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Virginia Court Overturns Spammer Convictions
EvilStein writes "CNN reports that "A judge dismissed a felony spamming conviction that had been called one of the first of its kind, saying he found no "rational basis" for the verdict and wondering if jurors were confused by technical evidence." Legal groundwork being set? Will other convicted spammers now have grounds for an appeal?"
Please take a class or read a book on the American judicial system. This is a decision in a state court related to a specific case.
They all willingly subscribed to my penis enlargement newsletter!
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
The land of incest can be warchalked as a safehaven for spammers as well!
My digital rights don't need management.
This is Virginia, not WEST Virginia.
How much ya wanna bet the judge is subscribing to the spammers' services and is being blackmailed...?
</joke>
What gives? Can we bring back the old content?
The first is that it is a terrible injustice that these spammers won't spend 9 years in jail and have to pay $7,500 for each spam that was received. The second is that this judge is stepping way over the bounds of interpreting and applying the law and is (as it is commonly referred to) "legistlating from the bench" by declaring the punishment to not fit the crime.
The third way to look at this is that Free Speech has won the day. To this way of thinking, another attempt to squash the little guy with a big mouth has failed.
I believe it was Voltaire who said, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
Of course he was also known to say, "A witty saying proves nothing."
But your honor, they have the option of cliking 'unsubscribe'. That way I know for sure that its a valid email id and i promise never to send another email to that id and also not sell it to my associates who are selling viagra
fuvoo: watch something
Is that the land of the free has a government and judicial system that sides against the common good when it comes to patents, and sides against the common good when it comes to spammers. Ironically, the reasoning behind the first (the government gets confused by technical babble) is applied against the people for the second (the people are confused by technical babble).
Did the spammer bribe the judge with rolexes and penis enlargement pills?
I say we get the email address of the judge who ruled this and make it available to all of the fine businesses who make me aware of their products all day every day.
San Francisco Photographers
Commercial speech, in this case spam, does not receive any sort of absolute or near absolute freedom. The Supreme Court has ruled it is not the same as political speech and can be restricted when appropriate.
Does the judge have a large enough p3N15.
Perhaps he needs some extra advice on helping this condition.
I'm sure he needs a M0rtg4g3 or a L04N.
Will he need pr0n to excercise his new larger p3ni5.
There's a very interesting video on the legal
aspects of this case available at
www.spamconference.org
You've Got Jail. Some First Hand Observations from the Jeremy Jaynes Spam Trial
Jon Praed, Founding Partner, Internet Law Group
In a nutshell, they convicted Jaynes' accomplice
based on the money trail and it wasn't all that
convincing. The evidence ruled inadmissable was
convincing, but not the evidence used to convict.
The person whose conviction was overturned was the 'accomplice', Jessica DeGroot. The judge upheld the conviction of her brother, Jeremy Jaynes, who is said to have led the operation. He will indeed be remaining a guest of the state for the next few years.
Now we can impose the death penality instead of the meager fine and short jail time.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Out of curiosity, how/why can judges overturn convictions? Isn't the whole point of having a jury so that one biased/stupid person doesn't have the ability to single-handedly find guilty/acquit someone?
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Of course, since McCain-Feingold, political speech isn't all that free anymore either...
The case will be overturned when it's revealed that Judge Thomas Horne received promises of several million dollars from an anonymous Nigerian benefactor in exchange for his help clearing a bank account. It's easy for us to look down on this sort of thing, but we need to realize that he needed the money because his wife left him because of he was being emailed by hot college coeds all the time. He tried to make it up to her by increasing the size of his sma1l p3n.i.s with he.rßal v1aggraa, but she left him before he got the drugs. Since then, he's had to remortgaged his home to afford prescription drugs like v4llium and viccodañ, but he really couldn't make ends meet.
The headline is wrong. Only one conviction was
overturned.
Jaynes, the perpetrator, had his appeal denied.
He's the major actor, and the only one that was
sentence to hard time in the first place.
Lawyers are supposed to be good at spinning up some sort of story or analogy to let people understand complex things.
Let me help our future Leesburg juror's with an analogy of my own: spammers are the equivalent to military electronic warfare jammers. They try to stop our productivity with enmasse information directly beamed into our communications infrastructure.
Forgive me fellow slashdotters but in former soviet russia the russian military had a rule that any attack against its communications infrastructure was the equivalent of a nuclear attack and therefore they went to higher defcon-equivalent. In an information age, spammers are attacking our communications infrastructure and we should be cracking down on them as hard as possible as well.
Having RTFA, it looks like a spammer's accomplice was convicted based upon inadmissable evidence, which I must begrudgingly admit is an acceptable ruling.
