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AOL Wins Anti-Spam Case
saikou writes "CNet writes in this story: 'A Virginia federal court awarded America Online nearly $7 million in damages as part of the Internet service providers' legal victory over a junk e-mail operation, AOL said Monday.'
Now, given tough times we should see more and more ISPs sue (and, hopefully win) the evildoers if not for their users mailboxes sake, then for their own budget. How long until there will be a major ISP whose plans include discounts for spam-fighters? (Help us to sue every spammer than sent mail to you and get $9.95 disount on your next bill :) )"
'A Virginia federal court awarded America Online nearly $7 million in damages
Great, now they have to collect it. Given that the losing party will probably declare (financial) bankruptcy to avoid paying, it's probably a lost cause. As we all know, much like the Catholic church, spammers declared themselves morally bankrupt a long time ago.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
AOL sponsored spam?
I mean, come on. Now spam is "Evil?" Annoying, yes. Illegal, maybe. Evil? Not a chance. This kind of rhetoric cheapens what real "evil" is.
Is the money going to distributed for the affected customers.? Do u think they will get their share of the "goodies" ?? when they are the ones who were most affected!!!!
What about the big providers that knowingly and willings host spam gangs? Surely the next target of a suit should be UU.Net. See my Boycott MCI rant for why we should go after UUNet.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
Try reading the article. They are not being sued over free speech issues. They were sued because of deceptive advertising and misleading people into thinking the advertisements were coming from AOL itself -- things like that.... not simply for sending advertisements.
Free Speech? Is it free speech if I walk up to your front yard with a Megahorn and start ranting to you about Hot Sluts 4 You or Dirty Cheap Viagra? How about discount diplomas in your subject of chioce? Would you like to share my 10 million dollars? Refill your expensive printer cartridges. Lose weight fast. Attract women now. Refinance. Here's your free pass. You've won. Hot Date. Cheap insurance for you. Business Forcast! Improve your penis size!
You wouldn't like it very much. You'd hate it in fact if it were a regular thing. While SPAM may no be trespassing, it is often fraud and that is against the law. When it's not fraud, it's often done through the use of stolen resources (in terms of server space, bandwidth, or personal information). Those too are crimes.
The few bits of spam you actually do get from legit businesses with interesting products or services are so drown out by the pure flood of crap that those who are trying to do real business without breaking any laws are harmed by the rest of the spammers.
Thus, spam isn't free speech. It's dishonest, it's annoying, it's unethical, and it's harmful to legit internet-based business.
I'm not saying spam should be outlawed altogether. I am saying that current laws should be enforced strictly against current spammers. Most of them are guilty of at least one serious crime even if it's simply an invasion of privacy.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
AOL/TW may be a huge media conglomerate, and their internet service may suck for geeks, but they are responsible at least in part for Mozilla, ICQ, Winamp (which is being ported to Linux), and send free coasters as a courtesy in the mail.
They are a media conglomerate, but they are about as non-evil as they get.
They are also Microsoft's second biggest problem, and anything that annoys them is fine by me.
An enemy of an enemy...
Back on topic, money seems to be the only thing spammers care about. $7 million is bound to be an eye opener.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
There are reasons to dislike AOL, but their attitude towards spam is not one.
I like AOL because:
- they've funded mozilla for so long,
- they made a nice open-source webserver, and
- they actually work to fight spam.
I dislike AOL for a number of reasons I won't bother to iterate here. Basically, they're a mixed bag, like most big companies.You're dead right -- spammers will simply run their businesses like the movie industry does.
Set up numerous little companies so that those which run into problems (such as being a box-office bust or having the snot sued out of them) can be bankrupted at no real cost to the people behind them.
I would expect that these spamhaus companies would rent their computers and other "assets" from a parent company at a rate equal to the revenues the spamming generated. That parent company would (of course) be a legally separate entity. This means that when the sued company is bankrupted for failure to pay the fines, it has neither assets nor cash in the bank and the spammers don't lose a penny.
It's a strategy that's been used countless times before in many different industries. The only losers are the *real* creditors who are unfortunate to lose their money -- but in this case that serves them right for dealing with a spammer anyway.
So what if a grandmother in Ohio believes that the Internet comes directly from AOL? Who cares if some mother of two thinks that AOL controls all content on the Internet and has created nice categories for everything to fall into? I imagine you're not much of a programmer. You're probably a somewhat knowledgeable user but that's about it. Let me explain something to you - as a real programmer, I don't want the user to have to understand very much at all. They have a task that they want to accomplish. That task normally does not involve understanding the differences between HTTP 0.9 and HTTP 1.0. Furthermore, I don't need to post on Slashdot and insult people who haven't gained the knowledge about how many things related to their computer function. Calling people "dumb" because they don't entirely 'get' what a dial-up connection is really reflects on you, not your "dumb" "friends." They lack knowledge; you lack self-esteem and self-respect.
Go home.
Responsible? ICQ, Mozilla, and Winamp ALL were created independently and then were bought up by the giant AOL.
Sure, now they control them, but how much has changed in these three since they got bought? Not much, just more crap was added to them to make AOL money.
Travis
Does anyone see these kinds of suits scary, and threatening to our free speech that we try ever so hard to protect? When you limit peoples communications methods - and spam can be very broad, it limits our speech. I find spam an annoyance, but I'd rather AOL spend the money they spent on that lawsuit to figure out a p2p filtering system like cloudmark's most excellent product for AOL users. (cloudmark filters out 98% of my spam, 0 false positive.. works off of checksums of emails)
Yes, spam costs you money - but so does looking through all the junk mail you get at home - that filtering can take a minute or too - the same amount of time as clicking delete on your computer.
