Good Guys 2, Spammers 0

JoeJob writes "A couple of victories in the legal war against spammers. First, a Washington resident has been awarded a $250,000 decision against a spammer that sent him 58,000 copies of a spam. Second, looks like the spammers who are trying to sue Spamhaus, SPEWS, and other spam blacklists have decided to tuck their tails and run. Let's hope this trend continues." If you care to celebrate this, one food springs to mind.

Comments

This is what it has come down (to)

[trolman]

When you look at the big picture CAUCE and the likes will prove to be the Open Source solution to the problem. Those other guys are just doing it for the banner ads.

Back in the day; when the debate about allowing comerical interest on the Internet fired up, many predicted that today' situation would be the outcome... *soft crap destroying the backbone and .com(ers) diluting the content to the lowest common denominator.

Virus Spam

[schnarff]

Too bad it'd never be feasible to penalize all of the people who aren't patching their systems and thus flooding people's inboxes with virus spam. I'm still getting hundreds, sometimes thousands of fscking "Your Details" e-mails every day -- despite the fact that the problem was widely publicized and (supposedly) widely patched. In a way, this is worse than spam, because not only do I often get more virus mails than regular spams, I *know* I'm using a lot more bandwidth on all the SoBig.F crap...but until it's ever feasible to punish folks who won't/can't patch their systems, I guess we're stuck with this crap, too.

ISPs?

[gregbaker]

Would it not be possible for large ISPs to lauch similar suits as class-action? Imagine AOL suing spammers on behalf of all subscribers in Washington, with any judgement distributed among the receivers (minus whatever fees come off a class-action suit).

You'd have people signing up for AOL, just to get the spam.

250k! thats it?

[greymond]

Now 2.5mil woul be painful, but 250k doesn't seem like much. But at least another one bites the dust. And hopefully this will encourage others who have the means to continue to sue spammers. I have the will, but no means. As in I have a desire and a bunch of email records yet I have no money for a lawyer and googling for free info seems to bring up useless adds for stuff I don't need.

On another note I was eating dinner wiht a friend and she told me in VERY strong terms that spam would "never go away" and as a business practice it works great and she supports it. She said in her company's case they "send" out their marketing material to harvested emails that are sold to them froma third party. Yet inthe next sentence she complains about getting penis enlargemtn emails and breast enhancers.....

meh!

But will he collect?

[redwoodtree]

This is all well and good, but it will be news for real when the spam house pays up. The chances of ever collecting on this judgment are slim and none.

Actually finding and garneshing their accounts is possible but I can not imagine that will be easy or practical.

The other question I have is, how about a class action law suit. I know about 100 million people that would like to sue, the ULTIMATE class action.

Simple Solution

[freedomchild]

Okay, It seems to me that there is a simple solution to all of these spam related problems.

Instead of relying on a technological solution that will be circumvented sooner or later, why not follow the money?

Going after the spammers themselves seems to be a losing proposition because they have become adept at being elusive. The people in this equation that cannot afford to be elusive are the ones that are actually collecting money from the targets of spam. The people that are paying the spammers for their services are the ones that need to be penalized. When the spammers are no longer useful they will die out.

Making money from spam should be made illegal. I think it would be a lot more effective at reducing spam than the methods that are being used now.

If my logic is in any way flawed, please let me know.