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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."
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.
-_-
Forbes Sympathizes with Poor
I totally misread *that* title.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
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.
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.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
What an ass. slubove@forbes.com if you want to send this guy comments - a shame there isn't a easy to use fax number to send your thoughts - but e-mail can do. You can see his pic here: http://www.mayocommunications.com/1016mcq_lubove.j pg
Pity the lawbreaking travel agent or car dealer whose fax advertisement happens to appear on a fax machine belonging to one Ben Livingston of Seattle, Wash.
"What's happened is there's a whole cadre of lawyers who want easy money..."
And spammers/junk faxers don't?
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...
So in your universe does Forbes usually champion the folks who are sick of intrusive marketing, instead of catering to the mindset that capitalists and business owners should be free to do anything they want to try to make money?
It's different here.
Yeah I'd say those are the most likely scenarios...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
People should just stop suing junk faxers and start putting them in jail. Advertising should pay for the media it comes in through, not steal from it. Junk faxing, and spam, is theft, which is a crime, and should be dealt with as a criminal case (which in many jurisdictions can be brought to court even by average citizens).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
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.
Get your phone number removed here.
Does anyone know if this actually works?
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?
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
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.
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).
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
But if I am indeed selling penis enlargement pills, then I'd better be careful that I've got written permission from you.
You could argue that what they were really opposed to was the kind of legalized extortion that a lot of small businesses get exposed to. What they failed to mention was that most businesses exposed to that kind of situation have it happen through no fault of their own, whereas fax.com brought it on themselves.
Duh.
1) To further humiliate the businesses, Livingston posts all the court documents and letters he sends, in which he typically demands a standard $500 fine, or $1,500 if the fax was sent knowingly. In all, he says he's collected about $6,000 in three years.
2)"What's happened is there's a whole cadre of lawyers who want easy money," says Wolfe & Wyman attorney Stuart Wolfe, whose Irvine, Calif., firm is defending several clients accused of sending junk faxes.
Given the limited $500/fax fines, and the admitted total of $6000 over three years of work earned by Livingston, just what business (even legal) would attempt to exploit such tiny earnings potential? I mean, who is Wolfe (and the reporter) kidding? You want to argue free speech rights for fax and email spammers, fine - fight it out in the Supreme Court and let the chips fall. But that argument is so ridiculous that I can't believe the reporter included it with a straight face. Never mind the fact enforcing financial penalties against civil wrongdoing is how tort law is supposed to work.
(shakes head in astonishment at the absurdity of it all)
--Maynard
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?
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
My point was that there would be a heck of a lot more than just 6 people doing this. I did not mean to imply that they are anything higher than the slime that eats away at the rust under the rain gutters of the house somebody built with their own hands.
The cost to the receiver are tremendous. The cost to the sender, not so much so by an order of magnitude. As such, and without any form of technological prevention, the legal arena is the proper forum for stopping a flood. The same thing happened with autodialers. If it wasn't for legal preventative measures, autodialers would have stopped the telephone from being a useful method of conducting business and managing your private life.
Exploring the potential economics of the situation does nothing to elevate these people's status above the kind of spore fungus clinging feverently, despite the efforts of a professional, to the back of a well-respected but elderly companion animal.
The ______ Agenda
Why do people read Forbes? There are good financial publications out there who actually have a clue - the Financial Times, The Ecomomist, Janes Defense Weekly, all tell it like it really is. Any business who takes what Forbes writes seriously is going to find itself in the position of Boeing. As the FT said last week:
Boeing's 737, with almost 4,000 planes in the air, is the most successful commercial airliner in history. But the company's largest and riskiest project was the development of the 747 jumbo jet. When a non-executive director asked about the expected return on investment, he was brushed off: there had been some studies, he was told, but the manager concerned couldn't remember the results.
It took only 10 years for Boeing to prove me wrong in asserting that its market position in civil aviation was impregnable. The decisive shift in corporate culture followed the acquisition of its principal US rival, McDonnell Douglas, in 1997. The transformation was exemplified by the CEO, Phil Condit. The company's previous preoccupation with meeting "technological challenges of supreme magnitude" would, he told Business Week, now have to change. "We are going into a value-based environment where unit cost, return on investment and shareholder return are the measures by which you'll be judged. That's a big shift."
