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California Anti-Spam Law Approved
Metroid72 writes "Zdnet reports that "A California anti-spam bill passed the Senate on Wednesday, a first step toward the passage of a law that would give people the right to sue spammers." I guess there's light at the end of the tunnel"
I wonder how Hormel feels about all of this Anti-Spam sentiment.
IIRC, this sort of law exists in a few other states. How simple is it to actually use? Does the spammer have to be in California? Do I need to be able to locate the spammer?
I'll quit my job and rake in easy money by suing spammers. If you'd like to know how you too can do this, send $5 to...
riding round the world on an old motorcycle
Find a spammer, heck, in the time it would take you to do that you could go out and find 500 bucks on the street.
Banaaaana!
I love Mozilla, and the spam filter is great, but that doesn't really solve the problem. A lot of e-mail servers are still getting clogged with spam and the bouncebacks, flames, and problems that result.
Yes but it's waaaay over there, very tiny. Just a speck.
Until something like this gets approved at the federal level, at least.
And I know that won't do much good for overseas spammers and so on, but perhaps it will increase the cost of doing business.
In those case, we can only hope that other countries will do the same. China and Korea, especially.
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
No lawyer will sue for something piddly like $500. What we need is for someone to set up a service that we can forward all our spam to. It will root out the sender and lump all violations against one sender together. Then, the guy gets sued to hell and back. We all get our $300/ea ($500 less 40% legal fees) and everyone is happy.
... has been e-mailed to every California taxpayer.
Sigs are bad for your health.
What use is the ability to sue spammers when you dont know who they are or where they live. Sure, The Spamhaus ROSKO Project will give some details on the big players, but chances are they already have their operation sorted out 'legally' offshore already.
is just a frieght train coming your way....
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Before we cheer legal solutions (which will have their fair share of downsides) maybe more people should take technological measures.
Also have a look here: Annoying spammers with OpenBSD's pf
Slides explaining how Bayesian email filtering is successful
PS: I know people might say, but what about the economic cost of spam, blah blah blah. Read the slides. If no one ever gets spam, people will stop sending it, and the economic cost goes away.
Good luck!
jabber: johnynek@jabber.org
Strangely enough none of the Peace movement organizations have spammed me. Perhaps even more stange, or suggestive, is that all of the peace groups are non profit, while all the pro war psam seems to come from some business hoping to sell some thing or another (offensive t-shirts, duct tape, plastic sheeting, etc).
SB 342, "Unsolicited email advertisements" (Florez)
SB 186, "Privacy: unsolicited e-mail advertising" (Murray)
SB 12, "Electronic Mail Advertising" (Bowen)
AB 567, "Unsolicited electronic mail advertisements" (Simitian)
For those about to rejoice, remember this is simply the first step. It still has to finish going through the state assembly, and then get signed by Governor Davis. Let's get some of this stuff pushed through for the better of the anti-spam community, shall we?
This sig no verb.
True, but as more and more people use customized spam filters spamers will have less incentive to continue.
A recent report on spam by Reuters stated that Yugoslavia, in an attempt to bring in more revenue is "harboring" spammers through its new program in which the government sells mass emailing licenses to spammers. These licenses basically exempt these spammers from any kind of criminal prosecution.
While this article is good news, it will not stop the constant migration of spamming operations to foreign countries who need the money.
There have been more and more people moving towards a newer solution which is very simple. Just ignore the spam. If more and more people ignore the unsolicited emails, eventually the Spammers will lose revenue or lose interest. By establishing all these forceful "spam attacks" we are just flaming the fire and provoking more spam. This is exactly the kind of media attention these spammers thrive on.
my two cents
With the junkfax laws, one may go after the junkfaxer (entity that sent the fax) and/or the entity on who's behalf the fax was sent. that has been proven in many cases where the fax entity could not be identified or was an offshore (often Canada) service. If your local carpet cleaning service pays a junk fax service to send the ads, then you can sue them directly. If they want to suggest they didn't do anything wrong, then just have them identify the people that sent the ads and simply add them as a defendant and let them fight it out.