I stand by my statement on email spammers, though.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
shouldn't be primarily composed of peers who work with finger-tip-access or no-finger-tip-access cash registers.
While on jury duty, have you ever mingled with potential jurors?
Perhaps the judge doesn't administrate an email server. If he did, he'd surely be advocating the death penalty instead.
Paul Murphy
http://www.murphymaphia.com
From the linked article that nobody seems to have read:
Ruling Tuesday, Judge Thomas D. Horne also said jurors may have gotten "lost" when navigating Virginia's new anti-spam law in the case of Jessica DeGroot. But Horne upheld the conviction of her brother, Jeremy Jaynes, who prosecutors said led the operation from his Raleigh, North Carolina, area home.
Seems to me we are not given enough information in this article to assess what the issue was in the specific conviction that was overturned. And I'm personally not familiar with the case. Does anyone know what the situation with the sister was? Did she merely live in the same house as a spammer?
Based on the article, she could have merely been in charge of canceling his magazine subscriptions. The article just indicates that the judge claimed the jury was confused in her case.
And I found an error in the story submission too:
Virginia Court Overturns Spammer Conviction s - Why is this last word plural?
Even the story submitters don't RTFA!
The linked story indicates no more than one overturned conviction, that of the sister. A third guy seems to have been involved but there is no mention of his being convicted, hence no overturned conviction.
When you buy a new car (substitute "email address" as you please), you expect that it will be clean and in working order. But as time wears on, problems will arise. You can stave off most of these problems by taking care to perform regular maintenance on it (for email addresses, this means taking precautions that it doesn't get picked up by spammers).
But time takes its toll. At some point the car will be wracked by so many problems that it just isn't worth it to hang onto it and you go out and get another car. Sure, you can patch it up (add virus scanners), take it to the repair shop (run a spam filter), even keep it safely in the garage (use a whitelist), but after a certain amount of time, that car just ain't gonna run no more.
Then you get a new one.
Email addresses can't be considered permanent property. At some point they must be discarded and a new address acquired. It's just part of the cost of owning the email link.
You don't complain if a car falls apart after 15 years. You can't complain if an email address becomes unusable after 2. These things just have limited lifespans.
The poster of this article has it ALL WRONG. I live in virginia and have been following this case closely. The main spammer in question who did all the spamming, setup the spamming business, and was responsible for 100% of it WAS CONVICTED AND SENT TO JAIL. HOWEVER, during this he used his sisters credit card to purchase hardware/broadband for his spamming operation which the prosecutor thought was grounds to convict her as well. The Judge threw out HER CONVICTION ONLY due to the fact that he was convinced she had no part of it and didn't realize what the stuff her brother was buying was to be used to. THE HEAD SPAMMER DIDNT GET OFF, ONLY HIS (possibly) WRONGLY ACCUSED SISTER DID. Good lord, I wish the fuggin slashdot POSTERS would RTFA sometimes....
If there was no rational basis for this verdict, why didnt the judge throw out the case to begin with as opposed to after the verdict was given?
What this means is there is someone who helped spam whos out on the streets but knows someone thats serving time. Maybe they will help spread the word that spaming will get you busted.
If you RTFA (yeah right), you know that the main spammer, Jeremy Jaynes, remains convicted.
It is his sister, Jessica DeGroot, who had her conviction overturned. Unfortunately, TFA is rather short on details.
Here is a better article: http://www.leesburg2day.com/current.cfm?catid=19&It goes on explain why DeGroot's conviction was overturned. The only piece of evidence that the prosecutor presented against her is a credit card statement showing purchases of those domain names used by the spammers. However her lawyers contend that it doesn't prove that she actually made the purchases; her brother or someone else could've used her card to purchase those domain names.
His sister (who only got a $7,500 fine) had her conviction overturned -- apparently on a technicality. The primary conviction with the recommended 9 years in jail stood. I find this mostly annoying but acceptable. Given that it was a technicality, it's quite possible that it will be reversed again.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
What kind of evidence would you like, Mr. Attorney? Would you like to look through my Sent box to see if you see any requests for C!al!s or V!4gr4? What, you don't see any, but that doesn't prove anything, for I could have deleted the evidence?
I also happen to be not walking down the street soliciting strangers to punch me in the face. So if someone does that is his defense lawyer going to say, "look, there's no evidence that this punch was unsolicited"?
Spam is bad and the most legal of legal actions should be taken against it. The Virginiains will learn though, that spam is very bad. ---- http://onticfusion.sytes.net/
http://onticfusion.sytes.net/
The average juror's biggest selling point is their lack of intelligence and their ability to be led.
;_)
The average judge, while more intelligent, enjoys setting precedents.
Put the two together and you've got the 9th circuit out in California
(Yes I just received my jury summons... I don't think I'll make it tho...)
