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California Sues Spammer for $2 Million
KilroyTheVeg writes "The Mercury News reports that the California Attorney General, Bill Lockyer, filed suit against Internet marketer PW Marketing LLC, accusing the company of illegally spamming millions of Californians. The Story is here and the Sidney Morning Herald also has the story here.
The suit named PW Marketing LLC (note:subpoena in link is third one down the page) and its owners Paul Willis and Claudia Griffins defendants in the suit which seeks "at least" $US2 million from them for allegedly flouting several state consumer protection laws banning spam mail. All I can say is Make 'em pay, it's the only way to hurt 'em where it counts." Update: 09/30 22:02 GMT by T : Note, that's Sydney Morning Herald.
I live in California and think this is great, but I'm also realistic enough to know that this will be stuck in the courts for years....
All the poor guy did was spam
Just because he only steals a couple of cents from a million people, doesn't mean it's not theft.
What if we arrested multiple mailers to real mailboxes?
Well, if they forged stamps in an attempt to send millions envelopes, I'm sure you would.
You don't have to prosecute EVERY spammer to stop, or even slow, spam. Right now a lot of legitimate (as in, not illegal) businesses buy and sell e-mail addresses and send Spam. I would bet that a high majority (over 90%) comes from the same small group of companies.
So if one of the say, 10 companies gets sued for $2,000,000 and put out of business, don't you think that the other 9 will start looknig elsewhere?
And even if my 90% weren't true, and ALL spam is from random people, prosecuting one will still put the "fear of God" in them and many will think twice before sending any spam.
I'm a big proponent of making Spam illegal, and prosecuting spammers. I believe that it will cut down Spam significantly.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
It's called legal precedent. In other words, once you've gone through the pain and hassle of pushing one of these through court, then it makes it a whole lot easier to get the next one.
As to the "just one," I admit I haven't read the article on this one, but remember that these are usually SPAM services that put these things out. In other words, this isn't just one message we're talking about, but potentially thousands of "clients", each one with hundreds of thousands of individual emails to users in California. Sure, knock one out and a hundred more jump in to fill the gap, but if you can prove that it will cost you money to spam CA residents, then people will start thinking twice about all those get rich quick messages. A lot of other states are watching this case, and if CA can make it stick, there will be other states to follow.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
cb
"All the poor guy did was spam!"
"What if we arrested multiple mailers to real mailboxes?"
Spam is totally different from mailers. It is free to take the time to empty my snail mailbox, but spamers can send files to my e-mail that I have to pay to download. This is why spam and fax spam is wrong: they both pass on unrequested costs to the receiver, and for stuff I didn't ask for!! I recently got some java-scripted spam that was over 5M! That is totally unacceptable.
Lawsuits working in conjunction with laws banning spam seem like the best legal (as in not illegal, NPI) way to teach folks that spaming is not a money-making business.
This has been my position all along. There's a lot of obstacles to going after unsolicited commercial email. The Direct Marketing Association quickly gets involved, since overly harsh penalties can excessively punish people that want to direct market to known consumers but screw up somehow. They have lobbying ability and tend to stifle legilslative debate.
And then there's the entire problem of *enforcement*. If I'm running a bulk emailing operation out of my basement and its now illegal, why don't I just rent a couple of systems in some foreign country where its not illegal that doesn't bother with a lot of American laws?
I'm far more convinced that if you put the effort into enforcing the current anti-fraud laws *now* on the books it would decimate the business that spammers need to stay spamming. The problem isn't UCE, the problem is fraud is going on unchecked on a massive scale and no one seems interested in stopping it.
is a cutting down of spam volume worth the general erosion of freedom and enforcement dollars that it will cost
Enforcement dollars perhaps, but there is no "erosion of freedom" associated with banning spam.
Every single bit of freedom that could possibly be "lost" was gone long ago, when other types of theft were made illegal.
Government has no right interfering in the business activities of spammers.
How about
"Government has no right interfering in the business activities of mafia."
Theft is illegal. Spam is theft.
Government has every right to "interefere" with such "business" activities.
Exactly! Insurance fraud, unlike spam, is clearly illegal, and there is already legal infrastructure to deal with it. We should just apply existing law and go after these people now, without waiting for new laws, or getting tied up in court trying to deal with new laws.
Actually, I think Libertarians beleive that one of the few valid functions of government is to enforce truth in advertising and truth in labeling, thus allowing consumers to make their own informed choices. Last time I checked, 90% of the SPAM I received was blatently lying about who it was from and lying about the subject to get my attention. This is and should be illegal, and I think even most Libertarians would agree. The basic principle is "You're freedom to swing you fist ends where my nose begins." SPAMMERS are wasting my time and money without my permission (not by force or coercion, but rather by deceit), thus they are effectively connecting with my nose, and their freedom should be limited.
