Virginia Spammers Go To Jail, And Pay For It

An anonymous reader writes "A Virginia appeals court has upheld the first felony conviction under a state anti-spam law. In the process, the court also suggested that spam recipients might be able to sue spammers for money damages. According to the court, taxing a person's servers with unwanted e-mails is a form of trespass, little different than intruding on their land or making unwanted use of their private property. Perhaps because of this decision, spammers will soon find themselves on the receiving end of a million dollar class action suit."

Comments

ObNelson

[Rob T Firefly]

Ha-ha!

Re:ObNelson

[Fordiman]

*jumps and sings*

Yayyyy! The sons of bitches are getting some punishment for being sons of bitches! I wonder what the buzz on the spammer boards is now (hehehe).

Re:ObNelson

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the title as "Virgin Spammers". Well, not for long! Brown wings ahoy!

Re:ObNelson

[Anonymous Coward]

And if they dont have money what good is a two million dollar class action suit?

Re:ObNelson

[tritonman]

Not that I'm on the side of the spammers, but saying that sending an unwanted email is the same thing as trespassing on someone's private property is just ludicrous. So what's next? In Texas, where you can shoot someone for trespassing, can you now shoot anyone who sends you an email that you didn't want? Does this include your cousing who keeps sending you those stupid chain letters???

Re:ObNelson

[bigdavesmith]

I for one am in favor of the death penalty for anyone who sends me an e-card with a big-headed cat and a song composed entirely of 'meows'. I'm coming for you, Aunt Jane.

Re:ObNelson

[FuzzyDaddy]

taxing a person's servers with unwanted e-mails is a form of trespass

It's trespass when you send enough emails to affect the functioning of someone's server. A single email wouldn't cause this problem.

Re:ObNelson

[Wornstrom]

if they arent making money spamming, wtf are they doing spamming?

Re:ObNelson

[ajs]

Just wait until the first time that ruling is cited in a case where some company sues a person who emails various management to complain about a product, or in response to a consumer advocasy drive. "Damages" will, of course, be assessed in terms of 3 days of the company's entire IT staff's salaries and the price of several mail servers.

Re:ObNelson

[budgenator]

I'm sure that even in Texas you can't walk into the town saloon and shoot somebody in face and say in your defense, "Well y'all see the varmit was on my property lastweek without permission, and it took me a while to track his yellow-bellied ass down". You'd actually have to shoot them on our property, very probablly in a location unitended for public access, and probably hope he didn't crawl off your property before the police got there.

So in Texas you'd need to shoot'em while the email was till downloading to be legal but of course IANAL, you should talk to yours before trying it..

Re:ObNelson

[Mister Whirly]

I though in Texas you could shoot anybody, anywhere, for any reason. Isn't that why people live in Texas??

Re:ObNelson

[Anonymous Coward]

So does this mean that Slashdot, the editors, and/or the posters can be arrested or sued for taking someone's server down with the Slashdot Effect?

Re:ObNelson

[name*censored*]

I think the idea is, thousands of people could file a class action suit.. or, large email servers (ISPs, gmail, etc) could sue for thousands of instances of the same spam.. it all adds up.

Re:ObNelson

[SomeoneGotMyNick]

ust wait until the first time that ruling is cited in a case where some company sues a person who emails various management to complain about a product, or in response to a consumer advocasy drive.

TFA talks about the defendant forging the mail headers as a basis for ruling. I don't particularly think many will try to forge mail headers in a complaint about a product. They would most likely expect some sort of response.

Re:ObNelson

[budgenator]

No you can't shoot anybody for any reason, but you can get married without realizing it!

Re:ObNelson

[Mister Whirly]

Technically, that would be shooting yourself in the foot.

Re:ObNelson

[lysergic.acid]

No, you're right. I'd compare it more to littering. One or two e-mails isn't a problem for any single person, but the collective resources (technological and human) consumed by hundreds of millions of unsolicited e-mails does have a cost to society. Now, malware I would consider to be comparable to tresspassing. It doesn't have the physical endangerment aspect so shooting someone for digital tresspassing probably wouldn't be justifiable either. But then again I've never been in favor of these laws that encourage a shoot first, ask questions later attitude.

Nine years for annoying AOL Customers....

[Sting_TVT]

God, how many years will the "You've got Mail" voice actor get?

Re:Nine years for annoying AOL Customers....

[aplusjimages]

Elwood Edwards is the voice actor. Why would he get time? He was annoying, but you asked for that service when you signed up with AOL. And don't tell me you never got excited when you heard those three magical words.

Re:Nine years for annoying AOL Customers....

[jamar0303]

Off-topic, but my cell phone had that "you've got mail" as the default ringtone for text messages (in the same voice too- I compared it to the AOL sound)

Re:Nine years for annoying AOL Customers....

[soft_guy]

but you asked for that service when you signed up with AOL.

They also use that annoying sound in their TV ads - did I ask for it when I turned on my television?

Did I ask to have zillions of disks mailed to me?

Actually, I was working for a company that was trying to sell something to AOL and I found myself in a meeting with the guy who came up with the idea of sending disks to everyone on the planet. Part of me seriously wanted to jump across the table and strangle him.

Re:Nine years for annoying AOL Customers....

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously you weren't, because the idea for mass producing AOL disks for distribution came from a woman.

Twit.

Re:Nine years for annoying AOL Customers....

[Rob T Firefly]

I'm glad you didn't.. that business model meant that for the last 5 years or so of the floppy era, I didn't pay for a single disc. Hooray for getting a fictional computer store with my address onto their floppy mailing list!

They used some quality floppies, too, in order to survive being thrown around by postal workers. No cheapo Fujifilm crap with the oxide flaking off.

Re:Nine years for annoying AOL Customers....

[SanityInAnarchy]

I know there's a voice actor who I hear every time I call my ISP. He says "You've got spam!" Then it tells me why, if spam is at all a problem for me, "You NEED LISCO!"

So if we have VOIP

[joshetc]

Does that mean we can sue telemarketers? The last couple of years I've found them to be far more annoying than spammers. Spam is more easily blocked and can be taken care of on my time. Telemarketers though, I have to choose between getting up during dinner / sleeping to answer the phone or dealing with the damn thing ringing every 5 minutes.

I'm still glad to see some spammers in jail though. I hope they all rot in prison then in hell.

Re:So if we have VOIP

[Silver Sloth]

Whilst I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment, how many times do I have to tell people I don't do business that way, framing the law is significantly more complex. Here in the UK the TPS http://mpsonline.org.uk/tps/ should prevent the majority of telemarketers, and

Under Government legislation introduced on 1st May 1999 and replaced on 11th December 2003 by the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations 2003, it is unlawful to make unsolicited direct marketing calls to individuals who have indicated that they do not want to receive such calls.

so I guess you've got your wish. The difference is that you've got to make the effort.

Re:So if we have VOIP

[tddoog]

Have you registered with the do not call registry?

Since registering I can't remember getting a single telemarketing call. I don't think it applies to politicians though, surprise.

Re:So if we have VOIP

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy an answering machine. Problem solved.

Re:So if we have VOIP

[aplusjimages]

Seriously. I registered when it first came out and we still get calls. My friends still get calls. It's not as much, but we still get calls.

Re:So if we have VOIP

[tddoog]

Man, that just makes me feel unpopular. Even telemarketers don't like me.

Re:So if we have VOIP

[allacds]

From the www.donotcall.gov website --
"The National Do Not Call Registry does not limit calls by political organizations, charities, or telephone surveyors."
"A telemarketer or seller may call a consumer with whom it has an established business relationship for up to 18 months after the consumer's last purchase, delivery, or payment - even if the consumer's number is on the National Do Not Call Registry"

Finally -- "30. What happens to companies that don't pay for access to the registry?

A company that is a seller or telemarketer could be liable for placing any telemarketing calls (even to numbers NOT on the registry) unless the seller has accessed the registry and paid the fee, if required. Violators may be subject to fines of up to $11,000 per violation. Each call may be considered a separate violation."

So in summary -- if you are still getting calls, first tell any telemarketer calls you get to remove you from their lists. Then if they continue to call, file a complaint against them at the aforementioned website.

Re:So if we have VOIP

[plague3106]

Except that the telemarketers found a way around it.

I've been getting calls to my cell phone no less; they claim they got my # when I used a credit card at a gas station. They're calling to give me '$40 of free gas.' Now if they really wanted to send it to me, all they have to do is drop it in the mail. But for some reason they call and need me to give them my information. Oh no, they aren't trying to sell me something though..

Re:So if we have VOIP

[Xzerix]

Yes, we (the UK) have the telephone preference service.

But does it stop the b******s calling from the other side of the world? No.

Anyone who interrupts my Sci-Fi marathons should be shot. Hung. Drawn. Quartered. Castrated. Boiled in Sulfuric Acid.

then I'll get cross...

Re:So if we have VOIP

[Intron]

I know a guy who worked on the software for differentiating "Hello? (rising tone, pause)..." from "Hi. I'm not here right now." so that the calls that are answered by a human get put through to the telemarketer (or recorded message) and the others get dumped. If you want to fake out the machines, answer the phone "Hi. This is Intron. I'm home right now. Who's calling, please?"