Some cases will be more tough to prove, but with a little case law, you can win. One difficult case would be something like mortgage lead spams. The spammer and website are offshore, and once they have your information, then they sell the leads to numerous companies that 'claim' to not know how the information was obtained, however this will not be a valid excuse. I haven't seen the text of the bill (will a karma whore please post it if found), but I hope the wording is like that of the TCPA (Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991). In order to be sent a prerecorded commercial message or commercial fax, one must have a prior business relationship or have given prior *express* permission to receive such. Express permission cannot be sold nor purchased. Those of us that run our own email servers or use catch-all domain forwarding or other such service will be able to track all emails quite easily where you can simply create a new account for every location you post, web site registration, sweepstakes entry, etc so that you can decidedly trace the method a company used to obtain your address. A company trying to suggest that you must have 'subscribed or requested at some point to be added' will be shot down faster than my advances on prom night.
You don't have to worry about stopping the spammers per se, but the people that are knowingly paying others to send the illicit ads. The spammers protect themselves decently well just like junk faxers and scamming telemarketers, but when you hit their source of money, then you cut the body off the head of the snake. If the business think they were unfairly treated, then they are free to go after the spammers they paid to send the junk. States can pass all the bills they want, but until the public has rights to collect damages that have been made themselves, such laws or bills will continue to be toothless. Washington's law, from what I understand, has been decently effective. I simply do not see how Congress can site idly much longer on this issue. This is something that is affecting more people than before. The junk fax problem was quite so widespread when Congress acted in the early 1990s. Senator Disney did well with the TCPA, so maybe an anti-spam bill would be considered someday. It would see the best time to pass this is on the heels of the implementation of the FTC/FCC regulations. Awareness will be at an all time high and the same arguments DMA, Fax.com, and other scum will try to usee will have already been shot down with fresh case law or interpretation of regulations. While some people get in the news for winning spam cases using the TCPA, it seems most of those involved default judgments (like the recent Sears case). I know this isn't an junk email list, but thought some would be interested in the obvious mirroring of aspects of the TCPA. Interesting aspect is also the additional penalty 'read: tax' going to state coffers, that will be included even if it is a private action.
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
Shut up, bloody Vikings!
Sigs are bad for your health.
Could be a whole new employement niche, Spam Collection Agent.
"Hello, you bad old spammer you, I'm here to tow away your server."
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Three laws have been in effect in California since 1998. They've not been widely used, but about a dozen cases that I know about have resulted in positive results for the prosecutors. You can follow current cases on the Suespammers discussion list, or read the archives.
The new law appears to be more protectionist than previous ones, which required either (a) opt-out by the recipient, (b) status as an ISP, or (c) evidence of fraud.
--Tom Geller
Founder, SpamCon Foundation
Tom Geller
However, this seems amusingly similar to the evolutions of spellings that led to 1337 5p34k. IRC would filter out some words like "hacker" and disguising these words with numbers and intentional misspellings was a way to get past the filters and avoid breaks in communications. They're using our own cleverness against us. :)
Bombs. Lots and lots of bombs.
To quote someone from the discussion of the national do-not-call list administered by the FCC, "I'm looking forward to the national do-not-spam list, administered by the U.S. Army."
(Note for the humor-impaired: I'm not serious about the above)
My legal education, in nifty podcast format
If I have 10 accounts at yahoo for example, and I get the mail at all my accounts, will it be $500x10??? What if I have 1000??? I'm going to quit my job, and start opening mail accounts... =)
This is totally off the cuff but...
It seems society may be taking the wrong approach to this whole spam thing. We keep focussing on the guy actually sending us the e-mail. We seem to be overlooking the fact that there is someone out there who is trying to sell something to us (or scam us). If it weren't for this seller/scammer the spammer would have no reason to send us anything. Instead of attacking the spammer why not attack the root of the problem: the guy who is paying the spammer to spam. The way I look at it the spammer isn't doing this out of the goodness of his heart. He's doing it on someone's behalf because they are paying him. The person doing the selling is likely much more accessable than the actual spammer because one would need to actually contact them to buy the product being advertised. In contrast to suing the spammer why has suing the company/person who has hired the spammer been cosidered?
