Gates' Resolve in Bringing Spammers to Justice

An anonymous reader writes "It didn't seem to me like any single company had the stomach to keep after the scum that are ruining the Net for the rest of us. Unless that company is Microsoft. Since the beginning of 2003, Microsoft has filed 96 lawsuits against spammers, and 119 lawsuits against phishers. By any measure, 215 lawsuits constitutes a legal juggernaut. "

Comments

Marginal Return on Investment

[mark99]

Reducing Spam makes people use MS computers (and Exchange) more (as opposed to the alternatives).

- Investing in spam filter technology reduces spam.
- Sueing spammers also reduces spam.

The optimal strategy will be to persue both strategies till they yield the same rate of spam reduction.

And that rate should be determined by whatever they think they earn on spam reduction.

My bet is that someone at MS has done the math.

And it keeps their lawyers sharp, who knows how and when that will come in handy :)

Re:Signs?

[smr2x]

Can Slashdot ever accept the fact that Microsoft can do some good? I'd be willing to bet that 30% of the comments on this article will be "OMG MICRO$OFT IS GOOD?!". Accept the fact that they really can do good things and shut with the Microsoft bashing.

Re:Lawsuits vs. building a better product?

[Matt2k]

Don't run Windows under an administrative context and that wouldn't happen. It'd be the same thing as letting your kids go browsing for a couple hours under root and when you come back you find you have dancing bonzai buddies all over your desktop and some mysterious new daemon called "Keyword search helper"-- and if Linux ever achieves a large desktop share, don't think that those type of programs won't be created.

Re:Lawsuits, the last refuge of the incompetent

[airjrdn]

They're damned if they do, and damned if they don't.

If they sued them, people would yell David and Goliath. If they let them go, people say they're not helping the community.

This is /. where no Microsoft action (good or bad) goes unpunished.