Re:So if we have VOIP

[bigdavesmith]

The problem with the do not call registry is that they are still allowed to call if it is a charitable or political call, I believe. At least, those are the ones I still get.

I don't mind the political ones, because they make the elections way easier. I keep a list of every politician I get a call from, and don't vote for them.

The charity ones are very annoying though. I get at least a call a week from some charity wanting to know if they can count on my donation. Donations start at just $25. Surely I can afford that. Can they put me down for a $25 donation?

Re:So if we have VOIP

[hackstraw]

Spam is more easily blocked and can be taken care of on my time. Telemarketers though, I have to choose between getting up during dinner / sleeping to answer the phone or dealing with the damn thing ringing every 5 minutes.

Maybe my area is different than yours, but the number of telemarketers went from too much, to almost zero after I got a new telephone number _AND_ when I got the number, I paid an extra $1.50 or so a month to have the number unlisted.

About once every 3-5 months I get a charitable organization that can sneak through the laws. For a while I did get some calls from India when someone either lied about their phone number or they had the number before I did, but those have gone away too.

Now, I think its silly that I have to pay extra for less "features", but to me its worth it. In the "everybody has 15-20 phone numbers that change all the time and none of them are able to be looked up in the phonebook" era, a phone book entry seems pretty useless. Yes, I do have a land line, but my work pays for a cell phone, and that is the primary number I give to people which they would not find in a phone book anyway.

I wish I could pay for a PO box and eliminate the snail mail spam as well, but even if I did pay for one, I would still get crap in my mailbox in front of my house. Is there a way to disconnect one of those, or can I just pull it out of the ground?

Re:So if we have VOIP

[rec9140]

I have to choose between getting up during dinner / sleeping to answer the phone or dealing with the damn thing ringing every 5 minutes.

Why do you answer the phone ? I've never understood this "need" to answer a phone. Just because it rings does not require that you answer it.

With CallerID you should know whether you need to answer it or not. Unknowns and out of areas should be blocked by either software on a PC or some telcos offer a service to do this which requires you to put in your number or a PIN. NOTE: Be SURE to CHANGE the PIN from the default or any one who knows the default can bypass it. The default is really easy since its 4 DIGITS. HINT!

I don't asnwer phones unless the CallerID is some one who I want to talk with.

I make use of 800/877 numbers extensively to ensure I get a good CallerID via ANI to ICLID translation. So unless your setting a bogus ANI on your trunk (which there are a few who are smart enough to do this, but most don't), your CallerID block just went FIZZT when calling me. I don't give out any number other than the 800/877 numbers and they are set for work, personal, throw aways for things like banks etc.. No one gets a local number.

Result, ZERO telemarketers. Calling an 800/877 for telemarketing purposes is illegal. So is calling for a whole number of others reasons.

People who bawlk at the number when I start out "area code 877..." Ok fine.. heres the last 7 digits and they throw in the local NPA. Fine with me. Some poor sod is getting my calls from all the marketing droids, not me! :)

Oh and that Do Nota Call Registry.... DO NOT USE! Do you really want your unlisted phone number in a database other than the telcos?

Re:So if we have VOIP

[vertinox]

Telemarketers though, I have to choose between getting up during dinner / sleeping to answer the phone or dealing with the damn thing ringing every 5 minutes.

Ever since I started to use a cell phone for my primary means of communication the "telemarketer" problem has gone away.

Mostly because its illegal for telemarketers to call cell phones.

I know many people don't like cell phones, but I only have a LAN line in my house for the alarm system but I could hook an old POTS phone up to it to call out if I lost my cell phone.

Re:So if we have VOIP

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah i fell for the charity treadmill. Collection for the volunteer firefighters, they send out some stickers, etc. I figured what the hell, those guys are alright, putting their lives on the line etc. and I donate. The next week, it's the state police, then the local sherriffs collecting for needy kids, then the state police again. They always make it sound so trivial, you know, $25 donation would really help us out, etc. Tell them you just donated a couple weeks ago and they throw that "Oh, well we don't want to bust you" cop humor blurb out there (see the double meaning?). After a while I just stopped answering my home phone, since anyone I want / need to talk to calls me on my cell phone anyway. Next thing I know, there are the return mail envelopes coming to my house (the ones they send to you for you to mail in the check), only they are addressed to other people, with names like Ali and Mohammed, and I have no idea who they are. What are they, trying to make me think that if the donations don't come in some terrorist task force is going to camp out across the street in a van? Finally I had to get pushy with them so I called them and told them that, you know, I donated a couple times, but it is kind of ridiculous to be getting calls twice a month for non tax deductible donations, plus there are no Ali's or Mohammed's here in this house, so remove me from your records. Never heard from them since.

Re:So if we have VOIP

[cortana]

If they have any business presence in the UK at all (likely since they are phoning you in order to sell you something) then you can sue them.

Re:So if we have VOIP

[pete6677]

These are scams. At least twice a year this is in the news, where some group is making false claims to raise money in the name of the local police. They always deny that their real fundraisers use telemarketing. This is why telemarketing charity groups have lost all credibility.

Re:So if we have VOIP

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had some that are different - They answer, but the line is silent for about a minute. Then the automated announcement starts. They don't WANT to talk to a person, they want to leave the message on the machine. Why? Your typical answering machine doesn't request to put your number on their Do Not Call list, making future calls illegal.

I'm in the US, and the Do-Not-Call registry has almost eliminated all telemarketing calls (except for a very few with businesses who can legitimately claim an existing business relationship...).

Re:So if we have VOIP

[joshetc]

Uh, I covered that. If I DONT answer it the thing rings. They also tend to continue to call back until they get an answer..

Re:So if we have VOIP

[budgenator]

I just keep a postit with a couple of legal references on the wall and when they call and get to the human spiel, I go off on them. When You got them convinced that your going to start swearing at them, instead you demand the address of their legal dept. Invariable they have an automated dialer which says "Please Hold for an Important Meassage" and thereby violate the federal anti-junk fax law, so telling the poor sap on the end of the line that your actually going to sue them for $500.00, gets you on the do not call list for keeps.

47 U.S.C. Section 227. Restrictions on Use of Telephone Equipment ...
(b) Restrictions on Use of Automated Telephone Equipment
(1) Prohibitions. It shall be unlawful for any person within the United States - ...
(B) to initiate any telephone call to any residential telephone line using an artificial or prerecorded voice to deliver a message without the prior express consent of the called party, unless the call is initiated for emergency purposes or is exempted by rule or order by the Commission under paragraph (2)(B); ...
(3) Private Right of Action. A person or entity may, if otherwise permitted by the laws or rules of court of a State, bring in an appropriate court of that State -
(A) an action based on a violation of this subsection or the regulations prescribed under this subsection to enjoin such violation,
(B) an action to recover for actual monetary loss from such a violation, or to receive $500 in damages for each such violation, whichever is greater, or
(C) both such actions.
If the court finds that the defendant willfully or knowingly violated this subsection or the regulations prescribed under this subsection, the court may, in its discretion, increase the amount of the award to an amount equal to not more than 3 times the amount available under subparagraph (B) of this paragraph.

OBTW it's a junk fax law, sending "messages" to machines "capable" of recieving faxes is illegal, even if it's an email sent to a computer with a never-used fax-moden card! All you really need to do is file a claim in your state's small caims court, it's designed into the federal law that way on purpose.

Re:So if we have VOIP

[Mister Whirly]

If you sign up for the federal Do Not Call Registry https://www.donotcall.gov/default.aspx and telemarketers continue to call you, they can get some big fines slapped on them. Not sure if you can sue, but it did put a damper on all those annoying calls after I signed up a few years back...

Re:So if we have VOIP

[QMO]

AFAIK, in the US telemarketing to cell phones is illegal.

Small claims court could get you a couple of thousand?

Pure rumor-fed speculation here.

Re:So if we have VOIP

[QMO]

If you really don't want anyone to interrupt you during the "Sci-Fi marathons," it should be easy enough to unplug the phone. The trouble comes when you are okay with some people interrupting.

Re:So if we have VOIP

[plague3106]

The catch is they may not be selling anything at all; they may be wanting my info so that they can resell it themselves. Could be a loop hole..

Re:So if we have VOIP

[tompaulco]

The do not call registry does not go nearly far enough. It only relieves you from calls from telemarketers. It does nothing to the groups that give me the most trouble: Charity groups, politicians, and surveyers.
Not to mention, many telamarketers are spinning their sale to fall into one of the other categories, for instance, asking you to do a brief survey about their product before trying to sell it to you.
As usual, the best response is to ask for their home phone number and what time they eat dinner and tell them you will call them back then.

Re:So if we have VOIP

[tompaulco]

Actually, automated announcement are quite specifically illegal unless you have opted in to a calling list.
I have had, however, telemarketers call, and the line be silent for a few minutes while the autodialer machine makes a determination that I am a human, and then passes it off to an operator so they can talk to you and avoid getting in trouble for having an automated message.
Once again, the politicans seem to be immune from the automated announcement laws, because I get stuff from them about twice a week on my answering machine.

