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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."
From the article:
"Fax.com's Katz called the practice "blackmail and extortion," among other choice words. On the other hand, Fax.com didn't exactly help its cause when it sent 1,634 junk faxes in one week in 2001 to the Washington, D.C., law firm of Covington & Burling, resulting in yet another successful lawsuit against the company."
Wow, let's assume that each fax page takes about 6-seconds (because you want high quality) and that each fax consists of a cover page and one page of content. Further that each fax transmission requires a 3-second handshake - 15 seconds phone time per fax. That means that 15 * 1634 = 24510 seconds or 7.8 hours of tied up phone lines. Yeah, if someone, over the course of the wee decided to tie up one of my phone lines for an entire workday, I'd be upset too.
If it were actually legal, there would be at least six other companies doing the same thing. With all that traffic, it would be hard for anyone to get a legitimate fax through.
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass.
It just shows how out of touch Forbes is with technology and what people think.
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Someone really needs to post a list of Forbes fax numbers at their different offices so we can all start trying to sell them penis enlargement pills.
64,583 faxes later they'll start to appreciate what we mean.
I regularly get faxes at 2 AM on my home number, on a line that hasn't been used for faxes for 5 years!!! So I hooked up a fax machine to see who was sending them, but the remove requests don't work and there are to many to try and stop them...
How are they going to retract this? Are they going to follow this up with an "It was just satire" announcement, or an announcement that the responsible parties have been sacked? Any bets?
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
I mean, really, they're feeling sorry because a company that makes money by doing something illegal is going out of business?
Do you really need reason for beer? Wingman Brewers
At least from a techno-libertarian sort of perspective, isn't this what we're looking for? These stupid junk fax-ers are imposing a huge cost on buisnesses and therefore on everyone else indirectly. Instead of using government time and money to investigate, private citizens did the footwork, with the promise of a reward from the 'offenders.' And the whole thing went through small-claims type courts which kept legal costs down.
I'm not shedding any tears over Fax.com.
Er... no, I'd say that was actually the point of the law. It's like the cockroches are shocked at the idea of having to scatter when the light comes on. "But-but-but... but the dark was so NICE!"
Fine by me. Speak up loudly, guys, it makes you easier to target and squish. Fax marketer, meet boot. Boot, fax marketer. I'm sure you'll get along famously.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Forbes doesn't get their profits from journalistic credibility, they get them from advertising dollars, and the most basic thing they sell to advertisers is circulation numbers. In the long run perhaps articles like these will erode their readers' respect and hurt their income, but that's in the distant future. For now, they may have just discovered that putting geek flamebait on the internet is a great way to get a lot of page views in a hurry.
Linking to DeCSS is breaking the law.
What were those 2600 punks whining about? They broke the law, they got punished.
The point is, the writer at Forbes explicitly says that the law is Draconian. These business type idiots (not all, but _these_) don't give a rats flying fuck ass about consumer's rights and they are either too dumb or too caught up in praising each other's dicks to realize how stupid some of their viewpoints are and how obvious they make it that they don't give a shit about anything except keeping their own power.
You must be kidding. It seemed heavily slanted towards agreeing and being sympathetic towards the fax-spammers. It's so disgustingly biased that I fear for your critical thinking skills and wonder what mods where thinking when modding you insightful.
The article is not necessarily defending fax.com or the other junkers, but condemning everyone who is so quick to file frivolous lawsuits that just end up costing the taxpayers.
My lack of God, it's Trotsky!
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 scary second scenario is a cordinated legal attack against a corporation by filing a seperate lawsuit in each and every jurisdication and in each and every court the company does business in AT THE SAME TIME!
I was never a spammer, but I used to run a advertising supported newsletter of humor and inspirational stories that was faxed to local business five days a week. Each newsletter was one page long, and faxed in the dead of the night.
Everyone we faxed the newsletter too subscribed by placing their business card in one of our card bowls placed at restaurants around town. We didn't offer a prize or anything else with the subscription, so we weren't tricking anyone into anything.