Since the lawyers moved in and made sure that no one is allowed any creative freedom anymore.
IANALIANALIANAL!!!
So in order to get a conviction, the prosecutors have to prove that the recipients of the emails DIDN'T do something? (Because they're looking for evidence they were unsolicited, and not for evidence that they weren't, so the spammer doesn't have to produce crap)
I think the law needs to be reworded. The only way a conviction will ever stand up if this this is the case is if someone has a verifiable record of attempts to get the emails to stop. And even then it might be hard to prove that future emails came from the same source.
...by sending him thousands of hardcopies of spam! Send your letters to: Judge Thomas D. Horne 18 E. Market St. Leesburg, VA 20176
"The newly born animals are then whisked off for a quick run through a giant baking oven." --heard on Food Network
ahh Virginia...
Where drunk driving nets you a slap on the wrist (7 day license suspension, misdemeanor -- Virginia Driver's Manual [pg. 30]) and spamming sends you to jail.
I'm glad to see we have our priorities straight, and the dangerous people are being kept away from the rest of us.
Allow me to ask this simple question: why is someone sending unsolicited email to you a crime, but selling your personal information to someone who sends unsolicited email not? Or to be more precise (in regards to ChoicePoint), someone allowing your personal information to be handled by crooks.
If you ask me, our personal privacy initiatives are more than a bit skewed, and with the estimated 600 man hours it takes a victim of identity theft to recover from said crime, someone needs to be held accountable. Then again, if our privacy laws made sense it'd be illegal to sell a citizen's personal information without their consent. The beneficial side-effect would be the removal of everyone's email addresses from the hands of spammers. After all, where do you think they get their information from? That's right, data warehouses (just like ChoicePoint).
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
Should I be allowed to stand on the street corner and hand out copies of Common Sense that I bought?
Absolutely. No question about it.
However, if you stole the paper that your pamphlet is printed on, you may still have a first amendment right to your message, but you're delivering it with stolen property. The problem with spammers is not that they have a message, and not that they're beating you over the head with it. The problem is that they are using your money to give it.
You can be forgiven for not realizing this, because in an effort to keep you as a customer, your ISP is eating the costs of each spam they receive instead of passing it on to you. However, each spam they carry is costing them a lot of money in the form of bandwidth, legal costs (spammers often sue ISPs for the exact reasons you cite), hardware upgrades, and charges to subscribe to filtering services, if they choose to do so. You don't see the grand total, but you are paying your share of those bills.
"Even the story submitters don't RTFA!"
:-)
I'm just drunk as hell, proving my point that even alcoholics can get stuff submitted to Slashdot.
In case it isn't obvious, I would be disqualified from any such jury. Heck, I'd be booted for trying to bribe the *OTHER* candidates to disqualify themselves so that I could get in.
By the way, laws are *NOT* going to solve the problem of spam. It's an economic problem, and it requires an economic solution. As soon as the spammers are forced to pay the actual costs, then the spam will be gone. Can't be done within the pseudo-economic non-model of SMTP, where they pretend email is free and the spammers respond by dividing by zero.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Jaynes' attorney, David A. Oblon, had argued that the spamming was not conducted in Virginia and that there was no evidence that e-mails were unsolicited.
It's trivial to prove the mail solicited, show the confirmations.
You have to talk to everyone that received the mail (or at least a representative sample) to show that they're not unsolicited.
So, why not prove it's solicted by showing the confirmation? Oh yeah, it really wasn't solicited was it, Rule #1.
Should I be allowed to stand on the street corner and hand out copies of Common Sense that I bought?
Yes. Definitely.
However you should not be allowed to stand in my living room and hand out copies of Common Sense that you bought.
Yes, it is very much true that if I don't want the copies of Common Sense I am free to ignore you. But I still don't really want you standing in my living room.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
okay lets sit back for a second...
this has gotten *way* out of control. a lot of us are the same people who rail on the courts and police for locking up nonviolent drug offenders so that there will be room for the fuckers who really need to be in jail (baby rapers, murderers, kidnappers, the very at-large terrorist element).
so why, oh why, are you upset that someone is NOT going to jail for commiting an utterly nonviolent offense? because you get some penis enlargement and get rich quick email? christ, use a filter. the place to hit these people is in the wallet, not the cornhole (as in pound-me-in-the-ass federal prison). if they're spamming, they're making untold millions of dollars - millions of dollars that can be snarfed up by the federal government.
it has really struck me as entirely ludicrous that the most vocal people in the IT world have been calling for throwing these dickheads in jail, when most spam "victims" get themselves into this mess on their own. i get next to ZERO spam, and i really have never seen what the whole fuss is about. i'm careful about where my email address ends up, and as a last resort i have a good spam filter. gmail does a really good job also. i have 50 invites, so whoever has managed to not get one (i really don't know how anyone couldn't have a gmail account by now), shoot me a message and i'll get one to you pronto.
