Lessig On Bounties For Spamhunters

An anonymous reader submits: "Digital rights (as in yours, not the RIAA's) guru Lawrence Lessig comes up with a Swiftian idea of how to fight spammers -- $10,000 for the first ubergeek to hunt the offender down. The column is at CIO Insight. Wonder if it'll reach its audience there."

Comments

Re:uhh, missing something here

[Alsee]

($50) for each electronic mail message initiated or delivered in violation of this section, up to a maximum of twenty-five thousand dollars ($25,000) per day

That part of the law is severely broken. They hit the $25,000 cap after the first 500 spams per day. The bigger spammers send MILLIONS of spams per day. At 1 millions spams per day the fine is 2.5 cents per spam, and at 10 millions spams per day the fine is one-fourth of a cent.

As they can crank up the volume of spam the fine approaches zero. The fine becomes an acceptable cost of doing bussiness.

Before anyone replies to point out the phrase "whichever amount is greater", that phrase reffers to proving "actual monetary loss suffered" which aint gonna happen.

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What an asshole

[Gruturo]

Once added to the list, there is no way to appeal the blocking or to fight such policies

This is bullshit, and he knows it, but he has to exaggerate and distort the truth in order to highlight his fashionable Bounty idea.
I inadvertedly ran an open relay and quickly ended up on Ordb, and rightfully, I might add. My mail server logs had this nice explanation given in the error message from other servers, complete with a helpful link explaining how to fix and get delisted (fix your server, resubmit its IP for checking, get automatically removed).

3 hours and a sendmail.cf later I was back with the good guys, and had this nice warm feeling :-)