Slashdot Mirror
Californian Court Fines Spammers $2 Million
afra242 writes "The BBC News has reported that a Californian court has fined a marketing firm $2m for spamming via email. This judgement was the first anti-spam ruling and the marketing firm were fines for sending out millions of unsolicited e-mails telling people how to spam. We're getting closer..." Other readers point to coverage of the judgement from the Associated Press (via SFGate) and from Reuters (via Yahoo!).
I mean, hey, it's not ass-rape, but $2 million will do for starters.
evil adrian
...it wouldn't work. That fines wouldn't help.
If rulings like this become everyday experiences, I honestly think the amount of spam will decrease.
It will not solve the problem, however. There are ALOT of ideas for this, one of which is POP-Before-SMTP, which seems somewhat sane. But then again, they (more or less) all do. I find it highly unlikely that any of these n solutions will find wide acceptance and use, before at most a handful standardized ways are selected.
Oh yes, and all your money are belong to us!
With great numbers come great responsibility!
First they need to make it a felony to spam. Spamming is no different from other forms of wire fraud (by using fraudulent headers, cracking into networks to send spam, theft of services, not to mention most of the time they are selling a scam).
Then spammers can be sent to prison where they can be stabbed in the showers.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Wow! $2,000,000 is 1/10,000 of one penny for each spam email. That'll stop him!
Okay, that's an exaggeration. Maybe, because of this judgment, the spammer will become so poor he will have to stop having caviar flown in from Moscow.
Which is to sue not just the spammers, but the companies who hire them and ban their imports to the Unites States (or whatever country you are in) to punish those overseas who may be beyond the reach of a lawsuit. The latter may be harder to enforce as I am sure there are ways around it and not enough customs agents to check everything. But it might at least have some impact on domestic companies who hire spammers. The more countries that join in, the more impact it has overseas. Companies will soon learn that using spammers costs more than it makes. Dry up the demand for spammers and the problem goes away.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
According to the article, a law goes into effect in January stating that people can sue companies for $1000 per spam e-mail they get. As much as we all hate spam, isn't $1000 per e-mail a bit excessive?
Think about how we react when we hear about the record companies suing people for thousands of dollars per song that they share. The normal reaction is, "There's no way that these people caused that much damage to the RIAA! They should only be able to sue for how much damage they can prove they incurred over that person sharing the song."
Why doesn't that apply here? Just because we don't like spam? One spam e-mail doesn't cause $1000 worth of damages just like one shared song doesn't cause $10000 worth of damages. Isn't there a bit of a double standard here? The people in the story got punished in a different way as well - they can't advertise anything over the internet for the next 10 years, not even their own marketing company.
Now, I'm all for spammers getting shut down and punished, but $1000 per e-mail seems a bit excessive when the actual damage to your time/bandwidth is nowhere near that.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
Not to mention the fact that often spammers are resellers of no-name crap products which could easily be relabelled and sold under a different name. Banning products only works if your product name has some value.
The bold print giveth, and the fine print taketh away
They hacked other mail-servers to send mail for them so it couldnt be traced back to them... Ah... wait a minute... I thought they were selling a physical object... a book on spamming.. which means they would have to have some place to be billed, and also a way to actually mail the book... Hmmm... guess we cant trace credit card purchases, balance transfers.. or US mail anymore.. wow. Musta been real hard to track down?
*There's Klingons on the starboard bow, scrape em off Jim!*
Then instead of hiring spammers to advertise their own products, companies will just hire'em to advertise their competitors' products
You're not giving enough credit to Law Enforcement agencies. That possibility would be studied very closely, and attempting to frame your competitors for commiting a felony is the sort of thing that's likely to make heads roll as high as the CEO level. Additionally the number of people that probably have to be involved would probably elevate it to some level of conspiracy charge.
espo
So there.
What all other laws with statutory penalties?
Cut down a tree in your own yard in many jurisdictions and you'll be paying out thousands in fines. Who is the victim there. Shouldn't you be allowed to cut down your own 200 year old oak tree if you want?
Littering on the highway is victimless...right? That will get you a $500 minimum fine in some states.
Junk faxes my only cost you a few pennies, but you can collect $500 from a company that sends it. The law prohibiting it has been around for over a decade. Every SINGLE federal court district that has hear issues of 'free speech' and junk faxing have denied the complaints. Commercial speech does NOT have the same protections nor should it.
That fact is that such activity is not victimless. Admins have to constantly adjust and upgrade mail servers to try to stop the flow or manage the load. That costs time and money, and those costs are passed on to you and me.
The only way to stop this kind of behavior is to make it no longer viable for them to do this. The Government doesn't have the resources, so a private right of action is the key. If it wasn't for those of use that take on telemarketers and junk faxers, I guarantee that it would be a much larger problem.
Cave, wreck, and deep diver.
The Federal Junk Fax Law provides for penalties of $500 for sending a junk fax. This punishment can be increased to as much as $1500, if the violation of the law was willful or knowing.
I know that there's more of a problem with externalizing costs with a single junk fax than there is with a single spam e-mail, but in both cases, the punishment is orders of magnitude above the actual damages. That's because you're encouraging the public to take action on this themselves, and there's a significant amount of time and work involved.
How many orders of magnitude beyond the original damage do you want?
A very good question. I want 2 to 3 orders, roughly. I figure that about 1% of all crimes get brought to prosecution, and I want to make the average penalty higher than the cost of following the law.
As another poster said, the damage from spamming is usually more than 1 mail in 1 mailbox. If a spammer sends 1,000,000 messages, and they cause $0.01 of damage each (by assaulting other people's attention without permission), that's $10,000 in actual damage.
That's a serious crime.
But suppose I subscribe to some e-newsletter from Sony, and then I properly notify Sony that I don't want it any more, but they improperly keep sending it. How much damage am I suffering? $0.01 to $1, we agree. I'm willing to stipulate down close to $0.10. "2 to 3 orders of magnitude" means $10 to $100 for each offense, which seems reasonable to me if I have to actually take them to court.
Punishment should appropriately match the offense, that is all.
You know, this is why I like this discuession more than previous Slashdot discussions about spam laws. A lot of people are actually coming out and acknowledging that spammers are human beings; they have the same rights as other human beings; spamming is one crime among many; spamming should be treated in a coherent framework with other crimes.
Honestly, there were days on Slashdot when it seemd like people wanted to punish spammers more than they would punish Osama Bin Laden.