really people, we have much much worse problems in the world than unsolicited email. the zealots over at spamhaus and spamcop and wherever else really make me chuckle, cuz the joke's on them. i'm glad this guy got off, and i hope they let every spammer that's in jail (i know there's a few) out so we can make room for more deserving scum.
i'll also add this, for you aol and yahoo users: i work for a company that occasionally (NOT hardly the primary business model) sends out what you would call spam, but really these retards signed up for the special offer emails on their own. your ISP's; aol, yahoo, earthlink actually BARGAIN with with some ISP relations person at my company about how much and when they will send the users email, and then they make sure it gets through. i'm sure this happens all the time.
the only person really responsible for keeping your inbox clean and crap-free is yourself.
just my 2c
I blogged something about this today here. Seems that prosecutors had plenty of dirt to prove Jessica's involvement, including an incriminating to-do list with her name all over it. Jon Praed presented a copy of these documents at the 2005 MIT Spam Conference, video of which is linked from my blog. Praed explained that, due to a legal technicality that's beyond me, the evidence was not admissible.
I am a lawyer, but this isn't legal advice. If you get legal advice on slashdot, you're likely to be confficted.
It's not even a ruling on the law by the court.
Judges make conclusions about the law as part of an appeal, but they also look at the facts. Each court subsitutes its own legal judgment for that of the lower court, but they treat factual findings by the jury (or judge) differently.
The standard for reversal on law is mere disagreement with the lower court. The standard for facts, however, is quite high: If a *rational* person could have reached that conclusion from that evidence, it isn't touched.
In this case, it appears that the court found that a rational person *could not* make the factual findings about that defendant which would be necessary to support a conviction. This says *nothing* about the law itself.
Compare this to a court in a murder case finding that no reasonable jury could have concluded beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused was at the scene--this says nothing about murder becomingg legal, just that the DA didn't make a casse.
hawk, esq.
I will forward him every spam I get, and I think everyone should do the same. After all, he will have no "rational basis" for complaining, right?
"Do I dare disturb the universe?"
AND THERE ISN"T TWO WAYS TO LOOK AT THIS. I agree with the 1st ammendment. I believe in free-speech too.
SPAM IS NOT FREE SPEECH.
WEBSITES ARE FREE SPEECH AND MASS MAILINGS THROUGH USPS ARE FREE SPEECH.
SPAM IS NOT FREE SPEECH AND NEITHER IS TELEMARKETING!
The difference is based upon the level of invasion towards the listener that the speaker is inflicting when contacting the listener. The difference is also upon who's paying for the medium, and where the destination is.
For instance, consider websites, the listener here is an active participant, and MUST somehow seek out the speach they wish to listen to. This form of speech is MOST protected, and rightly so. Consider also, the medium of cable TV, purchased movies and books. Even these types of speech are in jepardy by the proto-fascist Republicans (as seen on Drudge today) when gov. types want to impose restrictions on cable TV. Consider for a second, this is a product that costs money, and was deliberately sought out by the customer, not something that landed in their front yard without their control.
A second example might be a public speaker, like a guy on the street corner yelling about how God's gonna destroy all of us. This person does inconvience some with his speach, but the overall level is balanced by the fact that not ALL he says is protected (public decency standards and violent speech), and that listeners can go home if they wish.
The MOST UNPROTECTED SPEECH is unsolicited speech that intrudes on the legal "castle" or home. In this location, I am presumed to have specifically sought to NOT have others speak at me without an invitation! SIMPLY HAVING THE MEDIUM IS NOT AN IMPLICIT INVITATION TO SPEECH! This is mostly the same considering my e-mail, as I have sought nothing out, there is absolutely no protection for the spammer or telemarketer. What stupid reasoning could you possibly be using to consider that the spammer has the right to bombard me with solicitations when I'm seeking legal refuge in my only legal sanctuary! I've purchased a product (THE MEDIUM as you called it) for my own uses, not the speaker's. I've paid for this product, when the speaker/spammer pays for the product (i.e. free yahoo mail, television or whatever)they can call the shots. In this case (my phone and internet) I've paid, so I get to extend or not extend invitations to others to speak to me.