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
The problem with California going after spammers in Sydney is the reverse of the problem with, say, France or China going after US companies that are violating their laws against say Nazi related items or free-speech related pages in China. The extra-territorial nature of this is
0 20 3&mode=thread&tid=153 (italian police censor blasphemous websites)= 02/07/15/18 37255&mode=thread&tid=153 (Yahoo censoring portal)2 /07/17/16 17225&mode=thread&tid=158 (Crypto restrictions - well it is illegal in Iraq, Britain, so you must block it in the US).
0 2/09/02/02 46224&mode=thread&tid=153g /article.pl?sid=02/09/12/13 27238&mode=thread&tid=153
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't like spam either, but what is sauce for the goose (California going after companies in Australia) WILL BE sauce for the gander (France going after Google, Chine going after others etc).
This brings up other questions too:
1. If online gambling is illegal in your jurisdiction, can you stop it where it is based?
2. Suppose you have a data haven off the coast of Britain...
What California, China, France and Italy (among many others) are trying to do is to export their laws by extending their jurisdiction extra-territorially. Instead of a free Internet, you have an Internet governed by the most restrictive laws instead of the least. This is a bad thing for freedom on the net.
For example see:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/07/10/045
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=0
Etc...
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=
http://yro.slashdot.or
If you just type in "France censor" you can find a ton on here.
I would consider a totally disproportionate punishment for a crime in order to serve as a deterrent to others an erosion of freedom - those who are made examples of are subjected to a punishment they don't deserve.
That is not acceptable.
Hold the bus..... check it out.
If you really want to know the TRUTH about libertarians, you can go to http://www.lp.org which is the main entrance to the libertarian party website.
Being a libertarian myself, I can speak as to this spam issue, and also being someone who tracks down spammers quite often, I even give my own opinion on what should be done about the UCE problem.
UCE is theft, and spam is theft of my bandwidth, which costs money. It is theft of my time, which shortens my life, and that makes me totally livid, which is why I track spammers down, and do everything possible to get their accounts nuked, and all headers forwarded to the FTC (uce@ftc.gov) so that there is a record of it.
If a spammer gets busted, I believe they should be banned from using any computing device ever again. I think that would pretty much end all spam coming from the United States. I am going to ignore other countries, because there is not much you can do about that depending on which country.
Now this ORIGINAL discussion had nothing to do with Movies or MP3's and the association therewith libertarians, however I also have an opinion on that as well. It pisses me off when I see some lamer associate behavior and
So here divides "official libertarian party member opinion and my own personal opinion" I am sure there are a few spin-meister-social-engineering assholes who will attempt to change what I say into something it is not. To them, I say they better pray I never catch them. At least I am self thinking.
Being a linux user, I believe there should be a DVD player for Linux, and this has nothing to do with piracy. There are laws for piracy already, we don't need anymore laws for it.
Regarding MP3's I take an interesting approach, being also a musician, it is my belief that the quality of an mp3 makes it worth less than a cd. If you don't believe me then rent an 800watt amp and run an mp3 through it and listen to all the noise!
I buy tapes and cds and dvd's, I don't pirate anything. I have and do downloaded songs that I have bought which the original media was destroyed. I sleep perfectly at night knowing this. If you want to lable me a pirate for this then I say your wrong, you need to be looking somewhere else, if you want to associate libertarian with pirate your wrong again. If you want to crucify me for thinking for myself, and straying off the beaten mainstream path that's fine.
If you want to stray off the path, don't point fingers and say, "hey look at what the libertarians do. They do X, Y, and Z." Because in fact this is not true. I am a libertarian because I have a HELL of a lot more integrity than a lot of other people who are doing serious damage to our country as I speak this very moment.
Before I was a libertarian, I was a democrat, I used to smoke crank, weed, steal, lie, cheat, drink and drive, does that make all democrats bad? No, Before that I was a republican, I had my own business, but once in awhile I liked to do a couple lines of coke and keep a few extra dollars from the IRS, does that make all republicans bad? No.
So before you label people. Get the facts straight.
Two million dollars for a major spammer isn't disproportionate. First, assume that it costs the average person twenty seconds of time to decide if something is spam, 30 seconds to download a large html file with lots of pictures, etc. over a 56k modem, and you're at nearly a minute of lost work per message. At an engineer's salary, that's fifty cents of wasted time _PER MESSAGE_. Assume the spammer sent out ten million messages (not unreasonable). That's five million dollars worth of damage. If you ask me, they're getting off easy. Really easy.
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.