribers to sue for up to $50,000 and ISP's for up to $500,000. It allows you to sue for $100 per email + court and lawyer fees incurred. Looks like the cost of spamming is going up."
Now if the rest of the world follows suit, we might have a reasonable chance of greatly reducing the amount of crap that gets shoved through our inboxes every day.
Create a hotmail email address, sit back and wait. If that isn't fast enough for you, post a Usenet message. Better yet, sign up for AOL.
If laws like this are actually applied and not just presented to the media to polish the legislator's apple then it will kill spam. No matter how big the industry seems no one who makes a living at it could survive the fines. Just like mail and the telephone e-mail is there to be a convenience for the user, not the advertiser. Any abuse of this should be punished.
http://www.spamlaws.com/state/
You can sue for $100 per message + lawyer costs. What is unclear is whether you can sue for the cost to track down the spammer.
If you could, then I predict a small industry would spring up of bounty hunters who would go to any lengths necessary to track down the origin of a spam message. Heck, they would even pay you (or other affected parties along the route) to put in necessary monitoring equipment/software, etc. in order to be able to track down the origin of a message without interferring with the operation of your mail server.
So this law needs to be ammended to allow you to recover costs associated with tracking down the spammer. Bounty hunters would be knocking at your door to offer to help track down spammers. After all their fee becomes part of your cost to track down the spammer, and therefore part of the amount you could sue for.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
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I use Macs to up my productivity, so up yours Microsoft!
The real reason to limit consumer is exactly these types of laws. Companies have been spamming consumers and ISPs to death. We have tried to establish voluntary laws to solve the problem. We have tried opt-in list and verified opt-in lists. We have begged web hosting companies to make sure commercial email sent from domains they host have real headers with valid email addresses, and clearly identify the source of the product and emailer. All has been to no avail.
So we are at a point where the only recourse is litigation. Is this the fault of greedy consumers or lawyers? Or is the fault of an industry that does not have the integrity to define and enforce rules that insure consumers and agents are treated with respect.
I am sure that conservatives have and are going to complain that this law and litigation are indicative of a decline in the basic moral fiber of the American consumer. At the same time, they will be raking in profits from the backs of those same consumers.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
First off, forging e-mail headers should constitue fraud, not free speech. Secondly, why is it your right to tie up my system resources at will, while I have no recourse (other than purchasing expensive filtering software) to make you quit.
Just because I have your cell phone number, does that give me the right to call you 20 times a day?
Are you sending them to people that you've never met in any way? If so, then how are they personal? Otherwise you are just sending email to someone you know. I am sure that they know how to ask you to stop, unless they fear offending you.
I don't think that we need to go into a definition of "spam" here. We all "know it when we see it".
Now on to my rant!
Sending thousands of unsolicedted emails (spam) is not "communicating freely". It is an electronic slap in the face. You don't respect me as a person to keep yourself from wasting my time and resources. You have no right to my time and resources. Telemarketers are nobler than spammers, at least they bother you on a one-to-one basis rather than vomiting their filth onto every person they can possibly find at once.
Finally, I at least get to play mind games with telemarketers!
Lasers Controlled Games!
The spam may be from dial up European sources, but they are usually US spammers using services from there. Go after the people hiring them. If I tell you to break the law, I am still breaking the law.
Fight Spammers!
One of the central tenets of free speech is that I'm free to ignore you. I am not censoring anyone if I plug my ears. Although telemarketers are legal, they are not protected under free speech laws. No one has the right to call me up and force me to listen.
With email spammers are utilizing my resources (the bandwidth I pay for, the processor time my computer requires to handle them etc) to send me an uninvited message. They do not have any right to use my resources to disseminate that message. Nor do they have the right to use public resources to disseminate a message. If someone paints a message on the wall of the town hall, no one is censoring that person when they paint over it. People can use their own resources to say whatever the hell they want, but as soon as they start using my resources, they need my permission. Spammers automatically do not have my permission.
Regardless of the content of the spam, and regardless of the intention of the spammer, they do not have a right to send me anything. If they have a message, they can either pay to circulate it and then I will fight to the death to defend their right to do that - or they can rely upon agreed upon public forums. My inbox is not a public forum.
It isn't even a legislation issue. Spammers are trampling on other people's rights. The one thing that pretty much everyone will agree upon is that the government's role is to protect the rights of the citizen. Giving the citizen a legal recourse to go after people who use their resources without consent is exactly what the government should be doing.
This serves to making their Spam-friendly ISPs uncompetitive, which ultimately only hurts the state.
What a tragedy! Spam-friendly ISPs being forced out of business in Utah/Ohio. This is almost as bad as laws that make kiddie-porn-friendly ISPs uncompetitive. Imagine the revenue loss!
