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 :) )"

Comments

Re:Now to get back at the millionare spammer

[trentfoley]

...flood him with real junk mail...

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.

This is not a victory at large...

[smack_attack]

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!"

Sueing could solve my edu's budget problems

[JeffL]

Sueing spammers could solve my University's budget problems (assuming success, etc. etc.) Under Colorado's anti-spam law the university would be entitled to $10 per spam sent through its systems.

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.

I sued in VA and I WON!

[ooglek]

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!

Re:"Evildoers?!?!"

[gwernol]

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?