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Microsoft Files 15 Lawsuits Against Spammers
Popsikle writes "A Seattle Paper reports that 'Microsoft Corp. announced it has filed 15 lawsuits against alleged e-mail spammers in Washington state and the United Kingdom on Tuesday.' It states the tough anti-spam laws in UK and Washington allows ISP's to sue spammers. This could be a good test of the new anti-spam laws." There's coverage on CNN as well. Microsoft has picked a good venue for such a case.
Bullcrap.
Just look at K-Mart for a great example of this -- I have yet to get them to remove one of my forwarding aliases from their stupid system.
Why? Some idiot manager bought a cd of 5 million emails to add to their "Bluelight CRAP" email book. One, of course, was the harvested alias of mine.
So, I called them. Told them in no uncertain terms to take that off.
"But sir, why don't you just send the unsubscribe from that email account?"
It's a fucking forwarding alias. I CANNOT SEND MAIL FROM IT. Therefore I never opted in. But K-Mart won't unsubscribe without an email specifically from that address.
We went back and forth on this for about 15 minutes. I asked for the manager of their phone bank for the email division and got him. He denied ever doing something like that. Then he told me straight-out that only by sending an email to them could I have gotten subscribed in the first place so obviously I had opted in and could opt out the same way.
He's obviously a fucking liar and DID buy a scavenged email CD from someone, or else they did a web harvest themselves.
Don't kid yourselves. You can't trust the unsubscribe from a so-called "legitimate" business any more than you can the one from the spammers.
(a) everyone hates spam
.
(b) MS has the legal resources to really have a go at the spammers (and at the least make sure they get a lot of publicity about it)
Even if they lose, MS will be able to file their legal expenditures under "usefully spent money" in terms of the good publicity they'll buy re: the average joe on the street (and if they win they'll get the PR for free since they'll be recouping $$). All of a sudden they'd no longer be a corporation whose executives were repeatedly caught out prevaricating during their last trial, but instead a corp taking action to help everybody...
What stops Microsoft from appending some legal agreement in an EULA that specifies that their software can not be used by any individuals for the purpose of proliferating spam email. Define spam. Define a harsh penalty per email sent. Then try to enforce it.
.5 seconds, which was inadequate to read the entire document, that he did not know how the scroll bars worked and thought what showed in the window was the complete agreement, that he purchased the computer with the software already installed and he never clicked "I agree" at any point, etc., etc., etc.
Microsoft does not want to risk the courts ruling that EULAs are not legal, binding contracts. If Microsoft were to take that case to court, the spammer could challenge the legality of the EULA, showing that it was not signed, that there was no evidence that he read read or understood it, that the click-through agreement allowed him to click on "I accept" without even forcing him to scroll to the end of the document, that he clicked it in
There is a reason that the BSA and software companies take pirates to court for copyright violation rather than for violating the terms of the legally questionable EULAs.