Remember that I'm not infringing on your right to have a website with penis enlargment info, beastiality pictures and whatever products you wish to hawk, I simply have the equiv. right NOT to hear you if I don't want! In my home, I'm legally presumed king of my domain, and I'm NOT obligated to sort out people that I don't want to hear from. I entertain as I wish, and I am under no obligation to listen to anyone. You (spammer/telemarketer) are under the obligation to demonstrate that you've been invited! You should notice that I've NOT grouped spammers/telemarketers with the people who mail the equiv. types of offers. In this case, THEY are paying the fees to ship the product, so they have the right to send. Further, my mailbox is technically the property of the US Postal Service. I also have the right to NOT pick mail out of this box that I don't want. Technically, no mail enters my home uninvited. With television, I've made the implied exchange of watching commercials in exchange for getting a free product. I've made no such exchange with e-mails, I've paid for a service, the useful service of which the spammer is robbing me of.
This country is so f*cked when people will even entertain the notion that telemarketers and/or spammers have a "free-speech right" to call/contact me at my home, at my expense, at whatever time they feel! They don't... They have the right to purchase commerials, buy billboards and hire blimps, but they DO NOT have the right to call me or force open my window shades to see their billboards or force me to turn on my TV to see their commercials.
DEATH.... that's the only answer in this case. I can certainly understand why a judge would be a little nervous about sending someone up for 7 years in this case, when death is clearly the proper punishment for such a crime. Viagra and Cortaslim until such time as you are dead.
The judge decided that the evidence for convicting the sister didn't hold up and overturned her conviction. The brother, however, gets 9 years in the slammer, where they will hopefully put him to work deleting ads for bogus medical products and business offers from corrupt Nigerian officials, with time off for good behavior if he actually collects on the $14 million they're trying to get out of the country.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I am a firm believe that we should fix systems that are broken, rather than trying to apply round-about patches [insert Microsoft reference here].
That said, the spammers are not stealing any bandwidth, they are using what they're ISP's allow them. They are also taking up a negligable amount of my bandwidth, but they DO take up a good deal of my ISP's bandwidth, from which the cost does trickle down to me.
Here, the round-about patch is getting the government involved. A real solution would involve blocking the spam as early as possible (my ISP could reject it based on some magic header strings), drastically reducing the bandwidth, or coming up with email standards (there are many proposals, i just can't find a link right now) and denying any email from a non-standards-compliant ISP.
These industry-centric solutions can practically eliminate spam, and are far superior to government involvement.
I have to pay a trash fee. Shouldn't I be able to fine companies that send out junk mail?
"send mass e-mail ads"
When someone sends "ads" does that imply that someone is paying them to send the "ads". I wonder if they ever asked the spammers who paid them to send ads ?
...wondering if jurors were confused by technical evidence." Legal groundwork being set?
Oh, I think that was set a loooong time ago.
Table-ized A.I.
Can a judge really determine if jurors were "confused" by evidence presented and thereby remove a person's (and community's) constitutional right to be judged by a jury of peers?
The guaranteed right to a trial by a jury of peers is a guarantee of due process not only to the accused but to the community as well. How DARE this judge do this? What law in his state, I wonder, allows him to supercede this U.S. Constitutional right? What am I missing here?
I always preferred Anthony Chambers to Voltaire...
"I may not agree with what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to die in a fire of suspicious origin" - Anthony Chambers
-- Terry
What we need is to have some kind of spam bot loaded on enough computers, when someone gets a spam they feed it through this bot that forwards a copy to microsoft preserving the original email header. When microsoft investigates (and if they get enough spam they will), those spams will hopefully track back to the originating IP addresses and they'll have enough clout to stick it to the spammers.
.....But your honor, my machine was infected with spam relay spyware. I removed it but it just keeps coming back.
I wonder if I should start spamming people to buy vaseline, just so they're prepared for something large and painful where the sun don't shine.
Defendant:
Judge: Oh, so it wasn't your fault then? Case dismissed
narrator: If life were like that you wouldn't need lawyers.
A judge may not overturn a conviction simply because he would have personally found the defendant not guilty. He has to find that if the jury was acting fairly, then the conviction could not be possible. i.e. That no jury acting fairly could possibly have reached that guilty verdict.
I believe this judge was merely speculating why the jury reached the wrong verdict. I dont think there actually needs to be any finding of a specific 'cause' for the juries incorrect verdict. The statement to "confusion" is merely obiter. The court likely concluded the jury was not doing its job, which is to be FAIR and UNBIASED in its deliberation.
(as usual the media completely fails to report enough information to make sense out of what actually took place in the courtroom.)
This usually means that was no evidence before the court capable of supporting the juries conclusion, and therefore the jury either misunderstood or was using external evidence to reach its verdict, or was being vindictive and punishing the accused merely because of the victims suffering, or its outrage at the crime, rather than the evidence of guilt.
