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Ohio Law Could Send Spammers To Jail
ej0c writes "We in Ohio are set to save you from Spam. The legislature, with AOL's help, passed a tough anti-spam bill (Reuters). Spam in Ohio, and you'll be in the can for 6 months, with fines of $25,000 per violation, or $2 to $8 per e-mail. Text of the Act."
I'm finally getting the other folks in my office to use Thunderbird as an email client, the big selling point was spam filtering. Trends like this may make such FOSS evangelism harder, since people (esp. the lawyers) can just rely on the law to protect them rather than go to the trouble of trying software that didn't come with the machine.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Scenario... innocent dumb user has their computer hijacked and made part of a spam botnet.
Did they just spam? Are they now off to jail?
I am not being a troll, but for all the known spammers, there are so many unknown, who live in other countries. How is a state law going to prosecute these people? How/Will the law be implemented. This remains to be seen.
Maybe this is a warped way to improve the conditions of America's prisons. Once they're filled with non-violent offenders like spammers, drug-users, and copyright violators, there will be less incidence of assault and rape behind bars. We'll leave that for the outside.
Additional civil cases may be personally filed with the state over spam. This is stating that the attorney general has no judical power in the courts of Ohio. Such as the normal separtation of state and federal branches and laws. If the federal goverment fails to honor the CAN-SPAM act. You can still seek compensation through civil action through Ohio court.
Good news for me, however it is hard to say if this will help. I can see ISP rates going up due to increased labor with judical action requesting for records.
If you read the Ohio law as posted in the link, it states that an offender must "knowingly" break the law!
If this had been a law designed to send copyright infringers to jail for six months, I doubt we'd be hearing the many 'hell, yeah!' responses posted so far. We should all be uneasy about 'tough' laws which can send people to jail by criminalizing online-specific types of behavior.
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I'm not claiming that copyright infringment and spamming are equivalent activities, but I'll bet many of the same arguments people would use for criminalization and tough sentencing in one case are applicable to the other.
There are laws out there already against fraud and deceptive advertising, just as there are (old, established) laws against copyright infringement. We only start running into trouble by trying to 'update' these laws for the internet age (think DeCSS, DMCA, etc.). IMO, little good comes out of these 'tough updates'.
And so I say "tech solutions for tech problems" and keep the government and courts out of it as much as possible
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
By allowing a private right of action for individuals, you get some of the smaller-time spammers.
There is one spammer, AVTech Direct (Avtech Direct 22647 Ventura Blvd. Suite 374 Woodland Hills, CA 91364), that I and about 10 others filed suit against for spamming. A $5000 small claims judgement won't get them, but if they had 100 or 1000 judgments for $5,000 each for spamming, they may not spam anymore.
Fight Spammers!
Here's what I'm yapping about:"(F)(1) The attorney general or an electronic mail service provider that is injured by a violation of this section may bring a civil action in an appropriate court of common pleas of this state seeking relief from any person whose conduct violated this section. The civil action may be commenced at any time within one year of the date after the act that is the basis of the civil action."
We have that same (or damn close to it) language in our state law. Notice the word "may", that's the key. If the AG chooses not to he doesn't have to do shit. He can let it all flush away. They should have put that word as "must", which would have mandated action. As it is, this law is no better than Iowa code 714E that we've had for a while now and not one case has been put to the measure, sadly.
I predict no real help from this "feel-good" legislation.
That is in fact totally correct. If "Joe Trailerpark" is faced with a consequence along the lines of a 6 month prison stretch then he's going to take that into account when deciding whether he really wants to make that fast cash and certainly it sounds harsh. That's why it works. Is Joe Trailerpark a "criminal" though? Probably not but that's exactly why this could be effective.
I have a law enforcement background (8 years of MP work in the army followed by another 5 years in civilian law enforcement) and this reminds me of something I learned many years ago in one of the endless ongoing training courses I sat through. The subject was capital punishment as a deterrant but the basic idea still fits.
We went over a series of case studies with interviews that clearly showed that the death penalty was not in any way a deterrant to the people who had consented to be interviewed. They either never considered it or the idea that they might be caught and sentenced to death for doing what they did was in no way a factor when they made the decision to commit the crime.
When another series of interviews were done with people who agreed to discuss the death penalty most of the respondent stated that they would consider the possiblity of being put to death a big factor in whether they would commit a murder regardless of the circumstances. They also were very much under the illusion that having a death penalty in place helped reduce the number of murders.
Basically it comes down to the mindsets of criminals being very different from the mindsets of the average person. A harsh sentence deters those who in most cases wouldn't do it to begin with and barely registers with the people who would. In Joe Trailerparks case finding out whether he decides to spam in the face of prison time will be pretty revealing. Some of them, probably a majority of them will be deterred from doing it. Others, probably far fewer, regardless of how harsh the penalty may be will do it anyway.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Doesn't really matter. He is from the other party, and therefore stupid and wrong. If Jesus Christ himself had run (Democrat, of course. Jesus was into helping the poor and not getting involved in any fights.) he would have lost, same as Kerry, and been decried for all his ignorant beliefs that don't fit the harsh new world of ours.
Instead of arguing about whether a legislative or technical solution will work better, why don't we do both? Obviously Ohio spammers can simply move to Jersey or something, but this is a strong precedent that hopefully everyone else follows. Also, I've seen some comments about SPAM laws not being enforced. Well, if the DA can get actual prison time and the politicians tell the DA that anti-SPAM is a priority then maybe law enforcement *will* bother finding and prosecuting these cretins. Why would a DA bother now if they know they'll have to fight for months and the spammer will walk away with a 25k fine, which the spammer will make up in a month?
The technical ideas are being proposed, and we are learning about which ones are promising (note to M$, byte me). This process will take 5+ years to codify into some IETF stadard and get deployed in some meaningful way. In the meantime we can let our politicians do something useful by making the spammers we can catch pay in a big way (with community input I hope). This means prison time; just like embezzlement must carry a prison sentence because the financial incentives are so great and the chance of getting caught in time are small enough to be enticing. That is the *deterrent* factor. The malicious grin we get from this law is the revenge factor of punishment. This law has both.
While the materials for the flyers and other physical junkmail left on my property are paid for by someone else, *I* have to pay to get rid of them.
No one is paying for my time however trivial that may be to pick up the trash around my front door. I also pay for my trash/recycle service to haul the stuff away. And finally, when I get spam, nobody is alerted to the fact that I may not be home, since spam doesn't collect on the front doorknob.
Should I send a bill to the junk-mailers for hiring the neighbor kid to keep my doorstep clean?
What law would I be breaking if I had a couple of tons of scrap paper delivered to your front lawn? Seems to me this is the same thing leaflet-leavers are doing, just to a lessor degree.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
...is that if and when spam is ever eliminated, it would mean the end of Spamusement. http://www.spamusement.com/ I actually look through my spam to find the weirdest subject headings to send to the guy who makes the cartoon. It's the best use for spam I've yet to see.
"I'd rather stay here with all the madmen, for I'm quite content they're all as sane as me..." ~ David Bowie
Before drug prohibition, people weren't falling victim to to skyrocketing crime rates due to a violent black market. And, we weren't forking over billions to keep non-violent drug offenders in jail. We also didn't have the highest ratio of inmates per population in the world. And, we actually had rights as individuals to protect us from overzealous government.
It certainly isn't that way anymore.
Of course, all that violent crime and loss of human rights is worth it, when you can keep a peaceful individual from smoking weed on the street corner.