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?"

Comments

Two ways to look at this ruling

[Dancin_Santa]

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."

Re:Two ways to look at this ruling

[Dimensio]

The third way to look at this is that Free Speech has won the day.

Email spamming != Free Speech. Free Speech does not entail the right for you to use my private property to dump your unwanted advertising.

All email spammers should be put to sleep, as should this idiot judge.

Re:Two ways to look at this ruling

[Steve B]

Spam does fall within free speech.

Theft of services is not "free speech".

There is no legally significant difference between someone sending you a million emails and someone sending you a million pieces of junk mail.

The difference (the senders of junk snailmail pay for the service they use; the senders of spam impose this cost on their targets) is a matter of common knowledge. This statement can thus only be interperpreted as willful trolling (and will presumably be moderated accordingly).

you can refuse to accept them, or can throw them away unseen, and with virtually no effort on your part

It is also a matter of common knowledge that spammers routinely sabotage attempts to reject their communications. If the law treated the matter rationally (i.e. if it regarded attempted evasion of spam filtering as a form of unauthorized computer access, and applied the established penalties for that crime), the problem could be readily brought under control.

I place spam in the same category as the KKK

Yes -- KKK members are known to engage in vandalism and trespass, and are generally punished when they get caught at it.

If someone out there wants spam

Solicited mailings are, by definition, not spam.

If someone out there wants to send messages to people, then were I to ban their message based on its content or it being widely disseminated

An irrelevant hypothetical, since the issue here is banning a particular method of message delivery, for the same reasons similar meatspace methods (spray painting on the recipient's house, heaving a note wrapped around a brick through the recipient's window, parking a sound truck in the recipient's driveway and firing it up at 3 AM) are prohibited.

Free speech means having to tolerate the existence of speech you don't like.

It does not, however, mean tolerating theft and trespass.

No one is making you listen to it, however.

See above. The law need only treat e-mail filtering as it treats other form of comptuter security, and the problem is solved.

Re:Slashdot: News for Lawyers.

[rben]

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.

Why can judges...

[imemyself]

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?

Re:Slashdot: News for Lawyers.

[internic]

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.

Look at me! I RTFA!

[MillionthMonkey]

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.

Re:300 + spam per day

[Steve B]

Spammers have the ability to make millions of people a tiny bit miserable with their crime.

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.

Re:In Defense of Spam

[Baricom]

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.