Never disturb your enemy while he is busy making a mistake.
I don't think this is going to solve spaming. (You can fake your email, etc.) It will only add to the people who sue everything
Yeah, but don't forget that spammers usually want to sell you something and in order to do that they have to include some form of contact address or phone number in their spam.
Tracking down the people behind the products or services being promoted should be pretty straight forward -- proving that it wasn't a joe-job however could be a whole lot harder.
...for California to simply enforce the ADV:-at-the-beginning-of-the-subject-line law rather than create a whole slew of new spam laws? If the state did this, then users could just create mail rules to send those ADV: messages straight to the trash. Voila! No spam in your inbox.
So when I sue the Nigerians who spam me, will they want my bank account number to deposit the funds for the judgement? I figure that I can sue them for $16 million dollars by now.
Open source development is my way of competing with the low-cost programmers in India...
Technically, this will involve very little suing of actual spammers. What this will involve is going after the spammer's customers - those businesses that are foolish enough to purchase spamming services. The thing is that spamming doesn't make you any money directly. You have to find someone willing to pay you to spam for them. And, while it's pretty easy to set up a spam box somewhere offshore, it's not so easy to set up an entire penis-enlargement firm or "herbal viagra" firm offshore, especially if you still want to do business in the US. So, if the people actually trying to sell products find themselves at legal risk, they're much less likely to avail themselves of a spammer's services, even if the spammer has minimized his own legal risks.
I've been getting about 20 spams/day, and did some checking into where most of it comes from. And 90% of it comes from the USA.
About half of that was coming from various domains that turned out to be owned by emailhello.com. To their credit, I sent them a mail requesting I be removed from their lists, and that I not be forwarded onto anyone else. They replied saying they'd remove me with 48hours, and true to their word, they did.
This speculation that most spam doesn't come from the USA is uniformed fud, and mostly untrue!
How long until I start getting spam from lawyers wanting to sue other spammers on my behalf?
Sig is on vacation
Obviously this is not the same as product liability, which for all its evils, in many cases has made us safer in our homes, cars, and places of work.
Physicians know very well the nightmare involved in any kind of malpractice action.
While the Calif. legislature's intentions are good, the problems with this law will prevent it ever having its intended effect.
The only think it will do is make a small number of California lawyers very wealthy.
The fix for spam (lowercase letters only!) has to involve shutting down open relays, ISP and individual filtering, and carefully crafted criminal legislation. For instance, we don't sue crank phone callers, we prosecute them criminally. Likewise, the new federal law against junk phone calls and the federal do-not-call list have criminal penalties, ie, large fines. Those are the laws that have forced junk callers to change their behavior. This is the direction most likely to be successful with spam as well.
This doesn't do jack people for us people, just another open loophole law that was passed so the politicians have "busy work"
Most spam is sent out through a 3rd party, who usually hides behind all kinds of nifty little things like hijacked SMTP servers and spoofed IP addresses. My freinds dad was a spammer, so I'm quite aquainted with thier operations.
Let's say, I recieve a spam from penis enlargement corporation. I try to sue, PEC just points out that the spam wasn't sent by them, it was sent by "insert spam company here" and they're off the hook.
The law needs to include the customer of the spam house, otherwise it's going to be ineffective.
I'd *really* like e-mail coming from domain.com to actually come from domain.com. I.e. No fake-mail. If you have the email-address user@domain.com, you should also have to authorize with the domain.com servers in order to send mail. And mail servers should verify that mail from domain.com actually was sent by a domain.com server (they must know where the mail is to be delivered to that domain, why not if it was *sent* to that domain?).
Yes, I know that *unless* you do/can authenticate with your email server now, this will break a few setups. And it's not the end-all of spam solutions. But it'd sure be a good help.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Much of the spam I receive at the moment is highly pornographic - not a problem for me, but I have a two year old daughter. In a couple of years, she'll be using the 'net (albeit from behind some kind of transparent filtering proxy); how would you feel if your child was being sent pornographic mail?
OK, so I'll be closely monitoring her email account when I set one up for her, but why should I have to do this? It's not as though I have to open every envelope sent to her through the post.
Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it...