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Siblings Guilty of Spam Felony, Partner Acquitted
saikou writes "According to AP Story (via SF Chronicle), brother and sister spammers just got convicted 'in the nation's first felony prosecution of distributors of spam,' while third suspect was acquitted. Jurors moved on to figuring out appropriate punishment (please, please, please give them some jail time. Pretty please). More spam cases for Virgina?"
Is the editor seriously advocating jail time for spamming? I'm all for punishment, but I think taking every piece of property and dime of wealth is going to make a much bigger impact than sending them to a place that fosters the criminal mentality rather than reforming it. Reserve jail for hardcore felons that perform a physically harmful crime to someone else.
except in this case, the punishment is more for the fraud they committed, rather than just the presence of unsolicited junk mail. you advertise a product for $X and hundreds of people buy your product and it doesn't do Y as you promised, that's fraud. And that's probably why the punishments are as harsh as they are.
But we do give jail time to thieves. The spammers are stealing a portion of the bandwidth that I am paying for.
On one hand, I see 9 years in jail for sending nuisance email as excessive punishment, but on the other, they were making money committing fraud.
Since, however, they were tried simply on sending spam and NOT fradulent sales, I find this very disturbing. If the law they were being tried on was sending junk mail, does the content of the mail actually matter under this law? Why would the judge allow that information to be even considered?
It's kind of like trying someone for stealing a car, and saying it's a worse crime because he had a crack rock in his pocket. Unless the law stipulated stronger punishment for having drugs in a stolen car, it should be left out of the case.
Yes we need to crack down on online frauds, spam, worms, et al as much as the next guy but I really don't think that sending spam should carry (roughly) the same penalty as a rape conviction. Looking at these sentences our court is either saying "Sending spam is a horrific a crime as rape" or "Rape is no more worse than sending spam."
15 years is the sentence handed out in a rape & sexual battery conviction involving a minor. This doesn't sit right.What about theft? The total costs of spam are enormous, even without scams. Many, many millions of dollars per year.They suck up bandwidth and disk space, and waste millions of person-hours each year that could have bene used for something productive.
They steal bandwidth. They steal disk space. They steal our time, and time costs dearly. You can't replace it.
So until you can find a way to force them to pay restitution to everyone they've robbed, don't try to paint them as harmless.
Now add in scammers, pornographers, and all the other crap, and they deserve much, much worse than they're getting. What, you don't think porn matters? When it gets into my house, in front of me, or my wife, or my kids, it damn well matters. If you try to walk into my house and expose us to porn, you might very well leave in an ambulance if you aren't awfully quick on your feet.
How about another cliche?
In one month alone, Jaynes received 10,000 credit card orders, each for $39.95, for the processor.
In other words, stupid is as stupid does.
10,000 people fell for it. Isn't that rather depressing? Ok, we probably saw vote counts for the election and wondered how so many people could be so wrong, but 10,000 people trying to order something for $40 advertised in spam, that tells you this isn't exactly a nation of rocket scientists.
You can't seriously fight spam until people stop being so damn stupid.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Rape is generally accepted as being a horrible crime - everyone knows it's horrible, and normal people just don't do it. Basically if someone is committing rape, it's a good indication that they're eithor mentally unstable or otherwise are not considering the results of their action. The difference between 15 years in prision and like 50 years for rape would be pretty minimal, and keeping it shorter allows for some chance of the criminal becoming a useful member of society at some point in the future.
Spamming is a non-violent but financially costly crime. Since it's never been a criminal act before, the people doing it don't have an innate feeling that they're doing something wrong - they don't understand that society is going to *put them in prision* if they're caught spamming.
The absolute best thing that could happen here would be for the judge to rule that the spammers get FIFTEEN YEARS IN PRISION (quietly, under breath: with possibility of parole in 6 months with good behaviour). That will give us a headline that will scare some of the other spammers, but will wreck the fewest people's lives.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
On the other hand... arbitrarily guaging sentences such as this just for the fear and shock value it will inflict on other would-be spammers is a negligent policy decision. Any sentence issued by the court should be meant to be carried out in full. If there are mitigating circumstances, that's where suspended sentence and parole should come into play.
I'm no fan of spam, but do we really need a special statute to deal with it? The people in this article used spam as a means to commit fraud. They should be tried for fraud. I don't care whether the fraud was an elaborate confidence scheme committed by a team of clever matchstick men going door-to-door pretending to take donations for the LDS, or some shmoe sitting in his parents' basement playing evercrack with one hand while lazily sending off spam with the other.(There's some nasty imagery in there somewhere) Fraud == Fraud... plain and simple. Spam is about pissing me off by filling my inbox with crap every day. What have I lost, really, by experiencing the email version of what I do every day when I come home from work.... sorting through the pile of mail trying to see if there is -Anything- even worth opening.
If some shmuck sends me email with "fraudulent and untraceable routing information," is my liberty affronted? If so, why?... because I can't easily reply? Of course I'll grant that spam is annoying, but so are infomercials... and calls from political parties... and people who drive neon yellow sports cars. Should we next tack on some fines for fraud committed while driving an ugly sports car?
Why waste time litigating the relatively meaningless incidentals when our public servants could focus on the core criminal act, resolve the issue, and move on to the next case in a more timely fashion?
It is?
In discussions like this, you have to start by establishing what the value/benefit of the prison system is. Is it to punish the criminals? Of course. But why?
Punishment in its own right won't undo many of the crimes that carry jail sentences. It's simply a sad fact that once a murder, rape, or other abuse has been committed, it's done, and nothing can change that. All you can do is try to prevent it happening again, by:
In the first case, you're talking about locking someone up for as long as it takes to mend their ways, potentially indefinitely. In the second, you're talking about providing a sufficient disincentive to prevent others feeling it's worth it to commit the crime.
In either respect, of course 9 years is far too long. These people aren't a danger to society; they're a pain in the arse. To encourage others not to be pains in the arse, a custodial sentence may be warranted, but throwing someone inside for 3-6 months should provide a sufficient kick up the backside for a first offence (on top of fining them 100% of the takings they made through the spamming, of course).
Something like 9 years is enough to destroy a life and make someone coming out turn to far darker things just to survive, which is not a productive use of the prison system from any point of view. Save long jail terms for the crimes so heinous that what we really want to do is lock someone up and throw away the key, where that scale of disincentive is required to inhibit further crimes by others, and keeping the perp off the streets for that long is necessary for public safety.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.