When society finds something unacceptable (in this case, spam) and enacts laws to reduce it, there is an understanding that those who make a living from it will be financially harmed. Ohio convenience stores would have a competitive advantage if they could legally sell alcohol and tobacco products to minors. That doesn't mean that Ohio should make it legal.
Sometimes the good of society outweighs the financial interests of corporations.
only problem with this is that finding the source of the spam and actually holding them accountable will likely be a big problem.
/. a while ago about making such a great living at being a spammer etc - he provides a service to people who want to send out shitloads of spam. Under this law - who is liable for the spam - the _sender_ or the _client_ of the service?
also - who is truely responsible for the *sending* of the email e.g: the guy who was on
so - if you go after spammers and you find that the email you are getting comes from someone like this said spammer guy, do you have the legal right to demand client info from him - and can you sue both him (sender) and his client for 100/email each (totalling 200/email)
the other isue is the time it will take to try to track down these people when you have false headers etc.. and when they are in china or some such country where it would be hopeless to track them....
Nobody wants to outlaw legitimate replies. That's a red herring thrown out by spammers so the guillable will ignore the real issues.
What's at issue is the attempt to transfer advertising costs from the seller to the potential buyer. Note the key words "seller" and "buyer" - this particular issue only applies when somebody is trying to sell something to somebody else when there's no prior sign of interest. Today it's annoying, but without other economic brakes put on this process it will become a real burden on consumers. Already we're hearing of people who lose mail because the spammers have completely filled their 5- or 10-MB mailbox in a short time, and at the rate of increase I wouldn't be surprised to see many people essentially knocked off of email (due to the sheer volume of crap) within a few years.
Then there's the legal issues involved with spammers forging headers, often criminally impersonating third parties. Nobody has the right to impersonate a third party for commercial gain. These victims can sue, but it's difficult and costly and many courts still don't understand how much damage it can cause (e.g., by harming reputations, or having domains added to simple-minded RBLs).
If that's not enough, there's the fact that spammers often bounce their messages off of servers owned and maintained for the benefit of third parties. That's no different than somebody deciding to borrow your car to run some errands since you're not using it. Even if they return it, undamaged, before you need it again it's not acceptable behavior in our society.
Finally (on the commercial spam side), there's the fact that most of the spam is sent out with fradulent names, through hijacked mail relays, etc., since it's flat-out illegal. In an ideal world we could have the FDA go after the diet/baldness/penis + breast growth people, the SEC go after the "sure stock" people, etc., but in the real world they have other priorities and jurisdiction is often unclear. These anti-spammer laws are te best way to get the illegal crap off of the network fast.
As for the moral point that spammers have "the right to speak," you're absolutely right. But more importantly, I have the right to tell them to shut up. Every time I get a piece of mail with forged headers, fradulent subject lines, etc., all I see is some arrogant asshole saying that he's the center of the universe and I have no value other than being an easy mark. If somebody repeatedly knocks on my door, I can have the police arrest him for trespassing. If they repeatedly call me on the phone, I can have the state fine them many thousands of dollars for violating the DNC orders. Yet you would have me believe that I'm have no right to stop somebody from sending me, oh, an announcement of an exciting new insurance policy every single fucking day for close to six months now? Sure, I have the technical ability to filter that crap out (and I do), but because I don't run my own email servers I still have to absorb the bandwidth to get the damn message into the server *and* to get the damn message a second time from the server before it's deleted, unread.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
I think we can all agree that spam is annoying but this is absurd.
No, we cannot all agree that "this is absurd."
No harm is done to the user so why should they have the right to sue?
So who do you think pays your ISP for the bandwidth, storage, and additional mail server horsepower necessary to handle the influx of spam? Hint: The person paying is staring at your screen right now! Spammers try to say that the cost per spam is small and, while that's true, if I could steal one penny from every person in the United States, I'd never have to work again.
If the maximum amount was $1 per spam, no one would sue and the law would do nothing to decrease spam. The fine is set high to make the law work and to discourage spam.
I've had that happen to me a couple of times now. Probably because I'm a pain-in-the-ass anti-spammer.
No one has complained to either me nor my provider,though.
The only reason I know of it, is that I got all the bounces. Fortunately, there's procmail for that.
/Styx
I live in Utah. Yea, yea, I know. Anyway, a few months ago one of the users on my network stopped me in the hall to say he had just sent an e-mail in reply to a spam requesting that he be removed from the spammer's list. I got all upset and explained (again) that all that does is confirm to the spammer that he has a live address. Then he explained that he had told the spammer that he would sue him under some bogus Utah law. He made up the number and title, etc. I was only mildly amused until the next day when he received a personal reply from the spammer. He apologized and said he would not use the address anymore. I was amazed. I don't expect this to ever work again but at least now we have the law behind us. Oh yea, I also find it typical that the Utah law has as much to do with stopping sexually explicit mail as it does with stopping spam in general. I guess that this is where the political support comes from. Don't you wish your state had it's own Porn Csar?
