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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!).
Great! When do I get my share?
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"
The injunction also forbids Willis and Griffin from owning or managing any business that advertises over the internet for 10 years.
After 1 January, the state's anti-spam laws will get tougher and will also allow private individuals to sue spammers and collect damages of up to $1,000 per e-mail.
That's a nice pair of little clauses there.
The problem is that these guys were a perfect case: a pair of California spammers spamming people inside California using California computers. Methinks jurisdiction is going to be much more interesting when they try to go after out-of-state/country people. If they do so.
However, it does send a nice message to the bastards. And if just one of 'em decides to not hit that 'send 50 million emails' button, that's a little win for the Internet. We gotta be happy with that, 'cause the government (as usual) is gonna keep the money to itself.
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.
We're getting closer...
Hmm... I like them being fined, and california needs the money, that's for sure.
However, I wouldn't jump too high right now. I think we are just changing the game, not winning it. Here's an example of what spammers are doing now.
I believe whitelisting is one of the only way to go about stopping spam, but it has obvious problems associated.
Ah well, atleast the government is doing something... 5 years too late.
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 --
Perhaps the greatest asset that anti-spamming forces have going for them is that spammers don't have the foggiest idea where each of their spams are going to. Who knows whether joeblow@hotmail.com is an account based in California or Timbuktu? And that, I believe, will pose spammers with an insurmountable problem. They are going to have to make all their spams California-legal, because there's probably not a single spam list out there that doesn't target at least a few dozen people in California.
Now clearly there will be some people who will say, "This law is unenforceable against offshore spammers." That's fine. The question is, do you want spams coming from both domestic and offshore spamhauses? Getting rid of spam sent within the United States will wipe out a large part of the problem; and not just in terms of numbers of spams sent. It will also disproportionately harm spammers with the greatest financial resources and the greatest technical expertise to overcome spam filters.
On a side note, I've noticed that for the first time in memory, my daily spam load over the past couple of months hasn't gone up. There's blood in the water.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
The money does get put into the state coffers. This is not like the RIAA who keeps the money for themselfs.
Fight Spammers!
I'm all for free speech, even in cases were I don't agree with the person's view point. The stormwatch neo-nazi group is one example of bozos and foofoo heads while I strongly disagree with them, I feel it's their right to make total asses out of them selves.
At the same time, I reserve the right to censer what i'm exposed to, as a consumer I have every right to do this. To allow adverts of viagra and penis enlargements on the net should be considered free speech and protected under the law. However, spam in my inbox is steping over personal boundries. I accept advertisments as a way to pay for content I view, however spam is getting a free ride and providing income to people who are not associated with providing me e-mail.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
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 didn't get find for sending spam per se, they got fined for sending spam with specific characteristics - specifically spam with forged headers, no opt-out, and routed through a bunch of hacked computers.
Maybe this really doesn't make a difference, since most spam has those characteristics. While legitmate email addresses and not routing it through a ton of open relays would be nice, the opt-out part is useless, since almost everyone knows not to respond to op-out on spam, since it usually just results in more spam because they know it's an active address.
I have blog like everyone else
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!*
So there.
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Business and Professions Code 17529.2.
The important part is in the details.Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a person or entity may not do any of the following:
(a) Initiate or advertise in an unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement from California or advertise in an unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement sent from California.
(b) Initiate or advertise in an unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement to a California electronic mail address, or advertise in an unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement sent to a California electronic mail address.
The key here is that you can go after the advertiser, not the spammer. You can find the advertiser by following the money. If you put in a credit card number, where does the transaction come out?
Using an "internet billing service" like iBill won't help. They're actually the "merchant" in such cases. iBill is going to be involved in many spam lawsuits.
The Direct Marketing Association is frantically lobbying Congress to override this before it goes into effect. S.877, which just passed the Senate, would kill the California law and replace it with a weaker one. But the House hasn't acted. Watch for any last-minute action at the end of the session.
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.
The penalty for violating a law should be much larger than the cost of following the law. Otherwise, people just break the law for free, and only pay if they get caught.
It's a separate argument whether a law is a good law in the first place. But if you believe, as I do, that spam should be illegal, then it's okay for the penalties to be a lot larger than actual damages.
For example, go down to the grocery store and shoplift some bread, and then try to get out of the criminal penalties by offering to pay the $2 damages after you get caught.