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Dictionary Spammer Fined $55,000 for Spam Attack
Lawrence_Bird writes "In a first, a Japanese district court has ordered
a spammer to pay restitution to NTT DoCoMo for abuse of their imode system. 'The damage caused by large amounts of e-mail not reaching their destinations should be covered by the sender,' said the judge. The fine is about $55,000 and was based on an estimated cost to NTT of 1.2 yen per undelivered spam ($0.01) for the 4 million spams that were undeliverable. What is most startling is NTT DoCoMo assertion that of the 950 million emails
they receive each day, 880 million are not deliverable!"
If only there were more rulings like this one, maybe it would make spammers think twice if they knew they could be fined.
I want to see this guy fined per DELIVERABLE message aswell though.
Last.fm - join the social music revolution
I long for the day those fines are so common they don't even make it to /.
Do you like telemarketers too ?
.. lets say .. Cosmo Magazine, or Mother Earth News etc.
Sending unsolicited e-mail is NOT a legitimate business practice. Sending unsolicited e-mail is closer to harassment than it is to legitimate communication.
If your theory held, then people wouldn't get spammed with crap like penis/breast enlarging cream, ugoslavian tractor deals, or offers to become ordained ministers - they would get spam about things that INTERESTED THEM, 100% of the time.
You are confusing the issue, by assuming that all businesses have a right to free (as in beer) advertising, which as common sence dictates, is totally 180 from the true.
I work for a fortune 500. We send e-mail. We ONLY send email to folks who have opted into our mailing lists (by default, we are, across the board, and opt-out company - meaning we will assume you wanted to opt-out before we send you a lick of e-mail.)
One important nugget of info you glossed over in advertsising is the basic concept of 'target'. We make power tools, as a result, we normally do NOT advertise in
We follow the same practices with e-mail we send. Believe it or not, I actually DOES cost money to send bulk e-mail. As much as a TV ad ? no, but it still costs money, and as anyone who ever worked for big business can tell you - coming across ANY money is not always easy.
So, my long rambling has this point : Advertising is targeted communication with your audiance. Spam is Blind-Monkey-Flailing at anyone who is listening.
Saying that Spam is advertising, is like saying that the Homeless-Eveangelist-Guy who shouts about the *End of the World*(tm) in the middle of Times Square - is actually the pope.
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
This kind of mass mailing should be treated the same as a deliberate denial of service attack. Dictionary spammers tie up target servers without any reasonable expectation that most messages will reach an actual user. It is a consciously malicious act, and should result in criminal penalties, including prison time.
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
IANA network admin, but wouldn't all that sending put something akin to a huge glut of SMTP traffic on their routers? CPU cycles and bandwidth are hot commodities even if he's not getting what he wants.
Paid undeliverable outgoing mail, however, might just work. It doesn't require the collaboration of other companies in a cartel-type form. While it doesn't require cooperation, it does require a giant like AOL to implement it before everyone else will follow.
There is precedent for stuff like this. In video games, EA took the first step in making smaller boxes for retail shelves. Within three months, everyone else followed. Almost a year later, you can't find an 8x11 or larger box anywhere.
Laws are for people with no friends.
5 seconds??? Are you insane? Look at your watch. Now wait 5 seconds. That's an eternity. Why on Earth would it take anyone that long to look at an email and determine "Hey, who the %*#@ is this and why are they emailing me about penis creme?"
Personally, I can scan through a list of email subjects and senders (i.e., the folder - don't even need to see the messages' contents) and identify spam by the dozens. Even still, for the sake of argument, let's say it takes a whole second per spam.
Now, for the other holes in your ludicrous argument.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I regularly receive about 100 pieces of spam on a typical day.
At work? Then your work for a really crappy company. Even the tiniest of companies use spam filtering software. In the last 4 years, and at two separate companies, I've only ever recieved I think 2 spams IN TOTAL. Certainly not "100 per day." Sure, I get that much at home, but no one's paying me for that time, so you can't count that as lost productivity or economic cost or whatever.
So for normal employees, who can identify spam in 1 second instead of 5, and who receive 2 spams a year on their work account instead of the 26,000 you assert you receive, that amounts to about 0.0000001% of their paycheck, or precisely $0/year. Zero net impact on the company, other than loading down their mail servers a little more than usual as the spam filters do their thing.
If you get 100 spams a day on your work account, then either you're self employed and too lazy to set up even the most rudimentary spam filters, or your company sucks, or you're an idiot and use your real, work email address every time you sign up for a Honda mailing list or NASCAR "Speed Bulletins."
Stop the FUD. Spam sucks, but don't pretend it costs us more than a few seconds of our time or a few dollars of extra IT work. I get a kick out of all these people who complain that it takes them 30 valuable seconds of their free time in the evenings to delete a few dozen spams. Yet they'll sit there and waste hours on a Diablo game. If their time is so valuable, how come they spend so much time planted in front of the TV or surfing useless websites?
Like woodworking? Build your own picture frames.
Thats why I dont understand why ISP's dont get more involved in fighting SPAM, its costing THEM money. You would think that a big backbone like UUNET would spend a chunk of change to create 100% accurate filters and be pro-active on blocking out this bull-crap. It would only benifit them down the road.
It would even waggle the magic word 'ROI' in front of the exec's, so why isnt it happening yet??
No I didnt spell check this post...