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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 :) )"
is it a good thing that i'm rooting for AOL?
I should sue AOL for that 7 million!
I'm a paying subscriber and I *still* get pop-up ads from them!
Stage one was to flood him with real junk mail. Now Stage 2 is to sue his arse off :)
I don't want to SUE them.
:P
:)
I want to SHOOT them.
Seriously, I think if the Mafia went after spammers, we'd be seeing a whole heckofa lot less spam.
The drawback to that is there probably isn't enough ocean to hold all of the spammers they'll give concrete shoes to.
Can we colonize Mars with spammers that lost a lawsuit?
I am confused....Aol is for Anti-Span? Does this mean we like or dislike AOL now?
NO! NO! Please don't mod me, I'm too young to die a troll. *click* Oh the pain, the pain...
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
Postmen should sue AOL for injuries incurred hauling all those CDs around.
1,000,000,000 hours free! Because no one really wants dial-up.
FoundNews.com - get paid to blog.,
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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.
We have your settlement money ready to deliver. Seven million dollars! Unfortunately, we're having trouble getting it out of Nigeria because the current government is corrupt and has frozen our assets. If you could give us your bank account number, we could wire the money to you directly. Congratulations on your win!
Mumar Zibutu
Former King of Nigeria
People shape laws. Not the other way around.
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.)
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.
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.
Extra bonus brownie points if the spam licenses are large bright orange tags attached to the ears.
Nah. Brightly colored concentric circles, centered on the chest.
They are a media conglomerate, but they are about as non-evil as they get.
Time Warner was one of the biggest backers of the DMCA.
Will I retire or break 10K?
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
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.
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
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
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
While it's true that a single asshole rep shouldn't be taken as a smear on the entire company, they do have a big problem here, not just one rep. It's a structural thing. They have taken it upon themselves to make cancelling very difficult, on the apparently accurate assumption that their subscribers are rather easy to manipulate. They have a cancellation department, and those people are the only ones that can cancel your account. If you ask someone in another department, they can't transfer you, they can't even give you the number normally (unless you tell them you can't get online at all) rather they are to send you to 'keyword cancel'. There you find the number to call. There are one or two other choices, I think you can snail mail them (certified mail!), and maybe send a fax. Most people will call on the tollfree number, and it's set up to encourage that. When you call the tollfree number, you wait on hold for a fairly long period of time normally. If you hold on long enough, you eventually get a 'cancellation representative.' Now these guys are trained and expected, not to cancel your account as asked, but to find some way, any way, to talk you out of cancelling! In fact, their job performance is rated by the percentage of calls they 'save' from cancellation, and if that percentage dips below the goal, they are out looking for a job again. This can be turned to your advantage if you really didn't want to cancel, as they can and will give you free service for a month or sometimes more in order to get you off the phone without cancelling, but it's annoying as all hell if you really don't want the service. And given the pressure these kids are under to 'save' you whether you want to be saved or not, and the training they receive (adapted from the training developed for hard sell telemarketing) it's not surprising at all when one gets rude. She may, in fact, be fired for cancelling your account, so why wouldn't she be stressed out?
Your experience is somewhat dated btw, AOL in 1994 was a very different company. I don't know exactly when the system I described was put in place, but I know it's been this way since '99, and almost certainly a bit earlier, but probably not in '94 - there was a huge cultural shift at AOL after the huge expansions of the mid to late 90s.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
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.