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California Could Get $500/Offense Spam Law
Bud Higgins writes "CNN has a story about a law the California Senate passed which will allow people to sue spammers for $500 per unwanted email. This is one of the strictest anti-spam measures in the country and will set a precedent for other states to follow." This bill needs to pass the state assembly and the governor to become a law, though.
The new get-rich-quick scheme:
1. Get a Hotmail/Yahoo account
2. Get rich.
Vonal Declosion
"I hate spam but I'll fight for your right to send it. I don't want the government making laws about Internet content. Its just a bad idea. Tomorrow they might make a law against something you do. "
People will mod up anything that smells of anti-law or anti-government. Frankly I'm glad the state of Michigan has laws to stop people from using my fax paper to spam me. Or from people calling me at 2:00am with an auto-dialer.
The government made laws for telephone and fax use and somehow I pulled through this age of the apocalypse. I think the Internet will survive the oppressiveness of the government.
I hate spam but I'll fight for your right to send it. I don't want the government making laws about
Internet content. Its just a bad idea. Tomorrow they might make a law against something you do.
Are you also against truth-in-advertising laws that make it illegal for companies to lie about their products in TV commercials? That's a restriction of speech too - of commercial speech - and laws like that are essential for a capitalistic economy to function properly.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I'm a little uncomfortable with the government passing laws specifically against spam--not because I think spamming is something to defend, I'm just worried about government getting on a roll and meddling in other Internet areas that they have no place being.
Spam should be prosecuted under existing laws regarding theft of service and computing resources. I wouldn't mind a federal law that specifically restates that so there is no doubt and I'd like to see existing laws enforced against spammers, but I'm a little worried about government trying to regulate Internet. They have a hard enough time trying to regulate things they understand let alone things they don't.
Trollspam - gets you pissed by accusing you of sending email. So you open it and great! a web bug just confirmed your addy.
In OSX Mail: Uncheck "Display images and embedded objects in HTML messages" in Preferences/Viewing.
In Mozilla: Check "Do not load remote images in Mail & Newsgroup messages" in Preferences/Privacy & Security/Images.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Pose as an employee of your competitor, and hire a spamming company to promote them.
-- In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD was UNSIGNED, and the main(){} was without form and void...
I hate spam but I'll fight for your right to send it.
A perversion of "I disagree with what you say but I'll fight for your right to say it." Spam is commercial speech and as such is undeserving of such allegiance. This has been well established by court precedent in the USA- commercial speech does not enjoy the same First Amendment protections as noncommercial (political) speech. Even if it were political speech, the way it's delivered can matter as well. You can't run around with a can of spray paint before an election and put political graffiti all over buildings, for example.
I don't want the government making laws about Internet content. Its just a bad idea. Tomorrow they might make a law against something you do.
There are two conflicting memes I see a lot concerning crime, legislation, and the Internet:
- Crimes involving the Internet are extra serious and require additional punishment and more savage sentences.
- Anything done on the Internet should be completely legal and unrestricted no matter what.
The first is fueled by simple post-9/11-style ignorance and fear. The second is based on an understandable fear of technically illiterate Senators introducing legislation written by corporate lobbyists. Yet in principle both are equally invalid because they fail to recognize that the Internet is a part of the real world and not some sort of alternate universe that requires a completely separate framework of crazy rules.
Another related meme, common in industry, and illustrative of the same point:
- Introducing the Internet into a business process renders it patentable.
Why does the Internet have this strange effect on people? There is nothing magical about the Internet that makes our ordinary common sense suddenly inapplicable. (You need a little bit of education, more than the average lawmaker has, but that should be it.) Some people simply cannot behave themselves. There is no valid reason that the social and legal principles we've developed for dealing with criminals in the real world shouldn't also work well on the Internet- which after all is merely a part of the real world. There are technical issues involved with catching troublemakers on the Internet that have no counterpart in "real life", but real life has its own set of technical issues that don't exist on the Internet.
If you can't behave yourself and screw things up for the general public, you should be punished. The fact that you're using TCP/IP at some point is irrelevant. It doesn't mean your activities should be branded as "cyberterrorism" deserving a doubled or tripled sentence, nor does it mean that anything goes.
So you're saying that because I run an email server connected to the Internet that I am obligated to accept postage-due advertisements, which is what spam is? Because I have a mail server I am obligated to receive hundreds of fradulent advertisements every day on my dime and on my time? I am required to subsidize someone else's marketing campaign?
The fact that I run an email server does not give you--or any spammer--the implicit right to abuse it or shift costs to me. Mail servers are accessible via the Internet because they have to me--it does not convey some automatic invitation to subsidize the costs of an advertising campaign much less a fradulent or pornographic one.
While we're at it, why don't we go ahead and have some human refuse unloaded on your front lawn and charge you for delivery? After all, your front lawn is publically-accessible. No-one forced you to have a front lawn so everyone is free to unload whatever refuse they want there because we thought it "might be useful". And charge you, to boot.
Maybe this applies:
Ferguson v. Friendfinder, Inc., Case No. A092653
http://www.timothywalton.com/ferguson.html
(Thank you, Mark Ferguson, for going to the trouble of following this case through. For that matter, thanks for starting it.)
Hmmm... Let's say it takes just 1 second to delete 1 spam, which is not unreasonable if you actually look at the subject to determine it's not spam. Let's say the spammer sent that advertisement to 30 million email addresses, which isn't unreasonable either. So a single spam session to 30 million people, the spammer caused humanity to lose 30 million seconds. That's 8333 hours which is just shy of a year. Or let's say that we call our time worth about $5/hr--less than minimum wage. That spam session that cost the spammer a few dollars at best cost humanity $41,000.
And that's just one spam! How many individual spams do you think are sent per day? By some estimates, spam will cost the American economy nearly $10 billion this year (I've also seen $8.9 billion mentioned).
Let's look at it more personally. Last month I received 2171 spams. This month I'm on track to receive 3022. So call it 2800 per month. That's 33,600 spams per year. Again, assuming 1 second per spam that's 9 hours of my time that will be wasted on spam this year. That's one work-day, or a nice Saturday afternoon.
Those that say "Who cares? Just click delete. How long does it really take?" are quite clueless. Spam robs time from others and it DOES add up personally, economically, and at the societal level.
That said, I don't worry about spam much. Using some good filters and Bayesian statistics I'm seeing just a few spam per month even though I'm receiving about 3000 per month. What a relief.