Anti-spam laws are quite definately in favor of 1st amendment rights. The supreme court has, multiple times, upheld that commercial speech is "less free" than personal speech, especially with regards to speech that is not directed (TV,radio).
Spam prevents personal speech by forcing the recipient to deal with it instead of communicating with an individual's email send to the recipient.
Technological methods of stopping spam will only require spammers to get better technological methods themselves. This is quite similar to copyprotection mechanisms, if you can hear the song, you can copy it. If you want to allow arbitrary people to send you email, they will.
While I concur that bureaucracy runs amok, this is perhaps a case where the government should give people legal recourse against something that is near universally abhored.
On the subject of spam and legalities, I've lately gotten a couple of those "blackmail" spams, you know the ones politely worded "we request your permission to contact you" in the subject, but with instructions that essentially boil down to "If you don't want us and our affiliates to spam you senseless, reply to us so we can confirm your email address and sell it to another spammer".
Is this even legal? Basically, they are asserting that if I don't actively decline their "offer", (and open myself up to be spammed by anyone they sell my "confirmed" address to), they claim I am "consenting" to be spammed by them and all of their affiliates.....
If I refuse to contact them and they spam me anyway, will that constitute harassment of some sort?
Ironically, BOTH of the last two spamming companies (both of them seem to be set up specifically to spam on behalf of others) that have done this claim on their websites that they only use "triple opt-in" addresses, which is obviously a falsehood considering they wouldn't be contacting me at all if they weren't harvesting my email address from some other not-opted-into spam list or a website or something...and only the twisted mind of a spammer thinks "refusing contact" is the same as "Oh, please, spam me!"...
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
...and I'll say it again....
Spam works simply because the marginal cost of 1 additional email is so low that the marginal gain of 1 additional email sent will ALWAYS be greater (which means that some kind of nation-wide policy like this stands a chance at fixing the situation by raising the marginal cost of email).
For example....
Suppose I do television advertising. As I buy more and more advertising, I come closer and closer to saturating my potential market with exposure to my advertisement. Say I'm buying advertisements during sitcoms. For each add I buy, I reach fewer people who have yet to be exposed to my advertisement than the last ad that I ran. Thus the marginal value of each ad I purchase goes down, while the cost remains equal (all other factors equal).
That means that eventually I will reach a point where the marginal cost of the ad is greater than the marginal value. At that point, I'll start losing money on the campaign, and quit running the ad.
Now, let's look at spam....
Each exposure still costs some finite amount of money. The difference is that the cost is TINY compared with television advertising. Suppose I spend $1,000 on a co-located server and the associated bandwidth (a totally arbitrary number). That server can probably send literally millions (if not billions) of emails in the month that my $1,000 paid for. It's obvious that the marginal cost of the spam campaign is TINY compared to the marginal cost of the television ad campaign.
That means that the spam campaign takes MUCH MUCH longer. Indeed, as the marginal cost of the spamming approaches zero (which it gets very close to), the number of mails it takes to reach the point where marginal cost = marginal value approaches infiniti (which means you won't ever stop sending mail).
It's simple economics. The only way to lessen spam (from a purely free-market standpoint) would be to increase the marginal cost of the email (or decrease the marginal value, but that's not going to happen, because there's always an idiot out there that can be scammed into sending you a $5 check). Increasing the marginal cost of the email could be done in lots of ways - but they mostly all involve giving up some of the freedoms which we're probably not willing to give up in exchange for freedom from some spam.
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Furthermore, anti-spam legislation has the potential to curb one's right to free speech, and would violate the Constitution.
:-)
Companies don't have a right to free speech (and this includes everything from mom-and-pop businesses to multi-national corporations).
Many of the personal e-mails which I send are unsolicited and, while I am certainly not a spammer, could violate anti-spam laws because the recipient did not specifically request to be sent e-mail.
No violation would exist, because you are not sending bulk unsolicited e-mail. The key word here is BULK. While I know that the definition of bulk is open to quibbling, most such arguments are disingenuous, and ridiculous.
Legislating one's right to communicate freely goes against everything this country was founded upon, and anti-spam legislation is just another example of an overly powerful government taking away the rights of its citizens. I, for one will not support any such law, or any lawmaker who supports such a law.
That statement is so rah-rah and flag-waving that it is cloying. Our country was presumably founded by individuals with common sense (remember Thomas Paine?). I imagine that if spamming would have been possible in their day, the spammers would have been summarily executed.
P.S.
As an aside, I consider the founding father's original intentions to be largely irrelevant. When they framed the Constitution, women and blacks were excluded from its protection. We are now going through a similar fight and readjustment with homosexuality.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Oh, for christ's sake. For the ten millionth bloody time, spam is NOT a free-speech issue. It's a PROPERTY RIGHTS issue.
