Forbes Sympathizes with Poor, Abused Fax.com

An anonymous reader writes "Forbes invites sympathy for Fax.com and other junk faxers who are apparently being victimized by 'a small army of plaintiffs, attorneys and self-appointed activists', and Forbes particularly takes aim at 'the high-tech ambulance chasers' whose offenses include providing 'step-by-step instructions on Internet sites, printable legal forms and names of attorneys who specialize in the trade' to individuals who've received illegal junk faxes and want to do something about it. Because of these nasties Fax.com is 'all but out of business' and Forbes seems to be worried that email spammers might share the same fate. Help, I think I've fallen into a parallel universe."

Comments

Sneaking in on a good thing.

[TempusMagus]

You know I hate spam more than just about anything. But here is my prediction: Tougher anti-spam legislation will be used as a power-grab by the US feds. I can't wait to see what privacy sucking, corporate loving "provisions" will be added. Everyone hates spam so much that I'm sure our government will try and use it to sneak in the most egregious legislation.

Re:Sneaking in on a good thing.

[Misch]

Too late. The spammers "CAN-SPAM" act has already taken away our individual rights to redress grievances through courts of law. Individual recipients of spam cannot sue spammers. The power is left in the hands of attorney generals.

war dialing

[kisrael]

From the article:

To find fax numbers, the company used a sophisticated automated "war dialing" system that randomly called and recorded millions of fax numbers.

Yeah, real sophisticated. Call every damn number you can, sequentially, and listen for the whistle. Didn't mention the many millions more of non-fax numbers it called and hung up on.

Duhhh....

[Fryth]

"What's happened is there's a whole cadre of lawyers who want easy money..."

And spammers/junk faxers don't?

What Forbes fails to realise...

[Kotukunui]

is that this situation is caused by FAX.COM breaking the law.
Let me repeat that.
FAX.COM is breaking the law.

The people who have been on the receiving end of this lawlessness have been given a direct route by which to punish the lawbreaker. Eminently sensible in my opinion.

To me it seems that this is the ideal application of sensible real-world law. Forbes sees it as an attack on a legitimate business. Bollocks.

War dialing

[miu]

To find fax numbers, the company used a sophisticated automated "war dialing" system that randomly called and recorded millions of fax numbers.

So these are the obnoxious fuckers that leave empty messages, dead air, and fax tones on my voice mail?

Why isn't this considered electronic trespass or hacking?

Re:I don't read Forbes

[Walter Wart]

I do, at least semi-regularly. You have to understand, these guys are Business Fundamentalists. If someone is making a buck off of it it is GOOD. Anything including laws, divine revelation or public opprobrium that interferes with this is BAD.

Consider their audience. The people who read Forbes are business people. They like it when they and people like them are praised and dislike the people who get in their way, just like the rest of us. So Forbes prints articles which damn anything that is "bad for Bidness" (any Bidness).

Re:What?!?!? RealityCheck!

[Crypto Gnome]

it was a news piece that showed both sides of the issue

Now hold on there a minute, big fella. What do you mean both sides of the story?

There *is* only one side.

The side The Law is on.

What they're doing is equally as legal as selling heroin. (just to be clear not even slightly, not even for an instant, not even once)

You don't see Forbes.COM publishing articles saying "pity the poor crack-dealers" now do you?

A little math...

[Flower]

Fax.com claims they can pump out 3 million faxes a day. Make the following assumptions.

1. Each fax eats a sheet of letter head. That means each day companies receiving unsolicited faxes from this one entity have consumed 6000 reams of paper.
   
2. Assume that each ream of paper costs on average $5. That's $30,000/day industry pays. 52 weeks in a year, 5 day workweek minus about 10 holidays is 250 days. So the annual cost is $7.5 million dollars.
   
3. This does not include cost of toner, maintenance of fax machine, lost productivity, etc., etc.. I figure my estimate is conservative.
   

Yeah, it's a huge pity that they can't exploit their business model and wound up out-of-business. Tito, hand me a tissue.

Re:A very bad bad omen for us all

[The Snowman]

This assembly line type of legal attack on a corporation or government will only do bad in the long run because each and every corporation/government entity with an insurance policy will be driven out of business by a continuous parade of frivioulous lawsuits.

A company breaks the law by sending out junk faxes. Its entire business model is designed around violating federal law. Why shouldn't lawyers line up at their door? Slashdotting with lawyers instead of HTTP requests... a fitting end for a company that flagrantly disregards federal law and pisses people off.

I'm surprised they lasted this long. I wonder how they decided on this business model. Hey, I have a brilliant idea! I'll do a random search through the U.S. Code, pick a section, and build a business around disobeying that law!