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Michigander Beats Spammer With "Junk Fax" Law
TastyWords writes "According to this link, it's possible to apply the 'junk fax law' to successfully sue a spammer in small claims court. For those who are stuck in states which either have worthless (or near-worthless) anti-spam legislation, this creative approach of the law presents a creative method of turning the table on those who choose to spam first and ask questions later. All of the details are available for enterprising anti-spammers!" Update: 02/25 00:30 GMT by T : OK, so it's Michigander, not Michiganian. Too long as a Texon, Marylandite and Tennesseenaut.
And for those who haven't read the article, one of the key things as far as I am concerned is the fact that the plaintiff won an award of $539.00 (including court costs). Multiply that by a-very-large-number-of-spam victims and I think some damage will be done.
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
Who cares - when you win the case, you don't need to sign anything. If they had settled out of court, it might be part of the agreement, but to try it on after they had already lost?
" For those who are stuck in states which either have worthless (or near-worthless) anti-spam legislation..."
Uh.. what? What states don't fall in that category?
Seriously, is there a state that's got the problem under control?
Read the article. His tenuous argument is that email is similar to a fax, because he uses a dialup fax modem to read his email
No, the argument was that his computer is a "telephone facsimile machine" since it can "... transcribe text or images (or both) from an electronic signal received over a regular telephone line onto paper" as required by the statute. Further, the statute prohibits "[using] any telephone facsimile machine, computer, or other device to send an unsolicited advertisement to a telephone facsimile machine". The statute does not state that the advertisement must be sent over a telephone line, only that it must be sent to a "telephone facsimile machine".
Ie, the sender used a "computer" to send an "unsolicited advertisement" to his "telephone facsimile machine," which is prohibited section (b)(1)(C) of the statute.
On that note, how many of us use a fax modem any more
I doesnt matter, if your computer has one, then it is a "telephone facsimile machine" as defined by the statute.
I think the judge screwed up here, and this will likely be reversed on appeal. Even if you accept that Mark's computer qualifies as a "telephone facsimile machine" under the terms of this act, it's pretty tough to make the argument that what Sears did was "to send an unsolicited advertisement to a telephone facsimile machine". They sent an email message to an SMTP server, which stored it in Mark's mailbox. Using his fax modem to dial his ISP and retrieve the message was Mark's choice. Printing it out was Mark's choice. I'm very surprised that the Sears lawyers didn't slam-dunk this one.
What about faxs that come from Russia? When faxer pays Russian mob to look the other way? When police want to wheel and deal with George Bush instead of listen to him like they should (in order to take care of Russian crime with advice and recommendations)?
Other countries may be so corrupt that their affairs are not in order. They can not deal with some problems effectively, which means that we may feel the pain for some time. Pricey faxes are only one of them.
I suggest you read Slashdot
"Ask yourself this: should we rape the rapist? If not, why not? "
No, we shouldn't rape rapists. We should shoot them. Twice. Once in the crotch, let them suffer the pain and loss of manhood for a few minutes, then shoot them in the head. None of this rehabilitation crap.
My DSL connection consists of an "electronic signal received over a regular telephone line".
I also have a printer, and run my own mail server.
All I have to do now is make a few accounts and post some drivel on Usenet without masking my e-mail address and watch the funds come rolling in.
I'd do it in a heartbeat, but it's the moving to Michigan part that gives me pause.
Before any of you Michigan residents hit that "Moderate-Troll" button, just take note that I currently reside in California, so y'all can get a good laugh on my expense too.
I tried every decent and legal way I could think of to resolve the issue w/the business before I rented the chicken suit
So. This guy successfully sued his local Sears branch for sending him a piece of Spam mail, for a total award of $539. The theory is that (being that Sears is a place you can sue), them sending it to his computer, means that the Sears store, wherever it is, is culpable for doing 'damage', 'irritation', or whatever, to his computer. Great, good for him.
How do we apply this logic to things like copyright infringement over county, state, national, international borders?
This is bullshit.
The same people who are cheering this ruling, convinced it will slow down or stop spam, because those damned spammers will be liable for the shit they send will be the very same people screeching in horror because the **AAs are 'breaking into your computer' by browsing what's already there to find illegally traded files.
Ladies and gentlemen, you can't have it both ways. Either computers exist on the internet, so they exist in all countries at once and are obligated to follow any law in any place someone decides to sue them with, or they're not. But I for one am sick and tired of reading what feels like opportunistic banner-waving: if it serves my interests, then that's what I want.
Look at the bigger picture. Please.
Bandwidth doesnt cost money ??
It does when:
- you get your email via GPRS and you are paying for every single byte transferred.
- when you are dialing up to the Internet via a modem and you pay phone charges (in Europe there is no flat fee local calls).
Spam IS expensive wether you want to believe it or not, and I'm not getting into the whole "wasting time sorting it out" and "time is money".
