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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'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...
Forbes.com
28 West 23rd Street
11th Floor
New York, NY 10010
Phone (212) 366-8900
Fax (212) 366-8804
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.
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 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
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.
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/
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!