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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?"
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."
Like it or not, what is happening in the courts affects the technology world more and more all the time. I think that it's important to have the broader picture.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
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!
Perhaps it's a sign of the times. Maybe it's not that slashdot has moved from tech into law, but that law has moved increasingly into tech, something I think the majority of /. users would prefer were not the case.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
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.
Nope -- spammers have the ability to completely destroy e-mail as a usable medium of communication with their crime if not deterred. Nine years is, if anything, too lenient.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
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.
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.
Ah yes, the old "she must have asked for it because she wore sexy clothes"-type argument. That's really getting tired.
I have my e-mail address in order to be reachable by the public and I have had the same one since July 1996. I refuse to change it or hide it because doing so would make me unreachable by the people I want to be reachable for. If I do that, I might as well give up on e-mail entirely.
Remember? There was a time when e-mail was used to communicate with the world, not just with intimate friends and family. It was exciting, fun. Spammers have killed that for the most part, and turned the Internet from an open community into a hostile spam sewer.
Non-violent, you say? Not all violence is physical.
Maybe you would see it if you'd get a thousand a day like I do. (Yes, I use a good filter, dozens still get through.) Or if you'd be an ISP and have to deal with your mailservers dying under the load of millions of spams a day and having to shell out money to buy dedicated servers to deal with the crap (like my ISP), impacting all their tens of thousands of customers. Still think that's as "non-violent" as using some drugs?
How about all the viruses spammers keep spreading so they have zombie networks to sell to bounce spam off of? This is where most spam comes from nowadays. How is this not the most criminal form of cracking, tresspass and theft of service?
Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail. If they signed up for it, it's not spam, by definition.
So which is it? Did they sign up for it, or are you spamming? Of course, since you're trying to confuse the issue by conflating free speech with cramming "speech" down people's throats while making them and others pay for the privilege of being the crammee, my guess is the latter.
So because it happens "all the time" (?), that makes it right, doesn't it? Some ISP's also keep signing up those hardcore spammers and exempting them from their AUPs with pink contracts. This is a huge part of the problem.
Spoken like a true spammer.
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)...