The spammer can say any useless thing he wants to say, but he has NO LICENSE to use MY property to do so. My computer, my fax machine, my cell phone, and any other device that these degenerate free loaders want to use to steal their ad placements, are MINE, and not THEIRS.
Now, is that clear enough?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
These guys are worse than insurance salesmen...
If the Spam-needed-for-competition argument is true, then China and Korea would have the best hosting companies around.
Companies that spam know that what they are doing is illegal in many places, of course. They typically attempt to firewall themselves by hiring "independent" people to *cough* "send their advertising only to those who have requested it". You know.... " If you are receiving this mail, it is because you signed up for it!"
Then when those independent people spam every email address on the planet, if you go back to the company to complain, they would say (if you could pin them down), "oh dear, the independent advertising agent we hired must not have followed best practices, we asked them not to spam!"
"No, we can't really help you track them down and sue them, we just have a post office box address and a cashed cheque..."
"good luck... (giggle)"
So then you think: The solution is to make it explicit in law that companies are responsible for the actions of anyone they hire to advertise for them.
No, won't work. The company will claim to have never paid anyone to advertise (spam) for them. How will you prove it?
All you have is the company name and phone number on a spam bounced off some anonymous relay in Korea, and the company claims they had nothing to do with it. They will claim that someone is trying to make them look bad by forging spam from them. It might even be true.
My best idea is public execution of spammers, preferably by hanging. After the first few die on live TV, the others might become discouraged.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
I just took the liberty of reading my state's (MN) laws regarding spam and unsolicited commercial email. Apparently, if the email has forged the domain name or contains misleading information in the subject line, I, as the recipient, am eligible for $25 per message, or $35000 per day, whichever is less. In addition to this, if I never consented to receiving such email (which I assume would be nearly impossible for me to prove, considering the fact that all they have to demonstrate is that they have my email address) and the subject line is not started off with the three characters "ADV" then I am eligible to receive $10 per message or $25000 per day, whichever is less.
.mn.us domain. Does email fall under some kind of interstate trade agreement? If so, wouldn't it be subject only to federal law if it passes state boundaries?
My question is as follows: if the message originated in my own home state, Minnesota, I am sure I could bring legal action against the perpetrator. If, on the other hand, the message originated in another state, perhaps North Dakota, where there are no laws prohibiting spam, or even another country, perhaps Canada, would I have precedent to bring action against them? They cannot make a case that they do not know what state I am in, considering the fact that my email address is in the
I know these are a lot of questions, but I am surprised and delighted to learn that in my home state I can bring action (and get reimbursed) for each and every unwanted spam email message that I get, and I want to be armed with as much knowledge as possible. Thanks for your time if you have anything to add to this conversation.
Lack of eloquence does not denote lack of intelligence, though they often coincide.
I'll admit straight off that I don't know shit about what makes email work. I run communicator and email arives. That's about it. In fact, I still can't get sendmail to work on by box. But that's neither here nor there.
/. long enough to understand that when it comes to digital rights management (in any sence of the phrase) the answer is NOT legislation, it is technology.
.001 cents to send a message TO the account? Would this discourage spam? I think so.
Point is that I've been reading and posting to
No one faulted the MPAA etc for encrypting DVDs. That was fair and all. We cracked it, but it was fair. We faulted them for making it illegal to try to crack it.
Apply the same logic here. The answer to the spam problem is not legislation, it is technology. Now, I know that those spam filters in place on mail servers eat system resources. They have to... that's a LOT of mail. But I also know how easy it is to forge headers. I know that many programs and websites are capable of sending mail from accounts which don't exist.
Why do these holes in the system exist? Why can't they be patched? Sure... I know we're talking about a protocol which is on literaly millions of machines, but it seems to me that the best way to stop spam is to remove the walls that make it possible to hide behind annonimity with your email. Once that is done... well... it becomes easier to catch these people.
Secondly, micro-pay. We see this tossed around a lot. Now, I don't like the idea of paying for email, but perhaps that's what it will take to remove spammers. Could someone create a "premium" email service which would require that senders pay
I don't know what would or wouldn't work... but these seem like the ideas I see frequently here... why can't they be applied to email rather than just websites and cyphers?
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
California anti-spam cases are mostly stuck waiting for this case to be finally decided. But I think that once there's a win in this case, the floodgates will open. Not many spammers are in Utah, but there are lots of them in California.
The next big issue that has to be litigated is whether you can sue the beneficiary of the spam, not just the spammer. It's probably not a valid defense that the beneficiary hired a third party to spam for them. It can probably be argued that the actual spammer was acting as their agent. It gets complicated, with discovery needed to force disclosure of the transaction between the spammer and the beneficiary of spam. But that's how to go after the deep pockets, big companies that use others to spam for them.