Earthlink Wins Another Spam Award: $16 million

linuxwrangler writes "U.S. District Judge Thomas W. Thrash Jr. awarded Earthlink $16 million and an injunction against Howard Carmack for Carmack's use of Earthlink to deliver spam. Given that Earthlink is still awaiting payment of the $25 million it won against Kahn C. Smith last year, it views the injunction as the bigger of the two wins." A few more of these, and maybe the tide of spam will eb. Maybe. Nah.

Comments

Legal vs technical vs payperemail

[arete]

I used to believe that legal remedies couldn't stop things like spam, but I think I was wrong.

The very fact that spam is only a problem when it's on a large scale (don't think about recieving on a large scale, think that the list has to be large...) means, I think, that legal solutions can prevail.

arete

Re:Awards vs. Injunction

[gary bernhardt]

Generalizations like this do *not* further the anti-spam cause. Spam is most definitely an area where very large financial gain is possible. This obviously precludes spammers being "low-rent" sleezebags.

This reminds me of the thousands of posts over the years on Slashdot asking "Why does anyone spam? Noone buys that stuff." Then about a year ago a story gets posted showing someone who made *millions* spamming, and everyone stopped discussing it as if it had never happened.

Randomly assigning adjectives to someone you view as an opponent will not help your position. All it will do is make you look like someone who blindly slings insults, without giving any thought to the situation.

Re:Awards vs. Injunction

[datavortex]

Sorry, but in this case unfortunately the generalization is correct. That's pretty much how it's played out I'm afraid. There's only a couple spammers like Milette and he's more clever (and able to find scumbag salespeople at desperate bandwith providers) than many would like to admit.

This is way too hard

[ChrisWong]

The WSJ article today goes into some detail about the arduous chase with little pay-off. Earthlink must have some really dedicated anti-spam activists to even try this. Think they are getting big bucks? Hardly. From the WSJ:

The lawsuits rarely collect payments because most spammers don't have much money. Last year, EarthLink won one of the industry's biggest settlements -- a $25 million judgment against a Tennessee spammer, but it hasn't yet collected a cent. The Federal Trade Commission has brought 48 actions against spammers who make false claims about products or identities, but it hasn't recovered much money either. "Many times, there is no money left," says Brian Huseman, staff attorney at the FTC.

And it involves a lot of grunt work per spammer. How much is your time worth? It's like "The Cuckoo's Egg" story again. For just this one guy, for example:

The pursuit of the Buffalo spammer became Ms. Youngblood's top priority early last year. She spent about 10 hours a week on the case, and her employees spent another 10 to 20 hours a week, in total, hunting to see where he was hiding on the network.

Unless we start seeing some high-profile jail time, there won't be much of a victory.

Re:I wish I could get in on this

[Black Copter Control]

If they get more money back than was spent on the process, I will be surprised.
If they don't, then they shouldn't have sued in the first place.

Monetary awards are not the only reason for suing somebody (although going into court without a monetary interest can confuse the best of judges..). Here in BC there are many cases of companies going to court go get injunctions against protestors, etc. Although the injunctions are nominally interlocutory (until the case properly goes to court), they often stop prosecuting the case after the injunction is granted (i.e. the injunction is the only reason why they filed the injunction. I was actually surprised to find that they actually proceeded with one of these cases and got a ($6000) award.

Although they seem to have little hope of collecting on the $16M award, the fact that they can have these people arrested for violating the injunction can probably save them thousands of dollars in human an hardware costs.

Speaking from personal experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking from a front line position in certain corporations *coughs* phone monkey *coughs* in no way represents any corporations opinion (just what I see at the job)

I'd say besides connection issues...

Spam and pop ups tend to be the most irritating thing about the internet to those unfamiliar with it in general... I'm quite sure it's caused plenty of customers to cancel regardless of quality of service of the connection or the quality of customer service of any company...

Not only the cancelation but the support of the end user with these issues also costs money. Running 24/7 tech support with MSN, Earthlink, AOL or any major ISP...

1800 systems don't come cheap. Money is measured in minutes.

When 50% of your calls are due to spam and pop ups... With the rest as connection issues... If somehow you can kill the reason that the end user has to call in you already saved yourself a ton of money.

Of course I've talked with people who wanted to cancel their internet because they saw a banner ad saying "You are broad casting you IP!!"

Explaining the nature of pop up ads to the user is one thing, but when they are highjacked by Xupiter, Newdotnet, or "insert your spyware of the week" it's hard to understand from their end... Not to mention those same programs will cause IE to DIE! on say Windows computer if the program itself dies. (I'd say Newdotnet is horrible for that if it eats your wsock32.dll in win98... and embedds itself all over the registry... no web pages for you...)

Heck if I know how it gets on their computers.

"Do you have Kazaa on your computer?"

Usually the answer is "yes"

Personally, I'd like to see a few ISP companies go after these Spyware companies... Sure the end user can't sue because they agreed to a EULA but it often costs their ISP large sums money in terms of support costs...

Re:SPAM? What's that?

[Spetiam]

It's both a matter of principle and spam does have a financial and quality of service impact on companies and consumers.

In order to dodge spam, companies/consumers have to either spend the time manually deleting spam or put out the money to buy software to filter spam. In both these cases, spam still eats bandwidth.

Companies also have to be careful (i.e., spend time/money) that software filters do not delete legitimate email, as this could potentially have a severe imapact on their business dealings, service record, etc.

Finally, the burden of spam should fall on those responsible for it, not those that are "victimized" by it. So let's still nail the spammers.

Re:SPAM? What's that?

[CodeBuster]

The problem with this argument is that even if we all ran Bayesian Filters and blocked 99.9% of all spam messages from hitting our inboxes there would still be billions of messages going back an forth between mail servers before they are caught by the filters. This is a major drag on Internet bandwidth even if all of us never actually saw another spam in our inboxes ever again. These people who abuse their network privileges and degrade the network for the rest of us should be caught and punished for their behavior. Another thing that would really help is for slashdot people to advocate proper mail server configuration, including disallowing open relays, and education of all of the part-time mail sysadmins out there who perpetuate the problem with their own ineptness. There are groups already trying to do these things and it is helping, but it will take much more work on the part of mail admins and users to shut the spammers down for good.

Treat Spammers like hackers!!!

[pkinetics]

1. Spam is theft of services and or equipment.
2. Spam is often misrepresented, ergo fraud.
3. Spam is often sexual harrassment.

Why not go after these people for real crimes and send them to the slammer, confiscate their equipment, and all that other stuff the FBI loves to do? Also gotta figure if these guys are making any money, their probably violating some IRS law, so send more feds after them.

Bah... until judges and politicans actually grow up around this stuff, or have to answer their own emails, they'll never pursue it.

I bet when Bill Gates kids start getting spam, we'll see some radical solutions.