Re:So if we have VOIP

[tompaulco]

when I got the number, I paid an extra $1.50 or so a month to have the number unlisted.
I think it is unfair that you should have to pay extra to have your number unlisted, or to have to pay extra for caller ID. This should be a feature that you can choose or not choose for free and have the expense paid as part of a tax on telemarketers, politicians, surveyers, and charitable organizations. Actually, only the caller ID is an expense. Not printing your name in a phone book is actually a credit to the phone company's bottom line, or at least it would be if they were not selling your information without your permission.
I wish I could pay for a PO box and eliminate the snail mail spam as well
I don't mind snail mail spam because 1) it is paid for by the sender, not the receiver, 2) it subsidizes my first class mail, 3) it cuts down on heating bills in the winter.
That being said, you could probably put in a forwarding order from your home address to a P.O. Box. I don't believe they will forward bulk rate stuff. Then you can just substitute a rubbish bin for your physical mailbox.

Re:So if we have VOIP

[hackstraw]

I think it is unfair that you should have to pay extra to have your number unlisted, or to have to pay extra for caller ID.

I don't have caller ID even though I want it. I'm protesting them making me pay for it. My cordless phones have caller ID builtin to the handsets, but I would have to pay more than my overpriced $30/mo to have the ability to tap into information that is already on the wire to begin with. Now, I have had someone here on /. tell me that there is some gizmo whatever in the background so it may actually cost the phone company .30/mo or something for caller ID, but I simply do not understand why a phone costs me $30/mo that only works in my local area. No, I don't want 911. Thanks for offering, but I'm not interested. If I'm dying and by myself and I can't go to a neighbors house, then I will die like I'm supposed to, thanks. No, I don't care about the phone working when my electricity doesn't. In fact, my phone doesn't because all of my phones are cordless and need power to work. I do not understand why broadband from the same company is like $24/mo and I can go anywhere in the world 24/7 but my phone costs more, and does not go over 50 miles or so from my house. I have to pay extra to go beyond that, so I don't pay and ask people to call me if its long distance or use a calling card. I may get VOIP because its cheaper, but then I may have to get new phones and I like my phones.

This should be a feature that you can choose or not choose for free and have the expense paid as part of a tax on telemarketers, politicians, surveyers, and charitable organizations. Actually, only the caller ID is an expense. Not printing your name in a phone book is actually a credit to the phone company's bottom line, or at least it would be if they were not selling your information without your permission.

I would assume somewhere in the fine print you give them permission. They charge you to have the number unlisted because they make money off of selling the information otherwise. I don't know how common this is, but you can buy phone listings that are organized by area and go down the street. Pretty slick, huh?

Re:So if we have VOIP

[jonbryce]

You have to find them first. And that can be pretty difficult.

A more suitable punishment...

[__aaclcg7560]

Would be to have the spammers make and eat spam (the meat) all day while the prison guards sing about the joys of spam.

Re:A more suitable punishment...

[LoTechDave]

I would like to know the name of these clowns and address of the correctional facility they are at so I could post it for /.ers. My idea of a more suitable punishment includes receiving 30-40 postcards a day while in jail. On the postcards we could attempt to sell useful products like 'eyes for the back of your head", soap on a rope, removable tatoos of tits, and of course 'Prison Spam' which has grill marks that look like bars.

Re:A more suitable punishment...

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously haven't eaten spam (the chopped pork and ham product). It is very nice. A lot nicer than prison food (not that I've tried prison food, but I did eat a few school dinners).

Re:A more suitable punishment...

[Thaelon]

Better yet, send them KY jelly, and gay porn mags. Or better yet, gay porn mags and NO KY!

Trespassing

[Anonymous Coward]

taxing a person's servers with unwanted e-mails is a form of trespass

Does this mean if I receive spam from him, I'm legally allowed to shoot him?

Re:Trespassing

[phalse phace]

Only in Texas

Re:Trespassing

[everett]

And Florida, but you have to cram him inside your server first.

Re:Trespassing

[ScentCone]

Does this mean if I receive spam from him, I'm legally allowed to shoot him?

You just have to say the magic words. It's very important to use your best Edward G. Robinson tone, of course: "He was trespassing, see. Yeah. And I was fearing for my safety, see. And the safety of my loved ones, see. Yeah, see."

It's important to be assertive about such statements. You can't sound hesitant, or imply any misgivings. That's why these are the two most useless words in the English language: "But, officer..."

Oh, and don't shoot them in the back. And if you do, stand them back up, and shoot them again in the front. Those CSI guys can figure it out, but once they've heard your Edward G. Robinson, they'll let it go.

Note: this is not good advice. Do not follow it, or taunt Happy Fun Ball, either.

Re:Trespassing

[Anonymous Coward]

Only in Florida, I'm afraid. Just claim that you felt threatened.

Re:Trespassing

[griffjon]

Yee fuckin' haw, time to move back home. Judge, that spammer needed some killin'.

Re:Trespassing

[Mhtsos]

You just have to say the magic words. It's very important to use your best Edward G. Robinson tone, of course: "He was trespassing, see. Yeah. And I was fearing for my safety, see. And the safety of my loved ones, see. Yeah, see."
So it's something like "It's coming right for us"

ouch

[v1ncent]

Ouch! 9 years... do it to 'em!

Re:ouch

[aplusjimages]

Now they'll get unsolicited sex ads, except it won't be ads, and they can't ignore it.

Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[MBC1977]

This is great, because personally, I'm tired of advertisements I don't want (i.e Viagra, GetRichQuick,

other assorted unwanted ads. Now if we could adapt this law to work on the physical mailbox, I

would not have keep throwing away junk mail and other stupid stuff, like how many DISH Network offers

does one really need, much less use.

I realise it may they be trying to make a living, but not at the expense of my peace of mind.

Regards,

MBC1977,

(US Marine, College Student, and Good Guy!)

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[tddoog]

Be careful what you wish for. Bulk mailing helps subsidize the current mail system. Without it, either prices would go up or there would be a reduction in service (mail delivery every other day). Remember the USPS is one of the few gov't organizations that supports itself without taxes. All of the bureaucracy and none of the pork.

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[mrbcs]

In my little town, all I have to do is tell the Post Office that I don't want junk mail. I get none at all now.

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[Aladrin]

We tried that in our 'little town' and the answer was 'they've paid to have it delivered, and we have to deliver it.'

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[aplusjimages]

I thought the post office broke away from the government and that's why prices keep increasing. Also isn't that why its http://www.usps.com/ instead of http://www.usps.gov?

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[Seanasy]

You have the right to refuse mail. I wonder what would happen if you just started refusing every piece of junk mail that came. Maybe they would decide it's easier to just not deliver any to you.

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[nickmue]

You saw how bad Newman flipped out on Kramer for trying that didn't you??

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[nephillim]

Actually you can have a bit of fun with the real mail spammers by mailing random things back to them in those nice, prepaid, stamped envelopes. I have noticed a decline in the amount of junk mail I get since I started mailing their own mailings back, food wrappers, slices of american cheese, bannana peels, ... back to them. .... I would NOT advise you to try flour/baking soda !!!

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[Brobock]

Most of your mail spam originates from the USPS. Advertisers pay them to put inserts in every mail box. Have you noticed the ad papers never have your address written on it. I have personally attempted to stop this and all I got from the Washington Post was "How did you get on our circular?" They know damn well how you got on it. The USPS would have to carry a list of DoNotSpam names with them which would be too tedious.

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[fossa]

I emailed the USPS about this very thing, the ads with no address on them. They uselessly replied "You can write to each individual companys that are sending you the items or you can remove your name from common mailing lists [by writing to a few major mailing list mongers]". Well, gee, thanks, but there is no obvious "individual company" to write to. I heard a rumour that you can request that your postman not deliver these... I think I will try writing REFUSED on the next one I get and see what happens. I'm always at work when the postman comes so unfortunately I've never met him which makes me moderately nervous about annoying him.

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[Khyber]

Bulk mailing helps subsidize the current mail system. Without it, either prices would go up or there would be a reduction in service

Prices go up anyways. I remember when it was 27c to send a letter, now it's about to be 41c. This is in a 15-year timeframe, FYI. Prices are skyrocketing, with or without the bulk advertising distribution. And there's already a reductio in service. Mailpeople won't bother to drop your mail off if there's as much as a tiny marble in front of your mailbox, all they'll do is leave a note on your mailbox saying "mve it" and NOT DELIVER YOUR MAIL. I've dealt with the USPS on this issue amny times, and I'm about ready to sue them. If you can put a note ON MY MAILBOX stating that you can't deliver my mail because something is in the way of the mailbox, how the hell did you get the note on my mailbox in the first place? The USPS fails to answer that one, everytime, and someone gets fired everytime I ask that question.

