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[Junk]Fax.com Fined $5.4 Million
Satanboy writes "This article states that a record $5.4m fine was levied on Fax.com after blatantly ignoring requests by the FCC to discontinue the activity of sending unsolicited faxes. This is similar to actions CmdrTaco posted about earlier." The people at junkfax.org are apparently planning a large class-action suit against fax.com as well.
So, wait, if there's only a handful of spammers that account for 90% of the spam in my inbox, when do they get a 5.4 million dollar fine?
Surely there are damages. Bandwidth may not be as expensive as paper, but possible productivity used to delete spam is costly. Besides which, the porno spammers could get sued for lots of money by the parents of minors...
The theory was, years ago, that fax paper was expensive; by sending a junk fax, you wasted somebody's tangible property, hence it is illegal. Spam doesn't waste paper, it wastes bandwidth, disk space and time. Apparently, though, those don't matter enough to warrant making junk email illegal.
Lemon curry?
The damages from faxing are aparent in costs of paper and toner, along with tying up the machine itself. Email while annoying doesn't neccessarily impede you from downloading the rest of your email in a timely manner. The only way I can see a comparison would be if there were more email spams that were attachments that were in the megabytes. Those are always a real treat to download when your on dialup, and I can see where it would be comparable.
Basically this sets a precidence that will be followed in the future. Spammers beware... we can only take so much. Right now I average about 80 spam messages a day. While I just sort them into the trash, it is becoming a trend which is getting rather annoying. And I can attest that quite a few of them all come from the same PLACE, not the same email server. If it's an advertisement for the same sex site then they should be held accountable, last I checked there wasn't any free advertising packages available.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
how many unsolicited, commercial faxes do you get in a day?
... only a handful of people are responsible for 90% of the spam we get. i'd much rather pay an extra $.00002 a year in taxes for those dickwads to be on welfare, if, after passing a harsh law on spam, it caused them to lose their jobs.
how many unsolicited, commercial emails do you get in a day?
i'd guess you get a shitload more in spam than faxes. is the fax law responsible for that? most likely.
business people and politicians are, generally speaking, stupid when it comes to technology. you have to put things in a $$ perspective for them to notice.
i've been itching to run for a gov't position here in az because i'm not happy with what my lawmakers are doing for me (re thomas jefferson ~"it's not your right to rebel against an unjust gov't, but your obligation") one law i'd like to pass in spam-friendly (read: no laws against spam) az is to make 1. the spammers responsible *and* 2. the spammer's client. that will send the message right damn quick.
like the article earlier today
there are about 9k employees where i work. between all the employees, i'd say it's safe to say we receive at least 50k spam messages per day. assuming it takes 1 second to designate a message as spam, and another second to delete it, that's about 28 hours/day of wasted productivity. not to mention the bandwidth costs (oc-3).
What happened to the right to reasonable privacy within ones home? I know some *cough cough* public figures have said that we cannot expect privacy in public, what about within our homes?
Isn't faxing materials into the home a violation of our privacy?
Maybe we should hold the fax senders under the same standards as telemarketers, after all they are using the same technology.
Chicago2600.net more than a lifestyle, its a survival trait.
No, no, the really successful model is to buy the politicians before you get into trouble:
The only trouble is, the shelf life of a politician is pretty short: six years for a senator and only two for a representative. You have to make sure you renew or you might not get your money's worth...
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Anyways, it'd be kinda fun if it was possible to somehow detect a junk fax (maybe an empty TSID is good enough? All the legit faxes I get have a TSID) and then deliberately try to keep the faxer on the line as long as possible, running up their phone bill. Force the modem to 300 baud or something like that :) Maybe request retransmissions too (I don't know if faxes even support that). So is this possible?
Quite a few people are asking how to apply something like this to email spam. My suggestion is to use whatever anti-spam law may exist on the books in your state and sue the advertiser named in the spam. File it in small claims court, then subpoena their advertising records to prove the purchase of service from the spammer. Even if the suits are thrown out we're still talking about a cost of several hundred dollars per suit to the advertiser. At some point it would have to become more expensive to defend the advertising than to stop it.
That really is the key here, to make it more expensive to advertise this way than not, and ideally the law should make both the company advertised and the spammer liable. That together with a spam email being prima facia evidence of the crime placing the burden of proving the spam was sent without the advertiser's knowledge on them.
It's worth noting that in my state (Arizona), [spamming telephones using automatic dial announcement devices] is illegal.
It's also illegal in the United States for anyone involved in interstate commerce. It was made illegal as part of the same junk fax law (47 USC 227), which I refuse to call the TCPA because of the Palladium implications.
Will I retire or break 10K?