The company's senior executives agreed to move from Seattle, where the main production facilities were located, to Chicago. More importantly, the more focused business reviewed risky investments in new civil projects with much greater scepticism. The strategic decision was to redirect resources towards projects for the US military that involved low financial risk. Chicago had the advantage of being nearer to Washington, where government funds were dispensed.
So Boeing's civil orderbook today lags that of Airbus, the European consortium whose aims were not initially commercial but which has, almost by chance, become a profitable business. And the strategy of getting close to the Pentagon proved counter- productive: the company got too close to the Pentagon, and faced allegations of corruption. And what was the market's verdict on the company's performance in terms of unit cost, return on investment and shareholder return? Boeing stock, $48 when Condit took over, rose to $70 as he affirmed the commitment to shareholder value; by the time of his enforced resignation in December 2003 it had fallen to $38.
This is the internet. You are allowed to say "ass."
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
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/
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
"Both sides of the issue"... I know people today, most especially those who consider themseves journalists, think that presenting both "sides" of an issue results in a "balanced" article.
But it is not balanced. A real journalist doesn't mutely present both "sides". A journalist also has to judge, and present, the motivations and past behaviors of the people involved as well. All sides are NOT equal. A journalist is not a debate moderator.
Evolution theory is not the same as creationism. Creationism is not science, it is religion.
Corporate sponsored anti-environmentalist screed is NOT the same as a global scientific consensus. The motivations of each side are wildly different, and should not be given equal weight.
People who believe tax cuts are always beneficial are not as believable as pay-as-you-go fiscal conservatives: The tax cutters have twenty years of debt accumulation and other after-cut hangovers undercutting their position. Presenting them as equally believable as a pay-your-bills economist is misleading and does not serve the reader well.
Presenting pro-war neocons' arguments, long after they were proven farcical, as equivalent to those who have actual on-the-ground experience in political matters is not fair, nor is it balanced.
Life is not a football game! Everything is not an two-sided matchup of two noble teams!
Presenting the pro-Fax.com side as roughly believable as the anti-fax.com "side" is disingenous on any level. It is not journalism; at worst it is Machiavellan manipulation of perception. In this instance, it rehabilitates the fax.commers as underdog victims of liberal trial lawyering bloodsuckers in the eyes of the readership of Forbes.
A journalist has the responsiblity of weighing the credibility of the sources of arguments. And to inform the readership of the fact.
Sometimes there just isn't a balance! Sometimes one side is just wrong. And a journalist must say why.
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.
I take the original fax and tape it to a few blank sheets of paper. On the blank sheets I write something like "remove me from your list". Anyways, insert the first page, hit paper feed and tape it to the last page so it forms a loop. Dial the offending number and let it run all night. Kills their ink, paper and phone line all in one. It may not be effective but it makes me feel better.
Stranded.org
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.
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.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
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!
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
You don't see Forbes.COM publishing articles saying "pity the poor crack-dealers" now do you?
Actually you do
Forbs ran a "pitty the poor bud-growers" article a few months ago: link here
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
MOD THE CHILD UP!
The common factor being that they are British publications. One could ask why anyone reads any US publication given that they are mostly devoted to reporting 'character' and 'personality' stories completely ignoring any political issues of any substance.
If CNN were reporting in Iran today they would have reduced the power struggle there to a series of stories on who had the best looking turban.
The FTs comments on Boeing are right on point. Boeing was once a great company, then they stopped being in the business of making planes and started to be about squeezing contracts out of the US federal government. What is most astonishing about this change in direction is the time it took place - right at the end of the cold war when it was pretty obvious to anyone but the Boeing CEO that military spending would be winding down.
Sic transit gloria. If you read the decline and fall of the great powers what is astonishing is the fact that while eventual decline is inevitable there is no reason why the Roman empire could not with better management have survived a couple more centuries, the fall of the great powers was usually the result of hubris, of stopping the work of empire building and started waving flags, declaring empire days and generally lording it over everyone else.
I believe that the greatest threat to the pre-eminent position of the US today is the folk who have adopted the Condit strategy, forget how the US became great - by leading the alliance of the free world and instead start lording it over folk. Forbes is merely one of the organ grinders who are playing the tune here.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
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.
Cry me a river. They run an 'assembly line' sending unsolicited faxes, which is (I believe) a civil offense. The appropriate remedy is for the victims to file civil or small claims suits.