If you were tried with murder, and the murder victim was clearly still alive (and especially if the prosecutor admits the victim is alive, and the defense called the victim to the stand to attest to that), then the jury *must* acquit. The evidence can not possibly support a finding of guilt. Even if the accused was covered in the "victims" blood, and the "murder weapon" was found, and motive and opportunity was proved. If the victim is alive, then clearly no murder could possibly have been commited (unless they conclude that someone ELSE was murdered). In this case the jury must have misunderstood the evidence. That is kind of a crazy example, but it is a situation where an appeals court would reverse the jury's verdict.
Put basically... mere disagreements do not overturn decisions. More is required.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
why is parent post offtopic. the story in the link is from the local paper. The guy took his sisters credit card.
Moderators on crack again!
This however is a case where there are very few technical answers to.
Your some magic header strings would have to really be magic so spammers don't just fake their own.
While denying any email from a non-standards-compliant ISP is a good idea you then get your users complaining that they aren't getting the email from their freinds / customers because they are using the only affordable ISP in their area.
"Will other convicted spammers now have grounds for an appeal?"
Anyone who is convicted on the basis of evidence which can not possibly cause a reasonable and unbiased person to reach a guilty verdict has always had a grounds for an appeal. This is nothing new. Nor is it restricted to accused spammers.
The jury has a responsibility, not only the accused, but also to the 'people' to be fair and unbiased in its findings.
Among other things, this means its findings must be objectively plausible. The jury may not create fictions out of whole cloth.
If the prosecution (as the CNN article seems to imply) could not find a single person to come forward and claim they received unsolicited email, and if the accused testified and claimed they never sent unsolicited email, then the jury could not arbitrarily decide to conclude the opposite of the only evidence before the court.
If that was a necessary element of the offence, then guilt can not be proved.
If they said 'guilty' then either they made a mistake or they were not being fair and unbiased.
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
I am a firm believe that we should fix systems that are broken rather than trying to apply round-about patches.
Agreed. That's why I think the suggestion of another poster (that spamming be covered by existing computer crime laws) is sheer genious. IMHO, that's exactly what spamming is - theft of service - and it should be treated as such.
That said, the spammers are not stealing any bandwidth, they are using what they're ISP's allow them.
While some (maybe even most) spammers are sanctioned by their ISPs, many are not. Also, many spammers are now relaying their messages through hijacked computers whose owners are unaware of, let alone approving, that use of their computer.
They are also taking up a negligable amount of my bandwidth,
That's true for you and me. However, what about the people on dialup who are forced to download 300 spam messages with embedded JPEGs to get to the one e-mail from family they're waiting for?
A real solution would involve blocking the spam as early as possible (my ISP could reject it based on some magic header strings)
Your ISP is still downloading the message (and using the bandwidth) to read the magic header string. We've also already established that spam-friendly ISPs aren't going to cooperate on their end.
drastically reducing the bandwidth
Interesting. How? Compression? How do you intend to get the spammers and their ISP henchmen to cooperate?
coming up with email standards (there are many proposals, i just can't find a link right now) and denying any email from a non-standards-compliant ISP
No one is denying that a technical solution is great; however, many people believe the existing proposals are inadequate for one reason or other. There's even a "joke" template floating around that can be applied to most every solution proposed for spam thus far.
These industry-centric solutions can practically eliminate spam, and are far superior to government involvement.
Industry solutions work best when all parties are in agreement. Spamming, by definition, will never reach that consensus because you won't get the cooperation of the people you need most - the spammers.
I have to pay a trash fee. Shouldn't I be able to fine companies that send out junk mail?
I don't understand your reasoning, but under the assumption you should, how do you plan to do so without the government's help?
What we need is industry solutions with government-backed teeth. Working on the premise that spamming is equivilent to fax spamming - theft of resources - I think government involvment at some level is justified. I do see your point about keeping the government out of it - they do meddle in quite a bit as it is - but I think if we're careful, they could be useful to solve the spamming epidemic.
If you have a technical or industrial solution nobody's thought of, by all means, spread the word. You'll be my hero. Seriously.
i'm glad that we can follow up the momentum of this story and take advantage of their link to "Compare prices on Spam Software"
Since December 1st 2004:
15,144 email processed
10,563 spam caught
322 spam i've manually blocked (3.5/day)
$3.99/mo is a small price to pay for barely noticing that 2/3 of all email is spam.
that's just dealing with the problem...if you want to fix it we need to think about how to change the email application from the bottom up:
Create a "BLOCKING" facility on the email client. fairly easy to implement...a big red "BLOCK" button that when pressed, wraps the offending email and sends it to the A$$ (anti-spam server...i was trying to be serious...i swear that was absolutely accidental). the A$$ implements a DNS like distributed application that immediately spreads word to other A$$'s that an unwanted email has been identified. A$$'s can also be accessed by SMTP Gateway servers wanting to fend off SPAM by analyzing data that has been generated completely naturally by real human beings.
you heard it here...the cure to handling SPAM lies in R&D for A$$ technology
A jury decided these people were innocent and there is no rationale for the judge to overturn this case. The court system has failed.
email addreses don't need oil.