IANAL.
How about a computer, a dialup modem, fetchmail or other POP client, and a cron job that regularly fetches mail and pipes the newly-fetched mail to lpr?
That also sounds like it would qualify as equipment (computer, modem, printer) which has the capacity transcribe text or images from an electronic signal (noise to/from the modem) received over a regular telephone line (which is why I specified dialup) onto paper (which is why I specified lpr and a printer).
For a better case, burn a Linux distro onto a CDROM, and turn an old PC/modem/printer as an embedded system. "Well, some of us like to print our email. I don't like to check my email. When I come home from a hard day at the office, all my email is printed out in the output tray of the printer, where I can easily read it."
That sounds nuts to us, but I can think of several non-technical people who actually do treat their email that way -- "Email? That's like interoffice memos! Yeah, my secretary prints it all out, sorts 'em, and puts 'em in the inbox on my desk. By 10:00 am, I'm done dictating answers to my secretary, and I give her the tape so she can type up my replies on her computer thingy and send them out!"
Heck, if you end up taking this to court, your judge may in fact be one of those people. But then again, IANAL :)
Lex talionis is not, and never has been, "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life". Lex talionis is a view towards law that treats justice as interchangeable with retribution. If someone puts out your eye, then go over and slaughter the sonufabitch--that's lex talionis in a nutshell. What the lex talionis codes did was codify this pre-existing principle and give it color of law.
On the other hand, Hebrew law has not been viewed as proscriptive, but rather prohibitive. Instead of saying "retribution is justice", the Hebrew scriptures actually put limits on the government's ability to authorize retribution--you were forbidden from exacting vengeance past the wrong done to you. If someone put out my eye, I wasn't allowed to put their entire family to the sword.
"An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life" is, like much of the Old Testament, usually read with absolutely no clue about the context in which it was written. Look at the Code of Hammurabi, which is another legal code from roughly the same period in antiquity. The Code can be summed up as "if you transgress these laws in any way, you're going to get killed. Or if your transgression was really minor, just permanently maimed." That was a helluva system of laws, let me tell you. That's all it was: a system of laws. There was no concept of justice at that time, just pure, unadulterated law, and if you broke it, you died.
Then along come the Jews and their principle of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life"... and this system of laws was hailed as moral, merciful, and just. Why? Because it established limits on what the government could mete out for punishment.
So the next time you feel like condemning Hebrew law ("an eye for an eye") as a "morally bankrupt code", please consider the other options available at the time. And also consider that you're completely misunderstanding what the entire point of the Hebrew "an eye for an eye" instruction was and is.
It was, believe it or not, perhaps the first time in human history that someone put limits on the power of government and established that there were moral limits to governmental power. As such, it deserves our respect.
Gentlemen,
While this small victory is somewhat nice, it is quite too early to celebrate. It's a simple algorithm: take the number of emails produced by a spam-king, multiply by the number of possible suckers (gross profit), subtract the $500 per infraction of those willing to take the time and effort (net profit), and the result is well a very, very large pot minus a few pennies.
I would suggest taking a drug that fixes the infection rather than the symptoms. But I could be wrong.
Peace out
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
What I find most interesting about this is not the use of the junk fax law, but that Mark was able to sue Sears about it. This is something I've been wondering lately anyway: even if it might be next to impossible to track down the sender of a spam email, could you not still hold the company whose products are being advertised responsible for the spam?
IANAL, but I don't find it a fair stretch to say that, possibly even in a legal sense, the spammer was respresenting the company. The same can extrapolated to cover owners of websites, etc. -- any person, company or service that is the subject of the spam.
I was doubtful of this until now -- it seems like Mark pulled it off!
So then, why we don't stop trying to stop spammers, and go after the source? By attacking those that fund the spammers the spammers will still go down, and the targets are easier to find.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
I made a promise to my grampa, to beat down anyone who uses the term m*****anians. I have fifteen knockouts to add to his legacy. You want me to come in there?
I really don't care if a big company like Sears spams me, as long as they aren't abusive and maintain a "do not mail" list. What I hate (and I think everyone else hates too) are the fly-by-night overseas operations. Every week I get: Enlarge your penis! Enlarge your breasts! Make money fast! Sueing Sears does nothing to prevent this. The odd thing is though - it only happens on my hotmail account. All my other email accounts are 99% spam free.
"I received this email using a dial up phone line connection and printed the message."
It seems to me the junk FAX doesn't apply unless you automatically print out all your e-mail. Otherwise, you're not using paper and ink for an unsolicited ad. Voluntarily printing out an e-mail just to take the spammer to court sounds like it oversteps the bounds of the law since at this point you chose to use the printer, not the spammer. I'm surprised any judge would convict. It probably will be overturned if it becoomes a big problem for spammers. People have been trying unsuccessfully to use the junk FAX laws to prosecute spammers for years now.
Vote for Pedro