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[Dun Malg]

I thought the post office broke away from the government and that's why prices keep increasing. Also isn't that why its http://www.usps.com/ instead of http://www.usps.gov? [ Reply to This ]

Well.....sort of. They are separated from the government in that they are not subsidized by federal tax money, being required to support themselves on what they bring in. But at the same time, they are a tentacle of the federal government and can't raise postal rates without Uncle Sugar's permission, and you will still go to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison for robbing a mail carrier.

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[Xemu]

In Sweden, there is a law that if you put a sign on your mailbox that says "reklam nej tack" the mailman must not deliver any junk mail. If they do it anyway you're allowed to let your mööse bite them! (Swedish: Varning för älgen!)

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[Don853]

Your mail carrier must be lazy. Mine always delivers everything, and even has the decency to toss anything that isn't marked as fragile and won't fit through the mail slot up onto my balcony so it won't get stolen.

And in my mind, being able to send something from New Jersey to California in 2-4 days for 41c is still a pretty good deal. 60% inflation in price over 15 years? Not too bad. Lower rate of increase than college tuition or gas prices, to be sure.

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[raehl]

USPPS is a government-owned comanny, whose Board of Directors is either directly or indirectly appointed by the President of hte United States.

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[PitaBred]

That works in a socialist country where taxes pay for everything. We don't do that as much here, though some would disagree ;) All it would do here is make prices go up for sending legitimate mail.

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

You do realize that BOTH of those URLs work just fine, I hope.

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[Mister Whirly]

Great, so in addition to our phone and bank records, now the NSA is reading our mail too??

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[Xemu]

Your explanation sounds plausible but is wrong. Postage in Sweden isn't paid by taxes. It's private delivery and open competition. The Swedish Post has the lion share of the market but there are several competing private companies that delivers mail and they all must comply with the legislation that gives you the right to reject junk mail.

As far as incrementing the cost of sending legitimate mail ... did you know that most people sends less than 1 letter per month nowadays. A modest increase of postage is a very small price to pay to get rid of all junk mail for them. Besides, less junk mail is good for the environment. Mööses thrives in a healthy junk mail free environment.

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[weasel5i2]

Argh. tddoog said: "Be careful what you wish for. Bulk mailing helps subsidize the current mail system. Without it, either prices would go up or there would be a reduction in service (mail delivery every other day). Remember the USPS is one of the few gov't organizations that supports itself without taxes. All of the bureaucracy and none of the pork."

Whaaat?! You're kidding, right? So we pay $$$ for stamps for what reason? You seem to be a bit factually impaired:

Those bulk obnoxious "Smart Shopper" mailouts are not affiliated with the USPS in any way! They are marketing spam sent out by private companies who are only interested in profits, and not the public message delivery infrastructure (beyond the enabling of their trade, that is..)

Ever get those newspaper-like ads, and nested in the middle of them is the "Missing Person" card? THAT is your culprit right there. Federal postal regulations require that ALL spammy mailouts must contain a reference to the actual company sending it out. Look for the card, contact the company who made the card, and request that they remove you from their marketing lists. Simple. And doing so does not hurt the USPS in any way.

The main companies responsible for the junk? ADVO Inc., PennySaver, The Flyer, Val-Pak. Note that none of these are the United States Postal Service. Again, I must point out the ever-inflating price of postage stamps. I remember when postage for a standard letter was only $0.23! If mail delivery is subsidized by junk mail, then where does my stamp money go?

Check out http://www.privacyrights.org/fs/fs4-junk.htm for more information, loads of facts, and many suggestions on how to reduce junk mail (in the US, anyway)

--Weasel

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[NaDrew]

I wonder what would happen if you just started refusing every piece of junk mail that came.

I tried that a few years ago. The mail carrier left a cute note saying "bulk mail can't refused". Now it just goes from the mailbox to the paper recycling bin located conveniently underneath.

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[lemon031]

They'd better hope they don't ever antagonize the horn...

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[johneee]

In Canada, (since we seem to be getting into a international comparison of junk mail refusal) you can put something on your mailbox that says no junk mail please, and they'll not deliver any Unadressed Ad Mail. They will still deliver anything with your name on it (since they don't really have any way of discerning what's junk and what's real from those) but you'll be left alone with the 'give one of these to everyone at this postal code' kind of thing.

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[Ironsides]

Now if we could adapt this law to work on the physical mailbox

Slight problem with this. By law, you do not 'own' the mailbox, even the one in front of your house. The USPS 'owns' it. At least, it is considered their property for all intensive purposes.

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[tompaulco]

My mailman delivered my mail even when he had to get out of his truck because some punk kids thought it would be fun to push my brick mailbox over.

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[tompaulco]

Slight problem with this. By law, you do not 'own' the mailbox, even the one in front of your house. The USPS 'owns' it. At least, it is considered their property for all intensive purposes.
Luckily there are no such thing as intensive purposes, so the USPS doesn't own MY mailbox. I had to pay for it, and I own it. They sure didn't go out of their way to fix it when punk kids knocked it over.

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[Copid]

The point is not that they're affiliated with the USPS, but rather thatthat the prepaid presorted bulk mail is easier to deal with and generates more surplus for the USPS, allowing them to charge less for their general services (being nonprofit, that extra money doesn't get paid out to shareholders...it either goes to expanding services or keeping other prices lower). If $0.39 is too much to get a sheet of paper across the country in a few days, you could always carry it yourself.

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[epee1221]

Yes, they do. The .gov URL redirects to the .com URL.

Re:Good, now adapt this to Regular Mail

[Aladrin]

Wow, that's great. My father is all 'that's not right' but I"m going to buy a stamp and do that. I'm sick of the garbage. The worst around here is that several small newspapers deliver to EVERYONE like that with a 'current resident' address. Besides being annoying, other mail can get inside the newspaper and get lost.

Suing the spammer

[Rik Sweeney]

Disclaimer: I didn't RTFA

So how will this work? Will it only apply if the spammer is in the US? I doubt I'd be able to sue someone from Korea...

Re:Suing the spammer

[dingofish]

Well... If he come to a visit in US, I guess they can pick him up after customs. :-)
It's probably similar to the BetOnSport's Peter Dick case?

Re:Suing the spammer

[sl4sh13]

You'd get to eat his dog :-)

Now that's what I call justice

[jimstapleton]

but if I sued someone like that, I wouldn't want to sue for money. Since the crime is spam, I wanna sue for meat. Let me bring in a knife or sword for the verdit if I'm successful, I'll carry out the sentance for free... I think the digits will do nicely (and prevent more spam)

Re:Now that's what I call justice

[morie]

Learn from your classics. Be sure to sue for some blood and other spilled bodily fluids as well...

Re:Now that's what I call justice

[Darth Android]

Missing digits don't stop spam; they just mean it has more misspellings of 'Nigeria' than ever before!

Oh, come on!

[tygerstripes]

a form of trespass, little different than intruding on their land or making unwanted use of their private property.

Look, I'm all for spammers getting ass-raped by rhinos or whatever, but to suggest that emailing someone is equivalent to trespass??!? Just how out-of-touch and confused does the state have to get with technology before they're sat down in an electric chair in front of a monitor, with a sticky on its side saying "Learn"?

This is a totally spurious comparison. Firstly it is the confluence of internet/SM protocols, not the spammer, that puts the email on your server - although in the vast majority of these cases, you can believe that the recipient doesn't own the server at all. In those cases, the analogy would be more like "little different than sending them lots of junkmail which, when they feel like it, they can go down to the local post office to collect and bin".

For those who do own their mail servers - corporations, freelancers or other particularly tooled-up individuals - it's like dumping a shit-load of mail on their doorstep - again, through the postal service, which is an impartial, autonomous service that we deeply value!!

This spam is in no way infringing the rights or security of its recipients. It is a minor inconvenience, as is any form of junk mail, and when requested to desist it is illegal, just as is unsolicited junkmail when you so request (at least, in the UK). As such, yes, it should be punished. Is it entirely necessary, however, to confuse and inflame the issue with such shitty, uninformed, unqualified comparisons? And this from a court? Shit, they're supposed to be more responsible with language than anyone else in the country - what the hell does this guy think he's doing??

Re:Oh, come on!

[tinkerghost]

Take a look at it again. The biggest filter on prosecutablity is that you have to forge the headers you can send out spam all day every day as long as you are honest about where it's coming from. If you lie about where it's coming from, it's fraud and prosecutable. Check the laws again, you can put no return address on an envelope and it's fine, but if you put somebody else's address on it it's mail fraud. This is no different.

Re:Oh, come on!

[Fordiman]

"you can believe that the recipient doesn't own the server at all"

Well, not exactly. The user leases a portion of the server for the purpose of recieving mail. The spammer, through his actions, has spam on your property. It's more like flinging baseballs at your mailbox several times a day.

Still, after the bluefrog debacle, I'm all for blood. Jail's too nice for these spammers (though as you said, getting ass raped by large men named 'rhino' is a good first step).

Re:Oh, come on!

[stubear]

Wrong. When I put up a no trespass sign I'm setting limits on who can come onto my property. I'm likely going to allow family and friends to ignore the sign but everyone else better stay off or they'll get an ass full of buckshot. If someone were to disguise themselves as my brother and come onto my property it would still be trespass, I don't care how much they look like him. E-mail works the same way. I'm willing to allow a certain amount of e-mail come onto my server as long as they properly identify themselves. Spammers fail to do so and in fact they purposely forge headers to get past the virtual "no trespass" sign. You're making the incorrect assumption that all spammers are going to play by the rules and properly identify their e-mail. Guess what?