If certain attorneys are making it easy to do that, then good! They need to find a business model that allows them to be profitable without breaking the law, and they won't have to worry about going out of business.
'I ain't a liar, baby, and I ain't proud I just want what I'm not allowed.' -- Violent Femmes, 36-24-36
Crack is not equal to marijuana. Weed grows in most every climate, even a closet with a lamp. It's also cheaper, less addictive than caffiene and the worst thing it's users are prone to do is get up, walk to Plaid Pantry, and buy some munchies (I live across the street from a Plaid, I see it all the time. Granted, I live in Portland where it seems everybody just gets high and goes to bed at 9PM the way everything just shuts down at night. You can walk down the middle of Burnside Street (the main drag through town) at midnight on most weeknights and not get hit). If anything, marijuana supports the service economy. You will never get mugged in a back alley for marijuana money.
Help us build a better map!
Ashcroft's priorities:
1> Supressing threats to Republican hegemony
2> Raising money
3> Distracting Fatherland Security from Saudis in favor of Liberals
4> Could you repeat the question?
--
make install -not war
Here's a copy of my letter to Forbes after reading that outrageous article:
For you to mourn Fax.com or even imply there was *anything* unfair about their demise is completely outrageous. To even suggest they have a 1st Amendment right to send junk faxes is preposterous.
Let's talk about the First Amendment. If the cops come by your party on a Saturday night and tell you to turn it down or they'll cite you for disturbing the peace, I'll bet you a billion dollars that no judge will accept your argument that the First Amendment allows you to play your music as loud as you want late at night in a residential area. And you're just being loud. You're not doing doughnuts on your neighbor's lawn or puking in his bushes. But it's well established that a city can make and enforce a law that says your free speech rights stop at a certain decibel level in the evening hours.
But what fax.com was doing was like not only playing their music too loud, but puking in the bushes too.
They claimed to have 46 million fax numbers (16 million in general use and 30 million "untouched"). If they sent each of those numbers just one junk fax, and we can agree that paper and toner costs per fax were 1.5 cents (half penny a sheet for paper, 1 cent a page for ink/toner), the cumulative paper and ink/toner cost of that one junk fax per machine would be $690,000.
Now imagine there wasn't a TCPA to outlaw junk faxes. Imagine there were no activists who could sue, no fines the FCC could impose, no class action causes to attract the sleazy lawyers.
Do you think you'd just get one junk fax? You'd get 5 a day, even on weekends and holidays. Cumulatively across 46 million fax machines, that 5 a day would eat up $3.45 million *DAILY* in paper and ink/toner... over $1.25 BILLION a year.
That's $1.25 ***billion*** (you know, with a B) in printing costs that the fax marketers wouldn't have to pay. Instead everyone they were faxing would have to pay a share of it. That's 83.9 billion pieces of junk mail being delivered postage due every year and the recipients have NO choice about paying.
For Forbes to do anything but celebrate the demise of Fax.com or support the TCPA shows a complete departure from any semblance of logic or morality.
You can consider me an ex-subscriber when it comes time for me to renew this year.
Start a happiness pandemic
They sent over a thousand faxes to a single company within a week. I'm more suprised that someone hasn't gone postal on them.
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!
Don't forget, just breaking the law isn't enough. You have use breaking the law as a method of advertising. If you are not making money on the deal then Forbes will not write an article decrying the injustist of them actually enforcing the law when you are just trying to advertise.
How about spray painting advertisements on Junk Faxerss' homes? Or beat the crap out of them and then give them a flyer. Remember, you are a respectible businessman and as long as you are trying to make money you can do no wrong.
This signature used to contain a cute kitty virus with ansii art. Please set the slashdot editors on fire. Thank you
The above post is overrated. If they knew anything about fax.com, they'd know that fax.com recently (within the past two years) wardialed the university of washington medical center, tying up their phone lines.
I'd call tying up a hospital's phone lines to be VERY life threatening.
I used to volunteer there. If you tied up the phone lines, there was no way a nurse was going to be able to page a doctor for an urgent patient situation. Again, very life threatening.
"Would you rather have a playstation addicted dork wearing a star wars t-shirt?"
It's the profit motive of the spammers that needs to be attacked, and additional laws are unlikely to help a lot. The more we make their businesses unprofitable, the less we might see of them.