[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.

Comments

The difference between faxing and emailing ...

[SuperDuG]

See I've seen companies like this hold up medical faxes and important contract faxes before. Because usually these things are a few pages. I also know people who have resorted to turning their fax machines off when they aren't using them because of the huge waste. The other thing that is really annoying is that these machines sometimes get the wrong number and will give those wonderful fax tones in your ear when you pick up the phone.

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.

Re:The difference between faxing and emailing ...

[Steve B]

Email while annoying doesn't necessarily impede you from downloading the rest of your email in a timely manner.

Spam e-mail can fill an in-box memory allotment and cause the loss of legitimate e-mail, just as spam faxes can exhaust a paper roll and buffer and cause the loss of legitimate faxes. The two are exactly analogous.

Is it possible to slow down a fax transmission?

[Dahan]

I got tired of junk faxes wasting my paper, so I switched to using a fax modem and Hylafax. I still get a lot of junk faxes, but at least I can rm them.

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?

About spam email...

[slykens]

Fortunately my office doesn't receive too many of these types of faxes, and if we do I don't see them.

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.