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Spammer Sentencing Guidelines Released

Posted by timothy on from the nothing-too-much dept.

jfengel writes "The United States Sentencing Commission has issued its guidelines for punishment under the CAN-SPAM act (PDF, beginning on page 155). You can get 5 years for a second offense or if you're spamming for fraud, child porn or other felony, or 1 to 3 years depending on how much spam you send. If Congress doesn't say otherwise, it goes into effect November 1."

5 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. Two Words: by PeeAitchPee · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Unenforceable overseas.

    1. Re:Two Words: by gnu-generation-one · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "Two Words: Unenforceable overseas. (Score:5, Insightful)"

      Three words: "Spammers are American".

  2. Sentencing in general by Corp186 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Lately I've been thinking about sentencing, and I see people complain about how it's unfair that non-violent crimes get just as much time as, say, a man plowing over another person at 90 mph. And then we see the CAN-SPAM act, and think that these people should get MORE time than that. It makes me wonder if our view of sentencing being linearly or otherwise correlated to the aspect of the crime is wrong.

  3. We hate spammers *that* much? by haxeh · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I don't know what kind of email accounts you all have, but I rarely get spam, and when I do, the filters pick it up. Sure it's annoying, but it's really not that big of a deal. We need better filtering, if anything, not 'better' legislation. I can't understand how the same people who want to keep the internet free of government influence are supporting laws to crucify spammers. Maybe after we tackle the spam problem, we can lock up those damn haxorz for life and censor all that indecent content out there. And, actually, let's do it for the whole world, not just the US.

  4. Re:Worst effect on the least offender... by Allen+Zadr · · Score: 5, Insightful
    While my original post was about a kid who Emails the entire internet about the lemonade stand he's putting up next week (or some other innocuous example), there's another issue I see as well...

    So imagine when someone's Gramma, running a virus infected computer on (for argument's sake) Comcast, get's arrested and convicted for spamming.

    She goes to Computer-Repair-Center and fixes her computer. But they don't put all the most recent Microsoft patches. 10 days later, she's arrested for spamming, again.

    Is she the victim, or the perpetrator? Clearly the SPAM is being sent from her computer.

    Any jury will see that she is not actively involved, but she is enabling the actions of the SPAMmers. Is CAN-SPAM written in a way to clearly differentiate gramma from a SPAM company?

    --
    Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.