I thought it needed pointing out because you seem to be confused on this issue.
You're welcome.
It's like saying "but one pickpocket doesn't do much harm on the whole, it's the group of them that's the problem, so let's not punish any one pickpocket." And that's, sad to say, so skewed it's not even funny.
No, not one spammer causes the problem, but noone proposed to stop at one. We'll punish as many of them as we can catch. One by one.
Sure, the first one won't make that much of a difference. Probably not the second one either. But by the time we got the top 100 of them, we've already solved 90% of the bulk mail by sheer virtue of having the perpetrators behind bars.
But we probably don't even need to get to that point. By the time 20-30 of them are safely behind bars, a lot of the other wannabes might start thinking twice. You know, "gee, money is good, but is it worth spending years in a cell with a horny guy called Bubba?"
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Juries have to deal with whatever cases come up... If it's overturned because the jury wasn't seen as intelligent enough to decide the case, this'll have pretty terrible implications on pretty much any case with technical or scientific evidence. How is it that a jury can't be seen to understand penis enlargement emails being bad, but they can understand DNA evidence from hair folicles linking a person to a murder?
A spammer can be sentenced to 9 years in prison, but a child molestor might.. MIGHT.. get 2 years. Rapists are often out in less than 10 - and let's not forget that double murderers often simply walk just because they are rich and can't wear small gloves.
I'm not standing up for the spammers here, but FFS, why does someone who sends nuisance email get more time than the drunk driver who last year killed one of my best friends from High School? (30m + 5y probation after plea bargaining down to an assault charge.. bullshit)...
Here in the UK precedent works in the following way: (1) A decision of a superior court on a question of law binds all junior courts. It is only the parts of the decision which are a necessary part of the conclusion reached that are binding (we call those parts the "ratio decidendi"). A judge may opine away (and they frequently do) on matters which are not a necessary part of their decision but they will not bind (we call those opinions "obiter dicta"). (2) Some (but not all) courts are bound to follow their own earlier decisions (our Court of Appeal is, our High Court is not). (3) Decisions of lower courts or decisions reached in other jurisdictions are not binding precedent but may be "persuasive" which means the court will look at them and follow the decision if they agree with the reasoning. Judges take comfort from the fact that other judges have reached similar decisions. As I understand US contitutional law each state counts as its own jurisdiction. (4) The most important point is that precedents are concerned with law and not fact. If your facts are different the precedent may not apply. Where you persuade a judge that your facts differ sufficiently that the precedent should not bind him (or persuade him) you are said to "distinguish" the precedent. In this case it is impossible to tell whether the conviction was quashed because of a question of law or whether it all turned on the specific facts. Unless we know that, it is impossible to judge whether the decision is likely to have any utility as a precedent. Yours boringly Sean
Does this mean if I get in touch with a freind in Loudoun I have and have her send this Judge, and his kids and grand kids unsoliceted porn spam I can not be convicted of sending spam?
Enter the double standard that is our penal system. Some back woods ass hick of a Judge, overturns a ruling. My guess bieng from Leesburg, he thinks the internet is a new type of fishing net.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Did the submitter even RTFA? The court overturned one conviction on the grounds that the jury must have been nuts. This has NO bearing on any other case. The real story is that the other conviction was UPHELD on appeal.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
I've yet to see anyone realize that equating spam with murder, child sex abuse, and rape is insane.
Sure spam is annoying, but does it justify making the spammer into a felon? A felony conviction can make it impossible for you to get a job. You most certainly cannot get an apartment, and even your right to vote can be suspended depending on the state you live in.
Like I said spam is annoying, but let's make the spam itself a misdemenor. If they sell a product that kills someone or con someone out of their life savings, then there are already laws to prosecute them for those things.
Our society seems to make everything a felony. An 18 year old kid who gets caught with a certain amount of pot is made into a felon. His life is ruined, because of a teenage indiscretion. A dumbass kid decides to release a virus and caused some havok, but make him a felon? That's nuts.
All I need is a hammer, a rope, and 10 minutes alone with this judge and we wont have anymore spam convictions overturned.
This judge must be confused by the technical issues of this case. Either that or he stills think his Mubuto plans to wire him 3 million USD.
Maybe this is the problem with current submit story method /. has. A lot of people want their story to appear, and the best way to do that (to compete with the most likely hundreds of dupes) is to make yours sound more "sensational". As such, the editors pick that one as it sounds like it would make a story better.
