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AOL Sues Five Spam Companies
sugapablo writes "AOL has filed lawsuits against five spamming companies, seeking damages in the millions for unwanted email. As the AP reports, AOL hasn't actually figured out who all the defendants are though, filing the lawuits against some "John Does" and attempting to "subpoena service providers and others to try to track down the spammers"."
Wouldn't it be kinda funny if all the John Does turned out to be in foreign countries?
Back to the drawing board huh guys?
Life is too short to proofread.
I know we all like to bash Aohell, but at least they're one ISP that seems to be doing something right these days... fighting spam to its death... unlike 99% of all other ISPs.
So where is Sanford Wallace these days?
eTrade SUCKS
On one hand, suing spammers; on the other, forcing providers to disclose customer activity. It's dancing with the devil. (I'm assuming, since I've never actually done it to my knowledge. But I think that's what it would be like.)
The day you get 100 'free CDs' every day and have to foot the postage charge yourself, you might have a valid complaint.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
While I have no interest in the many free aol/earthlink/other isp cds I get in the mail, they have never reached the point where my mailbox has been overcome in a single day thus forcing my mail to be bounced. Aol pays postage and production costs for this crap, most spammers pay very little and generally do cause damage and increased costs to their victims.
They do know who at least one is: George Moore aka "Dr. Fatburn". Who is also being dragged into court by Symantec as well.
I wonder if his own actions to try to gag a web site turned him into a lawsuit magnet?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I find it interesting that they always go for the outlet doing the spamming. Why don't they sue the individuals paying the spammers to send the emails? Instead of trying to kill the spammers, starve them by making companies think twice about using this method.
You'd think that this means of advertising would actually destroy the "goodwill" of the product being advertised. I know I have less respect for companies that use this means.
***
Charles Martin
Database Developer IV @ Santander Consumer USA
So can I sue AOL for spamming me with all those frigging CDs?
That depends. Does AOL make you pay shipping and handling for those CDs? No? Then it's not spam.
Direct marketing (i.e., junk mail, paid by the sender) may be odious, but it's a different issue from spam (essentially free to the sender, burden to pay on the rest of us, including AOL). AOL is not really being hypocritical by fighting one and using the other, no matter how funny it may seem to claim otherwise.
You can sue for garden-variety fraud under state law, but you have to have been actually defrauded (i.e., you actually believed some false statement and were damaged by relying on it). If you know you're being lied to, you haven't been defrauded.
I am ashamed to call AOL my 800lbs Gorilla.
At least AOL has lawyers and money and might actually be able to do something here. It DOES cost them money not to mention the negative stigma of knowing if you ever sign up for an AOL account, your email will be prefilled with 1000 spams before you even log on the first time.
Its not that other ISP's don't do anything, they are just more concerned about shielding their customers from it rather than eliminating the source of it. My "Earthlink Spaminator" cuts my incoming spam flow by about half. Sure this doesn't solve the problem of spam, but for Earthlink, it shows the customer that they are at least trying to shield them from it.
I think we'd all enjoy a nice cold beverage. -David Letterman
I hate AOL and all their users, but damn, this sounds great! Best of luck, AOL!
That's a rather broad brush that you're painting with. Some people here may be using AOL out of necessity. There are a lot of rural and small-town places I know of around here where no ISPs have POPs other than AOL.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
It takes time for me to read through my mail, and time is money - especially if you get paid on results and not on hours spent. Of course it doesn't take me long to sift through mail discarding all the AOL CD's, but there is still a cost. It also costs to have them carted away once they are in the trash.
I'll stick with the more accepted definition of spam - direct mailings which you have not asked to receive. There are plenty of other more acceptable ways to advertise a product. Marketing droids just need to be a bit more innovative about the methods they use.
I may be off my mark here as IANAL but there is a big difference. AOL has proven that a) there has been a tangible violation of the law b) they have tracked the violater back to a particular system(s) c) they are suing the violator and not the company the violator is using to send email.