Re:Oh, come on!

[finity]

I think this is just one of many examples of how the current set of US laws is unfit to deal with issues in cyberspace. Right now, we adopt laws to fit the crime, and come up with (often poor) analogies to make them fit. I'm glad some spammers got busted; spam is anoying and, truly, if someone throws out enough spam, it can act as a form of denial of service. At the same time, though, we need to come up with a new way to govern cyberspace. One where the penalties fit the crime, and one that can move much more quickly than the US judicial system.

Re:Oh, come on!

[Eccles]

Not to mention the people who use someone else's address in the reply-to field. I periodically get mailer-daemon messages because some asshat has decided that an e-mail address using my personal domain is perfect for his/her reply-to address.

That being said, I would prefer large fines, internet restrictions, (maybe)house arrest, and a short prison spell (as a warning) as an alternative to spending the cost of a good college degree keeping him locked up for years.

Re:Oh, come on!

[tygerstripes]

Fine, so they're being naughty and pretending they're someone else. They're still not "entering your property", are they? If someone who is committing mail fraud with incorrect return addresses keeps sending you mail, it's irritating. It is most definitely not fucking trespass, and an ass full of buckshot is a criminally disproportionate response. You could shoot the mailman, you could go to the originator's house and shoot them, but clearly both are entirely inappropriate when the law has sufficient measures to prevent and counteract such problems.

I'm not objecting to the fact that this irritant is illegal and should be punished. My issue is with the unbelievably inflammatory and ignorant statement made by the court regarding email and trespass. It certainly is not the same thing and, unlike trespass, there is no implicit threat to your safety - or, let's face it, to property. It's just damned annoying.

Even with the sternest of signs, you can't stop a determined trespasser except by force, and I can see why you might want a shotgun as a deterrent. You invite and encourage mail and email, open forms of communication, and there is no way they can harm you (not talking about virii, trojans etc - whole other ballgame). Such a huge fucking difference!

Re:Oh, come on!

[twistedsymphony]

It boggles the mind how out of touch most political figures are with what could be considered basic modern technology. Flipping through the channels on TV a few days ago I caught a news program interviewing (IIRC) the mayor of Boston MA. I guess there was some poor schmuck who had the same name as him and a Blog with a url of his name. Apparently this guy was getting oodles of political hate mail from people who mistook him for the mayor.

The Journalist was taking some pleasure in poking fun at the mayor's lack of computer literacy. Do you have a website? "No", Do you have an email address? "No", Have you ever Googled anything? "I google... 24" (the number of the station)"... see what you guys are up to." Do you read any blogs? "I'll blog you in the head". It was incredible to watch the guy it he acted like he was on trial for something. Heck even my 75 year old Grandmother has an email address, shops online and visits blogs on cooking recipes. A politicians my father's age should be much more well versed in that stuff. Heck my father isn't even close to the most computer savvy person around but he's got a website for his business and uses his computer for a number of things.

Re:Oh, come on!

[AaronLawrence]

Maybe trespass is a bad analog, BUT it can be much worse than a minor inconvenience. Companies have had to shut down email addresses (like sales@wherever) because they are overwhelmed with spam. Like 1000 or more spams per day. Having to close and redirect one of your major customer contact methods isn't minor inconvenience.

Anyone with such an address that has to be listed for public contact suffers from spam, and they can't use aggressive filters because they can't afford to lose customer email.

Re:Oh, come on!

[plague3106]

but to suggest that emailing someone is equivalent to trespass??!? Just how out-of-touch and confused does the state have to get with technology before they're sat down in an electric chair in front of a monitor, with a sticky on its side saying "Learn"?

Tresspass can be classfied as 'making unwanted use of their private property.' They are 'making use' of my computer when it downloads THEIR message, and their message is also unwanted. I think it fits nicely.

Re:Oh, come on!

[plague3106]

Firstly it is the confluence of internet/SM protocols, not the spammer, that puts the email on your server

Ugh. So the message he wanted to send 'magically' appeared, with no effort from him. Your argument is that its ok to send mail bombs via the USPS. After all, its not the Unibomber, is the 'network of mail carrying stations that delivered the message to his mailbox.'

Re:Oh, come on!

[Peyna]

but to suggest that emailing someone is equivalent to trespass

Trespass to chattels (personal property) is what they are probably referring to, which is different than trespassing on real property. Another way to think of it would be "interference with personal property." In other words, by spamming these servers, the spammers have deprived the owner of the full use of his property and therefore he should be compensated appropriately.

Similar to the argument made by Intel in Intel v. Hamidi. Although, I think Intel lost that one, but it was on a much smaller scale and the California Supreme Court basically said unless the computer system is damaged or has its functioning impaired, the plaintiff would be SOL.

Re:Oh, come on!

[argle2bargle]

"This spam is in no way infringing the rights or security of its recipients. It is a minor inconvenience, as is any form of junk mail"

I couldn't disagree more. When you say it is little different from 'lots' of junkmail. Imagine if 6 18wheelers pulled up to your house and dumped TONS of junkmail on your doorstep, literally so much junkmail that you cannot open your front door. In fact, you have to hire an expensive service to remove the junkmail, as well as buying a larger house to accomodate the junkmail as it arrives. Oh and by the way, some of that junk mail contains anthrax, which if it gets missed by the service which you had to hire, will infect your family.

It is definately trespass.

My small companies email server has to block/process 247,000 spam emails in just the past two months, totalling 67 percent of all the email on the server. On some days the percent of spam reaches 90 percent. Even though it is blocked, this costs my bandwidth and my servers memory/cpu. It costs my company money.

Re:Oh, come on!

[wayne]

a form of trespass, little different than intruding on their land or making unwanted use of their private property.

... but to suggest that emailing someone is equivalent to trespass??!? Just how out-of-touch and confused does the state have to get with technology before they're sat down in an electric chair in front of a monitor, with a sticky on its side saying "Learn"?

Yes, "making unwanted use of their property" is a form of trespassing, known as Trespass to chattels, which is a well defined legal concept that has been around for hundreds of years. "Chattel" is the archaic legal term for personal property, in contrast with land or real estate.

Having watched the talks given at the last several years of MIT Spam Conferences, I can safely say that the people involved with drafting Virginia's anti-spam laws and prosecuting this particular spammer have a very good understanding of technology in general, and email in particular. They probably have a better understanding than than the average slashdot user. As horrible as it may be for some geeks to imagine, yes, there are a lot of lawyers that are very smart and can learn very technical stuff.

Firstly it is the confluence of internet/SM protocols, not the spammer, that puts the email on your server - although in the vast majority of these cases, you can believe that the recipient doesn't own the server at all.

You seem to have a very fuzzy concept of the internet and protocols. When someone puts a packet out on the net, they are, indeed, knowingly creating a process that will result in the packet ending up on the receiving computer's network port. It may not be the same exact electrons, but that is irrelevant. And, I assure you that AOL owns their servers and they are the ones that received the spam. Yes, customers of AOL rent the mailboxes from them, but AOL still has legal rights to the servers. This is no different than a hotel or apartment owner that rents out rooms/apartments. They still have legal rights to their property.

Not everyone likes the idea of applying the age old concept of Trespass to Chattels to the internet, for example, the EFF sees problems with it. I agree with the EFF on most things, and have contributed money to them, but in the area of spam, they act too much like chicken-little. The Virginia anti-spam law was narrowly taylored and well thought out. It is a shame that it large parts of it have been overridden by the much worse federal CAN-SPAM act.

Re:Oh, come on!

[Anonymous Coward]

And to show how much Virginia cares about public property, you can erect a fence on the border between yours and a neighbor's land and legally charge them half of the cost with no limit. But spam is over the line.

Re:Oh, come on!

[speculatrix]

Look, I'm all for spammers getting ass-raped by rhinos or whatever, but to suggest that emailing someone is equivalent to trespass??!? J

spamming steals people's time. if it takes one minute for reach recipient to delete a spam, then he only needs to have sent 4.7M spams to have wasted nine years of people's lives in deleting his crap.

spamming also uses network and computer resources that *could* more usefully have been used (though, I'll admit, chances are it doesn't).

Re:Oh, come on!

[tinkerghost]

RICO actually sounds good. Using fraud (fraudulent addressing) to run a business should come under racketeering laws. Siezing all his property & assets as 'profits derived from a racket' should be a nice dis-incentive for spamming.

Re:Oh, come on!

[GreyPoopon]

The biggest filter on prosecutablity is that you have to forge the headers you can send out spam all day every day as long as you are honest about where it's coming from.

Agreed. This is what REALLY makes me wonder how stupid the defense attorney thinks people are. From the article:

"You purchase an e-mail address list, alter the transmission information in the header of your e-mail to avoid retaliation, and on Easter morning send out a three-word e-mail to thousands of people: 'Christ is risen!' You have committed a felony in Virginia," Wolf said.