An e-mail address is meant for communication, just like a phone number (or even a car, though that's a very different kind of communication). A phone number is printed in a directory so that people can find it and call you. The same can be done with an e-mail address. A phone number isn't expected to "wear out" just because it's published and telemarketers get to see it, nor does a public directory listing constitute deliberate lack of "maintainance" of that number.
Sure, if you hardly ever use your e-mail address except within a close circle of trusted friends, it will last a lot longer, just like a car will last longer if you never take it outdoors but rather keep it in your garage as a kind of museum piece (or perhaps take it for a pleasant drive in the countryside once a year). Most cars are sold to be used however, just like e-mail addresses, and the owner is supposedly the authority on what it should be used for.
Accepting the notion that you have to keep your contact information secret in order not to have to change it every two years is precisely what the spammers want you to do. Their mantra goes like "If you publish your e-mail address on the Internet, you have effectively opted in to receiving any kind of commercial advertising, including ours. If you don't want our ads, simply remove your name from public view!"
I don't agree with that notion, and I'm certainly not giving in to threats made by spammers; they don't get to decide what the Internet is for. It may result in me receiving more junk mail than others, but if I'm ever to confront a spammer in public debate, I will be able to show by example that mere publication of one's e-mail address does not in itself constitute a request for commercial solicitations, just like a woman wearing a certain kind of clothing in public does not constitute consent to random strangers having sex with her. Nor does the way she looks constitute "lack of maintenance" of her right not to be raped.
I'm not sure, we may even be in agreement on this issue, but it's not quite clear from what you write. I have already "told" anybody who cares that I don't want their advertising, simply by stating in public that I dislike their practice. If this doesn't count, but I have to contact each potential sender individually with a request that they place my address on a do-not-mail list, it's obviously beyond my capacity to prevent most junk mail from reaching me in the first place. I hope you aren't suggesting that spam victims should resort to spamming in order to get their message out?
However, I'm not standing in the way of people who want advertising. They can simply subscribe to one or more opt-in lists, and receive as much advertising as they like. What I object to is advertising being sent to unwilling recipients who have neither opted in nor opted out, but of course neither their ISP, the sender nor some court of law can determine in advance whether they are unwilling. Would they have to give up their anonymity and declare publicly that they don't want advertising, so that those who want advertising will be able to continue receiving it without giving up their anonymity to individual senders? If your privacy stands in the way of somebody else's privacy, which one will win?
Or use a public blacklist, like MAPS RBL (not that I have much faith in that particular list these days, but long ago it was the only one around). For instance, I could use a list of network providers known to sell connectivity to spammers without disclosing their identities. It may result in also some legit mail bouncing back to the sender, but that's the point; I want my friends and anybody else trying to contact me to know that their current ISP is hosting spammers, hoping they will eventually switch to another provider. I'm sure they would do the same for me in case my ISP were to turn bad.
Waste of time. If they intentionally send me advertising unasked for, they have already violated long-standing rules of conduct on the Internet and lost any credibility with me, regardless of what the law says. If they show, by their own action, that they have no respect for my privacy and my property, why should I spend even five seconds trying to talk them out of it? It's much easier to put them to a public blacklist, allowing everybody else to benefit from my experience immediately if they want to. If they continue spamming after that, all they will get is bounces. Legal action would only be necessary if they break into my mail server and remove the blacklist, but that would invoke an entirely different statute.
We are in complete agreement here; I have no particular desire for violence. This can and should be resolved by entirely legal means.
This guy should get a whoping negative on "insightful".
Can a judge really determine if jurors were "confused" by evidence presented and thereby remove a person's (and community's) constitutional right to be judged by a jury of peers?
The guaranteed right to a trial by a jury of peers is a guarantee of due process not only to the accused but to the community as well. How DARE this judge do this? What law in his state, I wonder, allows him to supercede this U.S. Constitutional right? What am I missing here?
The wording of the Constitution, for one. The Constitution says nothing about a community's expectation of justice done. The Seventh Amendment says "In Suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise re-examined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law." No mention of the community or even the accused there. It does mention "according to the rules of the common law". Common law in both England and the US has long held that an appellate court may overturn a conviction on various grounds.
As to due process, the Fourteenth Amendment says "...No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...." No mention of the community there either, and remember the 13th-15th Amendments were intended to enforce Reconstruction -- to restrict the community from turning on individuals they considered "undesirable" (to wit, newly-emancipated slaves).
American and British law since either country has had any concept of rule of law (as opposed to monarchic despotism) has held that it is more in the community interest to allow the guilty to go free, even on the flimsiest of technical grounds, than to invite government abuses of power by taking even the smallest chance of penalizing, imprisoning, or executing an innocent man.
-- Old Man Kensey
The overturned conviction belonged to the king spammer's sister. Her credit card was used to buy the spammer's domain but prosecutors did not show any evidence that she used it. The brother is still convicted.