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.

Comments

Money !

[IanBevan]

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.

Re:Got go low tech

[KillerCow]

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.

Re:It is valid.

[Tackhead]

> The definition of a fax machine under the TCPA does cover a computer with faxmodem and printer. There are many lawyers who argue that it is not intended to be used that way and the courts will not support it. I have been unable to find any binding case (ruled on by an appeals court) in the country that has said a computer with faxmodem and printer does not qualify as a fax machine.

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 :)

You're gravely misunderstanding the principle.

[rjh]

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.

Re:I don't like spam either, but...

[Fnkmaster]

Nobody is going to appeal a small claims court decision. Small claims courts don't make binding precent, so there's no real reason to (500 dollars is approximately the cost of one lawyer-hour of time, thus it would be a very, very stupid business decision to do such a thing). Sometimes companies will appeal because the precedent of the decision is very damaging to their business - I don't think small claims courts have any real ability to form precedent, or to be cited as precedent anywhere else (maybe by the same small claims court judge). So why bother?

Brothers, too early to celebrate.

[airrage]

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

finding those responsible

[LuxFX]

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.