As a Christian, I find this appalling. It's a blatant attempt to appeal to religious sentiment, but it really backfires. First, if you are altering the information in the header to avoid retaliation, this means that you know up front you are sending your message to people who don't want to receive it. You certainly aren't going to win any converts that way. Second, you are sending the email at what ultimately boils down to shared expense with the recipient, so you are asking me to help pay for messages that I don't want to receive. Frankly, I'm insulted by his statement. Even as a Christian, I don't want to be receiving mass mailings from people I don't know, regardless of whether it is intended to be uplifting.

Wolf goes on to say that this is will be a shadow over free speech. I really don't see how. I'm not free to go to a business and tack up notices and advertisements without permission. And since it was being deposited on the mail servers of an ISP, this is exactly what the defendant was doing.

Re:Oh, come on!

[Anonymous Coward]

Another point:
other then forging the headers which in itself id consider a crime (yeah, i own a server), what do you think they are actually using to send the emails ?
Their computers ?
Legitimate servers ?
All those have been blacklisted ages ago.

They hijack machines. These are the same people that hire coders to write trojans, exploits and viruses for profit.
The aquire the machines illegally and are using them without their owners concent for illegal activities.

It is a minor inconvenience

??!! Wtf ?
Dude, have you ever started receving 1000k mails per hour around 12am on a machine that has the physicall limitations to 100k messages an hour ?
Watch your load rise, block entire countrys, find customers that are sending spam, search for wholes in software, clear the queue...
Consider how much time that costs, and how much time have you got before your customers that were on that machine start calling. Then getting refunds because they cant get their email between 11am and 2pm. Moving their accounts to someone with more horsepower. Then talk to your employer about the overtime that you had to spend on teaching sa the new ham and spam, clearing the queue from bounces because they accumulated to an astonishing 1m messages, the books you had to read etc.

Yeah. Minor inconvienience.

Its a drastic example, but it happens (yes, to me).
Not every company can afford to buy a server that handles that kind of load lightly.
Not every company can afford a fulltime admin.
Try freelancing as an admin - they dont call you when its good/bearable/bad - they call when the machine is spammed to its last user.

Re:Oh, come on!

[apendrag0n3]

Speaking as someone who runs mail servers for multiple domains (yes, I work for an ISP), let me just say that I, for one, think the comparison is apt and accurate. Maintaining a server environment where our paying customers are not inundated with the 80,000+ spam messages a day that we end up filtering out at our mail gateway takes MUCH time and money (both for personnel and equipment/software).

You may see this individual as merely taking advantage of a situation - "the confluence of internet/SM protocols, not the spammer, that puts the email on your server" - but I certainly do not. That would be like saying that the bank robber is not guilty because it was Smith & Wesson that built the firearm, and the gun dealer that sold it to him (legally), and the cab driver that drove him to the bank (unknowingly) all allowed him to rob this bank, so therefore he is not guilty of it. That is a confluence of EVENTS that leads to the same end. Criminal trespass and robbery.

Re:Oh, come on!

[thej1nx]

although in the vast majority of these cases, you can believe that the recipient doesn't own the server at all. In those cases, the analogy would be more like "little different than sending them lots of junkmail which, when they feel like it, they can go down to the local post office to collect and bin".

Are you really that dumb ? Or just pretending ?

Recipient doesn't owns the server ? Define "own". I am paying money to the ISP to "rent" space on their server to store my mails. Renting doesn't bestows a form of ownership ? You mean to say just because I am *renting* an apartment instead of being able to own one, *you* can come and put your stuff in one of the rooms?

Think again dumbass. It will land you in Jail, pronto. Plus beaten up very badly by me as well, if you persisted... with the law endorsing it. At least with spam, you are only going to Jail.

Yes, the servers are the ISPs property. Property rights say so. And the space I rent from them are *my* property for that period. And the owner decides what gets stored on that *private property*. Not *you*, dumbass!

The spam is not just a minor inconvinience. It is a very real loss of service. And especially to the ISP, it all adds up. You are using *their* bandwidth, whch they are paying to maintain. You are cutting into their profit.

If you were shaving off 10 cents from 10,000 accounts of a bank every day, you would be sent to jail for stealing 30 thousand bucks from the bank every month. The 10 cent won't get written off as a "minor inconvenience". You will get sent to jail for theft for several years. And with spam you are making businesses lose lot more than just 30,000 dollars each month, since you are sending emails by billions every months.

At least nobody pays engineers evey month to maintain and run a postal mailbox outside my house. So much for your brilliant comparision!

Even with free services like gmail or yahoo, your spamming is degrading their service, which means they lose their users. Which means less revenue from advertisements. Very real loss again. All thanks to your stealing.

Damn right, you are going to jail.

Re:Oh, come on!

[plague3106]

My issue is with the unbelievably inflammatory and ignorant statement made by the court regarding email and trespass. It certainly is not the same thing and, unlike trespass, there is no implicit threat to your safety - or, let's face it, to property. It's just damned annoying.

First off, in my state, there doesn't have to be any threat to safety, implicit or otherwise. Its merely defined as going onto someone else's property without permission. You could be there to give away sugar and spice, it doesn't matter, you're still guilty of trespass.

Second, it IS unwanted use of someone's private property. The internet connection and computer used to view the email. That apparently is the definition of trespass in that state, and spammers DO meet that criteria. The fact that it may not be dangerous and only annoying doesn't mean its not trespass.

Finally, I'd say that shooting someone IS an appropriate response to trespass, providing they refuse to leave. What reason does anyone have to go onto another's property without permission? You don't know the person, and you really don't know what their motives are. They could be giving away a car, or you could be next on their list of victims.

Re:Oh, come on!

[AmberBlackCat]

Although I don't think we're qualified to judge these people, I do think equal treatment is important. If it's okay to fine a little girl thousands of dollars for downloading music then it's okay to lock these trolls up for junk mailing.

Re:Oh, come on!

[tygerstripes]

No, it doesn't - that's like saying junk-mailers are "making use" of your mailbox when the mailman does his thing. Again, not illegal, nor should it be. If the postal service has to check that the sender is legit with you every time someone sends a letter, the system becomes unworkable and breaks down - both from the service's perspective and from yours. How else would people legitimately contact those they have never met? The laws that govern unsolicited junkmail are enough - this court statement just muddy's the waters.

Look, I appreciate that this is an emotive issue, especially for those who have dealt with a lot of spam and such, but ineffective application of perfectly suitable laws does not warrant additional laws. That way lies judicial ruin and opressive over-regulation.

If the current laws are not being enforced, why bother creating more laws? Once again, I have no problem at all with the ruling - just the ill-informed statement that followed it. It displays a fundamental lack of understanding of the issues.

Re:Oh, come on!

[tygerstripes]

Did you even read what I said? The statement that shooting is an inappropriate response is based on the premise that this action is not trespass, but more like unsolicited junk-mail - which is not defined as trespass in US or any other law. To then take your bizarre assumption and reiterate the shooting principle upon which it is based is called "begging the question", and is a really stupid argumentative trap that commonly displays a lack of ability to even see an argument from all perspectives, let alone entertain the possiblity of being wrong.

So, let's break it down: Is sending someone a letter through the post that they don't want trespass? Under US law, no, it isn't. It does indeed involve using their property - namely a mailbox, possibly a garden path for the mailman to walk on, but it is not trespass. If you tell the mailman to stop delivering then he will. You will not receive junk-mail. However, you want your legitimate mail, so you implicitly invite the mailman (is he trespassing? I think you'll find that hard to support) to deliver the mail. It is not his responsibility to vet the mail to see whether you approve of it or not. He is just a service provider.

It's the same with email. The service - which you pay for, true, and which is open to abuse - is not trespassing when it delivers the email as you invite it in. If the service were not impartial, we would not be talking about the internet (though that's a discussion for another article, I suspect). Why is this any different from junk-mail in your mail box? How can one be trespass, warranting physical retaliation, and the other not be?

Re:Oh, come on!

[tygerstripes]

No, that's not my argument at all. You're talking about something which can be compared to trojans and email worms, which is a different issue entirely - that is nothing like sending junk-mail. You're as guilty of muddying the waters as the court who made this spurious statement.

THE LAW ALREADY COVERS THESE THINGS - if such crimes were subject to trespass law (or whatever), these laws about spamming, mail fraud in the mail etc WOULD NOT EXIST. There would be no need for them!

The mail-bombing thing is an entirely different issue.

Re:Oh, come on!

[tygerstripes]

Try that thing with the trucks. Just try it. Then see if the court will convict the perpetrator of trespass. IT WILL NOT HAPPEN. This is not covered by the laws pertaining to trespass! It's exactly what I said - an inconvenience - but on a much larger scale. The analogous situation you provide would probably fall under harassment. But the perpetrator would legally not have committed any crime involving accessing your property.

Don't throw anthrax into the argument (or "thinking of the children" FFS) - that's not analogous, that would be like sending a trojan, worm, whatever in an email, which is covered by different laws, and is not the subject of this discussion.