I just don't know if this is something that you truely want to support if you get to the root of the issue.
They could offer a small bounty for every spam header you recieve on their network that you forward to their legal department. A small percentage of any legal reward from spam you recieved could be awarded.
Like the lottery.
Maybe not such a good idea.
Can anyone come up with a community-centric constructive idea? Something that will combat spam and encourage good ettiquite. Like recycling, getting five cents back for every bottle. I used to do that, when I could get that bounty back. I was a kid, so I'd go around picking up bottles and asking neighbors for their bottles.
I'm as mimsy as the next borogove but your mome raths are completely outgrabe.
Nothing of the sort can be attributed to spam.
If you think that spam causes no "substantial harm", then you pay AOL's costs for servers, bandwidth, and storage to handle over ten million spam e-mail messages per day. And while you are at it, write checks to every ISP to cover those costs. Then go back and write checks to every Internet user that has paid higher monthly fees because of spam. Respected estimates put the total cost of spam into the billions of dollars every year.
Since there is no substantial harm to users
According to industry estimates, spam increases each subscriber's monthly costs by several dollars. Just how much would it have to cost consumers before you considered it to be "substantial harm"?
There is no constitutional right to send my 5 year old nephew viagra and my 6 year old niece breast enlargement cream.
SPAMMING is stealing! You do not have a constitutional right to use my servers and my computers for advertising. I am not allowed to force you to take collect calls so I can sell you my crap.
Fight Spammers!
AOL spams everyone via the mail with Cd's and also increasingly in peoples inboxes, ive had two emails from AOL this week to an address i have never supplied them, netscape, or any of their child companies with. i should sure them for spamming my mail server and taking up bandwidth etc.
The worst spam, the spam that should be prosecuted, and the spam that should be destroyed, lies to the reader. The spam likely has forged headers. A lie. The spam likely has a misleading subject line. A line. The spam most likely has claims that goes beyond the traditional advertising hyperbole. A lie. The spam may fraudulently indicate that I signed up on a list. A lie. The spam may indicate a fraudult removal claim. A lie.
There is no way that fraudulent advertising speech is covered my the first amendment. Hyperbolic speech, probably, but not outright lies.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Granted, I prefer AOL/TW to MS, but that's more because (a) I feel that the first is less competent from a business standpoint, and I'd like to have competition, and (b) AOL/TW is smaller than MS (disgusting as that is).
AOL is not simply being a "nice guy" in buying ICQ, Mozilla, and Winamp, though you're right that they fund Moz development. They're fighting for control of the Internet instant-messaging market, which would put them in an incredibly powerful position of control -- essentially the dominant "telecom" provider of the future. ICQ is a smart move for them to make, because it lets them consolidate the two leading messaging clients under their control (damn few people use MSN Messenger or Yahoo). TW is a media distribution company, and MS has control over Media Player, and would like nothing more than to exercise said control to attack competitors (as they have with other monopolies and competitors in the past). Winamp helps nullify that. Finally, the same goes for IE and Mozilla -- AOL is *the* big ISP, and being at the mercy of MS's potentially auto-updated web browser is a scary thing for them. Mozilla helps them quite a bit.
Again, that doesn't mean that AOL is to be hated and despised -- I think that they're a lot less dangerous than MS -- just that they're certainly looking out for #1 in these purchases.
May we never see th
>>Sure, now they control them, but how much has changed in these three since they got bought?
:P), and I can't complain about them at all. I get responsive customer service (the 2 times I needed it), and even got 3 months free service from them because they screwed up my billing information. I didn't even have to ask, they offered.
It's not like they stopped Mozilla development right? They could have brought it back in house, or stopped it altogether if they wanted to. It's not like it's a moneymaker or anything.
AOL isn't really such a bad company. All things considered, they're actually pretty darned good.
I've had an AOL account since 1993(go ahead.. make fun of me
Like I said, they're not such a bad company.
Huh?
The biggest difference between unsolicited bulk snailmail and unsolicited bulk email is who pays for it. In email both parties pay for it (as well as some intermediate parties which have no involvement etiher way), whereas with snailmail it's the sender who pays postage.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-218360.html
"Not much, just more crap was added to them to make AOL money."
Yep nothing but crap added to Mozilla since then.
*rollseyes*
Nothing but the ongoing funding of Mozilla development. Oh right I forgot those Netscape employees who work on Mozilla do it for free. Netscape on their own would be bankrupt and gone today if AOL hadn't bought them. Thus Mozilla would NOT be where it is today without AOL. Yep sucks to hear, deal with it. I also noticed that ICQ and Winamp continue to be fully funded as well.
AOL may be a big bag of crap when it comes to their client software, but they served as Internet training wheels for a huge part of the Internet surfers today. They have their place.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Or it could just stop them giving media interviews and hence prevent the average slashdotter from knowing who they are....
Ideally, we should have a weekly story detailing a spammer's contact details AT RANDOM (i.e. randomly chosen from Spamhaus) and then :)
I hate to ask for more laws, but I'd like to see a law passed that requires any company providing a recurring-charge based service to:
(a) have a cancellations department
(b) make that department's contact information readily and easily available through all means which the company can be contacted (eg, no "online-only" phone list)
(c) the cancellations department's sole job is to cancel accounts. They may only ask once for a reason for cancellation and then process the cancellation. No offers, no lying, no bullshit, immediate cancellation.
Making you jump through sales hoops to cancel your account is dishonest, there's no two ways about it.