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WA Wins First Case Against Deceptive Spammer
GPFCharlie writes "The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is running this article about the first victory by a US state against a spammer. Apparently the judge ruled that a civil trial was not even necessary, since the state had already proven their case. The law was upheld by the WA Supreme Court and an appeal was turned down by the US Supreme Court. Next phase: penalties. How about 5 million hand-written apology letters?"
How about $5 for each offense to be awarded to an Open Source movement?
This space for rent
Answer: the spammer. He causes small amounts of unhappiness to VAST numbers of people.
If the Spammer causes 100 rapists worth of total unhappiness, who should recieve the greater punishment? Why the spammer should, of course.
It is people with attitudes like yours, holding to some spurious "moral standard" that depends on belief that allow a culture of unhappiness to prevail. let us attack those who cause unhappiness and society will improve and become a better place to live. Who knows, by applying these zero tolerance policies on spammers the greatly increased happiness in society in general may reduce the numbers of desperate rapists. Everything is connected. and we should act on what works best, you know?
Is removing barriers to commerce a good thing? If so, why is spam "bad," since it is enabling commerce?
For murder, why is it that WTC caused so much panic, whereas traffic accidents, personal handguns, and AIDS cause nary a stir? The number of people who died in WTC was (for the sake of argument) 3,000. The number of people who died of in auto wrecks (41,730 for 2001) caused nary a stir, yet much more "harm."
By your reasoning, we need to forget this 9/11, "we'll never forget," patriotism, and Saddam and concentrate on increasing auto safety...
Yeah, right.
Please, think carefully before invoking Big Brother to solve your problems! As convenient as it sounds, regulation of e-mail provides yet another disturbing precendent for government control of private communication. Our founding fathers viewed governments as a last resort for problems that cannot be solved locally.
Think about it. Defining "spam" is about as easy as defining "offensive" content. Subjective decisions about which e-mail messages are deemed worthy to be delivered should NOT be made by politicians.
There are very obvious technical solutions to the spam problem involving digital signatures. Consider the icon at the bottom of your browser, which informs you that an online merchant is "trustworthy" (i.e. their identity has been independently verified). It's not hard to see how this concept of "transitive trust" could be extended to e-mail, while preserving relative anonymity.
Basically, various groups would establish public-key databases containing validated e-mail signatures, and databases could transitively incorporate other databases, similar to DNS. (Most likely, keys would be issued to servers rather than to individuals.) Mail servers could then be configured to reject any e-mail which is not signed with a recognized key. A user could report spam to the approriate *local* group, and they could respond by reprimanding the sender or revoking the key. The definition of "offensive" would then be relative to a particular group's interests. A similar scheme could be used for content regulation on web sites, etc. etc.
E-mail has been LONG overdue for incorporation of basic technologies like PGP. This is partly because of the perceived cost of implementation, but mainly because of apathy on the part of sysadmins. So, if you sysadmins are finally ready to take action, please do something more proactive than simply deferring to Uncle Sam or some other imperial authority.
Sending e-mail should not be a crime!
Receiving e-mail should be optional!
-Gonz
I've sued nearly 20 spammers in WA Small Claims Court this year. To date I've won every case, or settled out of court. It's good to see this win at the higher court level, but it's not really news to me.
Almost every spammer violates the law (RCW 19.190) because even if the return address is valid (e.g. optin@spammers.com) they are always forged return addresses because the actual mail comes from Korea or China or a dialup somewhere.
Having said that, I do sometimes get spam from more 'legitimate' spammers (i.e. ones who actually have a website, usually mentioning keywords like CRM and direct advertising). They send mail with their own domain name, and they send it from their own servers. It's probably less than 1% of the total right now. Those emails don't fall under RCW 19.190.
I rarely go after the actual spammers but instead the companies that hire them. The spammers themselves are service and/or judgment proof, whereas the companies that hire them are usually real companies registered to do business somewhere. Having said that, you would be surprised how many companies that spam go out of business shortly thereafter. It appears to be an act of desperation for many.
I've collected over $5000 in settlements and I have $7000 in judgments outstanding. If they don't pay up, I sic Dun and Bradstreet debt collection on them so at least their D&B credit record will be ruined for all time (an unpaid court judgment is considered a Very Bad Thing on a businesses credit record). Total cost to me per case is less than $50 usually, so I can afford the unpaid judgments.
I understand the free speech arguments, but RCW 19.190 is pretty specific. First, it must be unsolicited commercial email. Secondly, they must have a misleading subject or forge the addresses. I have got spam pitches from religious types and politicians, but neither falls under RCW 19.190. And thirdly, there is a registry for WA resident to enter their addresses (http://registry.waisp.org). If the spammers are really honest, they could listwash us all from their lists. Of course, they never do this because they are always buying the latest and greatest CD full of email addresses.
It's the old rule of Garbage In Garbage Out. If you collect 20 million email addresses at random, don't complain to me about how hard it is to check them!
These guys have built a really clean implementation of a peer-driven (as opposed to true P2P) spam filter. You install their MS Outlook extension on your desktop machine, and it filters incoming messages against a list of spam signatures reported by other Cloudmark users. You then have the opportunity to report any spam that makes it through the filter, which in turn reduces the probability that other users will be subjected to that particular spam message.
They are running an open beta test at the moment. I've only used it for a few days, but it seems like a definite win. It's been flagging around 75% of the spam I've received since I installed the beta, with zero false positives so far.
Not affiliated with Cloudmark, just a (so far) satisfied user...
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
should everyone in the U.S. now have to follow this state law, to make sure that they don't accidentally transmit banned material to residents of that state (for example, by placing it on a website where a resident of that state could access it)?
website != email
If I go to a website, I chose to do so. If you spam me, you chose to do so.
Anyway, I'm still waiting for someone to give a real example of how this law could cause harm, not a silly hypothetical. No, a jury is not going to convict your uncle because his subject line said "funny joke" but the body wasn't funny.
This is true, and actually the precedent was already set in the Amateur Action BBS case nearly a decade ago, when BBS owners in California were jailed for three years for violating obscenity laws in Tennessee after a Memphis-based postal inspector downloaded images over a modem connection.