At the bottom on the newsletter were unsubscribe instructions: write unsubscribe on this newsletter and fax it back.
Everyday we'd get unsubscribe requests, and everyday we'd process them. Many times someone would call from a business and unsubscribe one day, and then a couple days later a receptionist or something who sat near the fax machine and depended upon us for her daily chuckle would call wondering what happened to us, and we'd resubscribe them. Then, a week or two later someone from the business call and unsubscribe again, ad nasuem.
One day, without any notice, I was sued in small claims court by a local attorney who claimed that I was sending him unsolicited faxes, and as such owed him $500 for each of three faxes that he'd received unsolicited from me. The faxes weren't unsolicitied, and I had recorded in my files that someone from his office had called in to request the fax. Also in the files were notes detailing that someone had canceled, then restarted, then canceled the subscription of the course of a week and a half.
I took this information with me to court, but the judge explained that unfortunately his hands were tied and he was bound by the statute that required that I pay $500 for each of the three faxes -- no matter what the opinion of the court might have been about the excessiveness of the award.
That night, I removed every attorney and legal aide off the list, and within a year I totally ceased operation.
danec. http://www.carlsoncarlson.com/dane/
I agree with the submitter, Forbes standing up for a junk fax company seems quite contradictory to their usual position. Forbes is decidedly against the "nanny state," preferring to believe that people ought to be able to educate themselves and make informed consumer choices. Forbes is generally not in favor of outright fraud or theft (which is what junk faxes are).
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
My brother who works for a hedge fund tells me how they have bought articles, not ads, articles in forbes. So perhaps fax.com gave forbes some money to show both sides of the argument. Not that it should help them. Fax.com broke the law, the case was so obvious the higher courts refuse to hear it, fax.com keeps getting sued for breaking the law.
Its terrible that fax.com is all but broke. "At its peak, the company boasted of a database containing 16 million fax numbers and 30 million "untouched" fax numbers, and that it could blast out as many as 3 million faxes a day on behalf of Merrill Lynch (nyse: MER - news - people ), Mail Boxes Etc. (now a unit of United Parcel Service (nyse: UPS - news - people )) and other customers. To find fax numbers, the company used a sophisticated automated "war dialing" system that randomly called and recorded millions of fax numbers."
What a sleezy business.
Right now Forbes.com is being bombarded by unsolicited requests for that article by us. :) Who knows, maybe they have to pay for their bandwidth. Let's see how they like it when they get cost money by people they have no interest in.
They call the lawsuits an "unintended consequence" of the 1991 law. But it seems to me that the problems fax.com is having are exactly the intended consequence. Exactly what other consequence were they talking about?
TCP: Why the Internet is full of SYN.
MOD THE CHILD UP!
Yes, you want to accidentally misuse this: fax.com's fax number submission page
... sufficiently so that when they sent me an issue, then an invoice (both unsolicited), I wrote "CANCEL" on the bill and sent it in. I've gotten 7 issues so far, and written "CANCEL" on two invoices. And yes, I mailed them in.
I wouldn't count on Forbes getting a clue any time soon.
> My comment can be quoted whenever, wherever, so long as you bloody well provide attribution! >
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Junk faxing is an illegal business. Junk faxers are in violation of the law. They are being paid by a third party to present me with advertisements using my paper, my toner, my electricity, and my phone service-- basically, they're making money at my expense. Since that's the case, I have absolutely no problem with making some money at their expense, and in fact I am currently pursuing a civil action against one of Fax.com's customers, who sent me one junk fax about every two weeks for almost all of 2003.
The very thought that you are attempting to coax sympathy from your readers for people engaged in an illegal business is laughable, and so is the sense of indignation over consumers getting fed up and using the legal system to fight back.
Drug dealing is another illegal business where some people are trying to make money in violation of the law and at the expense of other people. Are you sympathetic toward drug dealers? Are you indignant when they are penalized in accordance with the law?
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~Philly