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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 :) )"
Can anybody dig up Jay Nelson's home address? Imagine if every spammer that makes his name in any headlines gets slammed with junk snail-mail. It might just raise the cost of spamming to a level that would be prohibitive.
As I see it, this is good for two things.
1. The spammer stops spamming.
2. Starts a trend of spam not being profitable
This is great. But for every legal victory there is over spam or p2p software doesn't this setup for another legal loophole to be found?
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
99% of the SPAM I recieve is undesirable and expensive noise. Forged headers of commercial email certainly has nothing to do with "free speech".
And sending commercial email under the guise of someone else (ie - using my email address in the FROM: header) ) should result in very heavy fines (may I suggest to the legislators a punitive fine of US$25000 per email destination)
Some free speech advocates will complain about a loss of their freedom to send commercial information to deserving customers. Happily, there are still countless avenues to communicate to these deserving souls: telephone, personal visits, snail mail, newspaper ads, TV ads, radio ads, pre-movie ads, magazines, movie product placements, tv show product placements, yellow pages, airplane banners, billboards, etc.
When someone declares bankruptcy, you can still seize their assets. Individual assets valued under something like $1000 are exempt. Things like automobiles and houses, along with cash and investments are likely to be liquidated to cover the payment. So they're in good shape to get the spammer's house and life savings, provided that they haven't spent all their savings and equity on legal bills.
(I'm expecting a lot of Catholic church buildings around Boston will be sold soon; likely to the Vatican with a lease-back contract, but providing plenty of cash for settlements. Just my guess.)
IMHO, this is a victory for AOL users, spammers are going to scramble now to delete %@aol.com from their databases, but that's about the extent of it.
Once a backbone provider (like Level3 or %Bell%) gets up the gusto to throw this kind of lawsuit at spammers (and offshore spammers), we may actually see some reprieve.
Until then... "So easy to avoid spam, no wonder it's number one!"
Hammer of Truth
In the last 34 hours or so, since the logs last rotated, my server has received almost 1000 spams and blocked the delivery of over 8000 more. I'll call that 6000 spams in 24 hours. This is just one mail server on a large campus with many different mail servers.
At $60,000 a day (dreaming) per machine a cluster of honeypots could wipe out the university's $11 million budget defecit in a week or two.
not all spam is evil, but many spam messages are
misleading
most of these can be considered as some sort of evil
-- SouNerd.com
I very well could be wrong, but didn't Mozilla, ICQ and WinAmp all start out as seperate programs from a seperate non-AOL entity before AOL bought them all years ago? Similarly to how Hotmail was before Microsoft.. Just curious..
Sing While You May!!
Although this was said in semi-jest, I think it is a good idea.
Imagine if they had some sort of centralized spam-reporting system. Everytime you got spam, you registered it (much like CloudMark's model). Come lawsuit time, you (depending on how much spam you registered) get a chance to cash in on all the spam they sent you.
I won a judgment against Printpal.com (owned by Piggyback.com, Inc) in Oregon from VA for $580 plus court costs ($43)! I am in the process of collecting it. Check it out:
http://purplecow.com/vaspam/
I hope to offer a service soon that will help VA residents (and other states which have anti-spam laws) sue spammers. If we can all do our part, thousands of lawsuits against spammers will get them to stop!
TossableDigits.com: Temporary Phone Numb
But in UUNet's case, they are not saying "we want to pretend to some misunderstanding of common carrier notion, so we won't interfer with customers who spam from us." Their Acceptable Use Policy says that they don't allow spammers on their net.
The simple fact of the matter is that they lying about their policy. They do allow spammers (but claim otherwise), as long as those spammers pay a premium for "bullet proof hosting". (No, I don't have specific evidence of this in UU.net's case. But there is evidence of these kinds of contracts in general and it is the only way to explain the pattern of UU.net's selective enforcement of their AUP.) Also consider the fact that UU.net collaborates with spammers that they host to reduce complaints without reducing the spam.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
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.
May I beg to differ? Why thank you.
If you subscribe to the notion of "evil" at all, it comes in many shapes and forms. There are enormous evils like the Holocaust and Stalin's murderous rampages through the Soviet population. There are small but still potent evils like small boys torturing animals.
Obviously spam is not "evil" on the scale of the Nazis/pick your favorite world-scale evil. The interesting thing is that sending a single piece of spam is a very small evil. Does the fact that billions of these small acts of evil have been committed add up to a large evil?
Is evil additive?
Sailing over the event horizon
The interesting part of the article was how AOL managed to reduce, by 20% the amount of spam that ended up in their users mail boxes. They have implemented some system that allows users to "vote" on the quality of the e-mail. Once a critical mass of "trusted" voters agree that a given piece of mail is spam, that piece of mail is removed from every other members inboxen.
Critical mass total number of AOL users. And if one person consistantly "votes" against the norm, then their vote is weighted less, preventing spamers from voting that their own spam is !spam. Pretty cool system. I hope some OSS mail client can incorporate such a feature soon....
I'd love to see AOL dump all that cash (minus legal fees, of course) into Mozilla to help further develop the bayesian filters that they're adding to moz mail.
do not read this line twice.
OK, we all hate spam. It is prolific, and abused.
But what kind of precedent is this setting? Could this be abused too?
Let's analyze what is happening here. One person has the right to sue another because they sent a mass email. How else can that be twisted?
What about internal email? Can a person be sued because they informed everyone in the company about a bake sale for their church? After all, they ARE promoting their religion with an unsolicited email. What if somebody used a quote from Carl Marx as their sig line? Is that offensive enough to be sued over?
I am sure that everyone here can think of other examples. The point is, one particular freedom has been abused by the few, therefore, it is being taken away from the many. What else can this lead to?
Just a thot.
"Logic merely enables one to be wrong with authority." - Dr. Who
they made a nice open-source webserver
No kidding? AOLServer is open-source? I always figured it was some closed, propriatary thing, but it's free and Free, according to sourceforge. Son of a gun.
AOL's products kind of suck, but unlike MS they can't (or don't) force you to interact with them. So, yeah, I suppose I like AOL more than MS.
May we never see th
What we need is for the backbone providers to start charging for the bandwidth that gets used. For example: Spammer A on Backbone X sends out a billion messages a day. Backbones Y and Z charge Backbone X for taking up so much of their bandwidth. Backbone X sees it's not economically feasible to allow Spammer A to send out the spam.
This is, admittedly, simplistic. But, for once, I'd like to see economics work in an open market without having the lawyers get rich.
Your mind looks a little cramped. Why don't you stretch it a little?
Is this for real?
Let me get this straight, AOL used to sell email addresses of its subscribers to 'similar-industries' as part of its EULA. The business model used to be based on advertising as of a few months ago when the backlash against all the pop-ups came. They then realized that most of their customers were leaving because of all these ads. Now that AOL has decided to kill its advertising based revenue stream, they are TAKING TO COURT the same companies that they used to sell email addresses to?
You think its a joke, start your own email server under your own domain. I havent recieved ONE piece of SPAM since I started doing that
I guess thats an interesting way to replace the revenue stream
Very true. The US is the most prudish country in the world. Go to Europe some time and take your kids to the beach, or even just turn on the TV.