Re:Oh, come on!

[Dun Malg]

They're still not "entering your property", are they? ... It is most definitely not fucking trespass

Hacking into someone else's computer is considered "criminal electronic trespass". I'm sorry if you think the word should only apply to someone hopping a fence and walking across the lawn, but it has a much wider meaning.

Re:Oh, come on!

[tygerstripes]

It's a welcome sight to see some informed response among the dross that's been posted in reply to my original comment.

I appreciate the notion of Trespass to Chattels. However, I think it is worth noting that the email service we install on our servers was so installed by our own volition, and it is that service which allows the spam to occupy our systems - the spam cannot enter without the appropriate system we have put in place. This is why I used the postal analogy - we invite the mailman every day, implicitly, accepting the consequences that may ensue. We put our trust in the various laws covering postal services that are designed to protect us from its possible abuse.

Since Trespass of Chattels does not apply when somebody sends junk mail to our postbox, nor, I believe, should it apply to mail servers. Again, we have laws which should protect us from the abuse of our email service. The fact that the laws are ineffectually enforced does not mean that they are not sufficient, but that their enforcement is insufficient.

The issue of paying for the service is a muddy one, but then how do you separate those who use "free" webmail services from those who run their own web services. It seems to me that the issue of cost of the mail service should not be a part of the criminal laws pertaining to spam - though of course, recompense can be sought through civil lawsuits, as this is their purpose.

Isn't spam law enough in itself, without bringing in the notions of "property"? I know the following is slightly off-topic and a somewhat nebulous issue (so please don't treat it as the same subject), but I personally found that my understanding of computer security took a huge leap when I ceased to see my bandwidth, processor cycles and memory as "property" and started to view them as "territory". All the principles of defense, ownership and security seemed a lot simpler to apply after that...

Re:Oh, come on!

[tygerstripes]

I agree. I don't disapprove of the ruling at all - just the analogy given by the court. It seems like an unreasonable icing on a very reasonable cake.

Re:Oh, come on!

[tygerstripes]

There are so many misapprehensions in your posting that I barely know where to start dismantling it, but let's just start by saying that calling someone Dumbass every few lines because you disagree with what they said is hardly clear-headed argument.

First: no, it isn't stealing. If I shaved 10 millionths of a cent from you bank account every day, it would be stealing. The spammers are not appropriating any of your lost funds however - merely causing you to do so by abusing the service you rent. That's wrong, obviously, which is why it's illegal under spam laws. That's the purpose of spam law. The fact that it's wrong doesn't make it stealing. The fact that you have lost money does not mean it has been stolen.

All of the points you make essentially state that Spamming Is Wrong. OF COURSE IT'S FUCKING WRONG - THAT'S WHAT THE JUDGMENT IS SAYING! But that does NOT mean it's trespass, and that's all I said - that it was an inaccurate and irresponsible comparison. If the court had said "it's the equivalent of murder" and I had objected to that statement, would you be calling me a dumbass for criticising the inappropriate comparison?

Next: no, you do not "own" the email service from your ISP. You rent it. They use it exclusively for delivery of email, and you voluntarily give them the money to do so - you are paying for a service. Web-space, server-space etc are not the same as an email service. The abuse of that service is of course wrong, but it is not stealing, nor is it trespassing on your space. Try and convict a spammer under trespass law - see how far you get. I think the judicial system has a clearer understanding of the law than you do.

Finally, once again, I did NOT say that spamming is acceptable. Of course it's fucking wrong, and it's illegal under ANTI-SPAM LAW. I did say I agreed with the judgment, didn't I? Pay attention! My objection was ONLY to the comparison with trespass, which it clearly is not, in legal terms.

Re:Oh, come on!

[greywords]

Just because it's there doesn't mean you have access to do whatever you want with it.

For example, most schools and universities have message boards (of the physical variety) scattered around their campuses. People post signs about upcoming events, items for sale, etc. If one person, however, were to put up dozens of identical fliers on all of the message boards, covering all other messages, the school could get that person in trouble for abusing the system.

Communal communication mediums are owned by a specific person or entity that grants specific rights to the people making use of the resource. We have to take into account that the server is owned and operated by that entity and we must abide by their rules. Anything else is "Trespass to Chattels", as it were.

Re:Oh, come on!

[soft_guy]

That being said, I would prefer large fines, internet restrictions, (maybe)house arrest, and a short prison spell (as a warning) as an alternative to spending the cost of a good college degree keeping him locked up for years.

I'd prefer the death penalty.

Re:Oh, come on!

[mythras]

It may have been said before, and it is painful to hear, but the laws against spam in Virginia were likely drafted by someone who worked in AOL's network group, at least in part. Being based in Virginia, and with former Governor Warner being from Northern Virginia, I'm sure the combined Dulles Corridor IT groups drafted the legislation for the state to rubber stamp. I, for one, am glad they did.

Re:Oh, come on!

[Buran]

Considering the fact that to deliver the junk the trucks would have had to enter one's property to be able to block the door, yes, it's trespass.

Re:Oh, come on!

[plague3106]

No, it doesn't - that's like saying junk-mailers are "making use" of your mailbox when the mailman does his thing.

I think technically mail boxes are 'owned' by the postal service. I believe they even have markings to that effect.

If the postal service has to check that the sender is legit with you every time someone sends a letter, the system becomes unworkable and breaks down - both from the service's perspective and from yours.

It IS illegal to forge a mailing address though. And with email the checks can be done electronically. It will slow things down a little, sure, but that doesn't mean its not feasable and that the spammers shouldn't have to do this.

How else would people legitimately contact those they have never met?

What if people don't want to be contacted by those they never met? Shouldn't that be their right?

The laws that govern unsolicited junkmail are enough - this court statement just muddy's the waters.

Nope, its pretty clear. The computer is owned by one entity, and the internet connection is paid for by them. At worse, none of MY resources are used when receiving junk mail; that's not the case for email.

Look, I appreciate that this is an emotive issue, especially for those who have dealt with a lot of spam and such, but ineffective application of perfectly suitable laws does not warrant additional laws. That way lies judicial ruin and opressive over-regulation.

Preventing others from gaining a benefit at another person's expense will hardly lead to over-regulation and judicial ruin. The people receiving this crap have a right NOT to be communicated with, especially at their own expense. Arguing this isn't a emotional issue at all; its a perfectly logical stance.

If the current laws are not being enforced, why bother creating more laws? Once again, I have no problem at all with the ruling - just the ill-informed statement that followed it. It displays a fundamental lack of understanding of the issues.

Who created a new law? Trespass has been around a lot longer than anti-spam laws.

Re:Oh, come on!

[tygerstripes]

Of course - forced entry to someone's property, I can see the reason behind that.

But is sending someone a junk letter trespass? If you forced your way into their house and put it on their kitchen table, yes - and that's what you're talking about with criminal hacking. If you put it in the mail like anyone else, no it isn't. The result is the same, but the means are perfectly legitimate. The method of the mail's entry to your property is via a service that you invite, knowing full well that such an abuse is possible but illegal. Spam law wouldn't exist if trespass law already covered this act.

Re:Oh, come on!

[plague3106]

Yes it is. It doesn't matter if the package is harmful or not. I'm sure a single person delivering thousands of snail mails to a residential address would be arrested as well. You're trying to say its not the sender's fault that an email arrived at its destination, which is exactly the affect the spammer was going for.

FWIW trespass doesn't cover the USPS because laws were created SPECIFICALLY to allow the postal carrier to come onto your property for the purpose of delivering mail. I also believe that mailboxes are technically the property of the USPS, whereas my computer and internet connection are not (they are owned / leased by me, respectively).

Re:Oh, come on!

[plague3106]

Did you even read what I said?

Yup.

The statement that shooting is an inappropriate response is based on the premise that this action is not trespass, but more like unsolicited junk-mail - which is not defined as trespass in US or any other law.

If the defintion of trespass in that state is 'unwanted use of personal property' then yes, spammers CAN be guilty of trespass. The spammers actions would not be possible without someone owning a computer. I think you should research the law; the US doesn't define trespass at all, that's up to the states.. and the state in the case may very well have a broad definition of trespass.

I've already addressed your statements in other posts on the differences between snail mail and email. One is that they needed a law SPECIFICALLY to allow postal carriers onto your property without your permission.

Re:Oh, come on!

[Skater]

I periodically get mailer-daemon messages because some asshat has decided that an e-mail address using my personal domain is perfect for his/her reply-to address.

I'm in that boat right now - someone is using one of my domain names on their reply-to address, so I get dozens (or more) mailer-daemon messages each day. I hate to automatically filter them into trash in case I send a message that bounces. Very frustrating.

Re:Oh, come on!

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't checked the ruling, but I suspect the article is oversimplifying. The usual claim for spam isn't trespass, it's "trespass to chattel", which is different and a much better fit. Trespass to chattel involves making unauthorized used of someone else's goods/land/etc.

Re:Oh, come on!

[budgenator]

trespass definition - trespass is the entry to another's property(property definition - is the right to use, enjoy, or possess a determinate thing) without right or permission
Therfore placeing an Email on my server is using my server, and using my server w/o permission is tresspass. Any questions?