In the RIAA vs. Verizon case RIAA was suing to get the subscriber information without ever proving that there were specific incidences of copyright violation (instead charging that P2P is ONLY used to steal music). In addition they did not sue copyright violators (as a "Jane or John Doe") and then use supoenas to get the personons name. Instead they sued Verizon to get the information directly. Verizon's argument from the begining was that that RIAA was skipping step one- 1) Show evidence of a crime and step two- 2) Seek to take action against said anonymous criminal (this may seem odd, but our legal system allows us to sue an unknown person/ group and fill in their name later). Instead RIAA sued the people who "facilitated" the crime and stated that all of Verizons customer records should be on display to the RIAA Nazi SS forces without proof or ponderance in court.
AOL, as stated, is instead going directly after the offenders and using the power of the courts to get specific information about specific crimes, not all customer information at will and on demand.
Just my $0.02
Huh?
And don't forget that your trash disposal is paid for by taxes, and just like spam the individual cost of disposal per item is tiny, but given the overall amount of trash that unsolicited mail generates, this adds up to a significant amount in the long term. The costs of this are spread across the whole community, even those who are lucky enough not to be targeted by advertisers very much still have to pay a share of this disposal 'stealth cost'.
And since the CD's at least probably end up in a land-fill your great-great grandchildren may still be paying a price (of sorts) in a hundred years.
Is it just me who thinks this is all screwed up?
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
Not quite:
: //www.eff.org/Cases/RIAA_v_Verizon/
RIAA wanted Verizon to turn over the the records without getting the courts involved. Verizon does not want to give this information out without a court order. AOL is going directly for the court order. Very different scenario..
What the RIAA really wants is to avoid the courts and use the DMCA for the inital step of information gathering so they can act faster and more efficiently for shutting people down. The disadvantage of this is that they are no checks and balances present without the courts involvment, the ability to request this information on a whim could very easily be abused and nothing in terms of real proof required that a copyright violation is truely occuring. What Verizon does not want is a precedent set where any company that feels a copyright violation has occured can request this information at will. This would be a great strain for Verizon to support this. They want a court order steps followed to limit these requests, kind of like a security deposit to prevent a flood of requests for user information.
The court battle they are in now is mainly to determine if organizations like the RIAA can request this information via the DMCA and without specific court approval. This is a much larger issue then RIAA vs. Verizon.
http://news.com.com/2100-1023-982809.html
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Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
On one hand, suing spammers; on the other, forcing providers to disclose customer activity. It's dancing with the devil
I wonder what the impact would be, in the cases where AOL cannot track down the spammer without violating individual rights, if they were to simply contact, or if needed, publicly identify the ISP that knowingly hosted the spammer, and then let the flood of complaints begin.
If somebody told me that stack of spam was coming from *ISP-name-here*, and that *ISP-name-here* had been informed, but wasn't doing anything about it, I'd certainly be rerouting all my "male enhancement offers" in their direction..
And of course, if that occurs to them, I wonder what the chances are they'll abuse that idea to make other ISPs look bad...
Junk mail sucks, and I'd love to see it abolished
Junk mail subsidizes the post office. Without it, there probably wouldn't be a post office, or stamps would cost a whole lot more than they do. A post office is only cost effective with a certain threshold of volume. If junk mail didn't exists, it would cost more money to send the same non-junk mail.
With electronic spam, the more they send, the more it costs the receiver and the casual users of the system.
The more volume in physical mail, the cheaper it is to send and receive for the casual user.
This isn't the sig you are looking for... Carry on...
not funny at all, think from an AOL marketing person's point of view - if they sent out CD-RWs, people wouldn't just bin them, they'd keep them and every tme they reused them, they see the AOL logo. Over and over again, instead of the current system where they see it once - on its way to the bin.
Someone should point this out to AOL's marketing dept. (just don't tell them you can slap a blank label over the top, ok).
And it'd be more environmentally friendly.
I love it when a plan comes together!
Because AOL gave millions of people who had no clue about the Internet access to the Internet. This is much akin to taking several million people who have no clue how to drive, giving them shiny new high-performance cars and dumping them on the freeways.