Re:Oh, come on!

[pembo13]

Spammers who use any religion for their spam deserve what ever they get. I can forgive them, sure....but they still need to face punishment.

Re:Oh, come on!

[budgenator]

The difference is when I put a mail box out on the curb, it's purpose is to be a recepticle for stamped or paid for Mail, it is illegal to put anything except stamped or paid mail into it. It is my beief that the mail box that I purchase becomes the property of the post office when I palce it on the curb, and if it's not outright postal property, it comes under their jurisdiction. When the postal carrier places unwanted but paid for mail into "my" mail box, it's not tresspass becuase 1 that's what the mail box is for and 2 I have to actively move the mail to my posession.

My email server on the other hand does not belong to the post office but belong to me, and using my server w/o permission is tresspass and you can only shoot people for tresspass in Texas and after dark.

Re:Oh, come on!

[Steve B]

to suggest that emailing someone is equivalent to trespass?

Every spammer still in operation uses some trick(s) to evade spam filtering. That clearly makes it deliberate trespass (and ought to be prosecuted under the existing computer-cracking laws).

Re:Oh, come on!

[Steve B]

Next: no, you do not "own" the email service from your ISP. You rent it.

Irrelevant. The laws against burglary, trespass, etc apply to rented spaces as much as they do to owned ones.

Re:Oh, come on!

[tompaulco]

You are correct, it is not trespass at all. It is theft. Theft of time, resources, bandwidth etc. But then most crime eventually comes down to theft, whether the object thieved by either tangible or intangible

Re:Oh, come on!

[alfs boner]

existing computer-hacking laws

Fixed that for you, dorkus.

Re:Oh, come on!

[thej1nx]

Theft of service is not theft ? Brilliant. I suppose it is perfectly okay, if I hook up illegal connections to *your* power supply lines, and making you pay for all of it. Clearly, I have not appropriated any of your lost funds, and therefore am not really stealing anything from you. I am merely *causing* you to do so by abusing the service you pay for.

My points don't "merely say that spamming is wrong". My points say that it is a theft of service... a concept that you are being incredibly dense at grasping.

*After* clearly showing you how the ISP is suffering a very real monetary loss, there is no theft of service ? Try using the lame "abuse" excuse when it comes to making illegal connections to your neighbours phone lines, power lines, cable connection and see how far you get.

It is irrelevant whether I am "renting" or "owning". Try burglaring a "rented" apartment and see if you get shot or not. Trespass laws apply as much to rented apartments as "owned" ones. You have to be an idiot to suggest, that because I am merely *renting* a car, if you climb in and drive it off, it is just an "abuse of service" and hence not a theft. Try it once, and see how many police cars chase you for *stealing a car*.

Private companies run subway metro trains, taxis... for *paying* customers. The usage of car is rented as a service. So after I have paid in advance for it, it is okay for *you* to jump inside and drive away? Just because it is a service ? or just because it is running on public roads?

The servers are as much a property of the ISP, as the office space or company car. Trespass and theft laws apply just as much.

It is amusing how you think just because power supply, phone services, cable TV are "services", their illegal unpaid usage, is somehow not a theft. Your concept of "theft" is both childish and stupid.

Re:Oh, come on!

[thej1nx]

"we invite the mailman every day, implicitly, accepting the consequences that may ensue"

And we have to pay the post office a monthly payment for having a mailbox outside our house? Since when?

*I* end up paying for having *your* spam being stored in my mailbox. In postal mail, the cost of mails I receive are paid for by the sender in form of stamps. Start paying for my end of receiving your mails as well, and foot my entire internet bill, and then sure, feel free to make that stupid anology and send me spam.

So will you be footing my internet bill from this month onwards?

Re:Oh, come on!

[Lost Race]

Furthermore, the reason spam only accounts for 90 percent of incoming mail is because of the increasingly drastic action being taken against spammers. If we all Just Hit Delete and not let it bother us, there will be no negative consequences to spamming, and more people will feel free to spam more; eventually 99.9+% of email will be spam.

Re:Oh, come on!

[tygerstripes]

Yes, one question: by your definition, why isn't an unsolicited (ie without your express invitation) email from a friend "trespass"? You may welcome the email after you have learned its content and source, but up until you've made that entirely subjective decision - according to you - your friend is breaking the law. Imagine even that it's someone you've never met, but a welcome email nonetheless. Where do they stand?

It is not possible to retroactively impose your preferences on an open situation like this and expect it to be legally cogent. The law has to be consistent and objective or it isn't law. Either your friend is committing trespass or the spammer isn't (again, they might be breaking the law, but not trespass law).

Re:Oh, come on!

[tygerstripes]

It IS illegal to forge a mailing address though. And with email the checks can be done electronically. It will slow things down a little, sure, but that doesn't mean its not feasable and that the spammers shouldn't have to do this.

I think you're missing the point of my orignal post: I'm not saying the spammers have done nothing wrong or illegal. I'm just saying they haven't trespassed.

What if people don't want to be contacted by those they never met? Shouldn't that be their right?

Absolutely that's their right. You have the right to set up your email service so that only emails from addresses you've specifically approved will be accepted. People don't usually do that though, simply because it means nobody they haven't previously asked to can email them, which defeats one of email's perceived benefits.

At worse, none of MY resources are used when receiving junk mail; that's not the case for email.

This is where my analogy breaks down - as does any analogy under close enough scrutiny. I was illustrating the point that the service is invited, not that it's free. I understand that the use of resources makes it more complex, but the receipt of any email, legitimate or not, welcome or not, requested or not, requires the use of your resources. If you want to prevent anyone using it without your permission, you have a virtually closed system (again, losing some of its benefit). Unfortunately email is open to abuse, and the abuse of that system - spam - is already illegal. Again though, that doesn't make it trespass, any more than it makes the email from a friend you haven't seen in years trespass.

The people receiving this crap have a right NOT to be communicated with, especially at their own expense.

I think I've answered that one. They also have a right not to be spammed with illegitimate mail headers - but again, this is already covered by appropriate laws. Why does that mean that this is trespass? You have knowingly invited email from a service which does not discriminate, even though it is possible for you to make the service discriminate. Your openness is being abused, but you did make it open. It sucks, yes, it's illegal, yes, but it isn't trespass.

Since it seems to be the unpermitted occupation of property that's confusing everyone, I'll use another analogy. If you have a house-party, and you post signs everywhere saying ANYONE can come, you will undoubtedly get undesirable elements appearing. When they arrive, they haven't trespassed unless you have already informed them they cannot enter. If they enter and then you tell them to leave, and they leave, they haven't trespassed. If you tell them to leave and they don't, THEN they are trespassing.
However, any email that gets on your system you can delete, just as you can turn away an undesirable from your party. No trespass. The email occupied your server, the undesirable guest trampled your lawn, drank a bit, but didn't do anything illegal (well, they could have, but that's a different issue).
If you post these invites everywhere, and someone gets a hold of it, shows it to all their friends, they show it to theirs, and so on, you may find thousands of undesirable people arriving. What do you do? You either cancel/stop the party (close your server), maybe with a list of people who CAN come in (email whitelist), or you put a doorman on the gate (spam filter). They won't do a perfect job, maybe getting it wrong one way or another sometimes, but what choice have you got? An intelligent doorman will recognise people whom maybe you don't know but wouldn't mind coming in, but that's the best you can hope for - he isn't an avatar who knows your every whim.

Whatever measure you take, the only time somebody would be committing trespass would be if they didn't leave when asked (couldn't be deleted). Doesn't really apply in the case of normal spam.

Please don't be upset everyone. I know it's frustrating, annoying, even costly when spam gets through, and that it should be punished accordingly. However, this muddying of the waters, by bringing up inappropriate laws because they feel right until they are carefully considered, doesn't help.

Re:Oh, come on!

[tygerstripes]

I'm not saying that it isn't the sender's fault that the email arrived at its destination. That is their fault, and that's why we have spam law.

What I'm saying is that it isn't trespass

As for the postal worker, you're butchering my analogy worse than I did. The email service is one that you set up yourself, so the fact that the this service you installed did its job and allowed the email onto your system means that the spammer didn't trespass. They made use of the service you paid for, just as anyone who emails you does. There doesn't need to be a law allowing this service to take place on your server as you set up and paid for the service yourself.

The fact that spammers are also abusing this service in a way that is harmful to you is illegal as covered by anti-spam law, but it is not trespass.

Re:Oh, come on!

[plague3106]

I think you're missing the point of my orignal post: I'm not saying the spammers have done nothing wrong or illegal. I'm just saying they haven't trespassed.

Did you read the defintion of trespass for the state in question? I don't think you have.

Absolutely that's their right. You have the right to set up your email service so that only emails from addresses you've specifically approved will be accepted. People don't usually do that though, simply because it means nobody they haven't previously asked to can email them, which defeats one of email's perceived benefits.

Why should the onus be on the user of the mailbox? Why shouldn't the law (like trespass) default to NOT being allowed, unless given permission. The sender of messges has no responsiblity, they should be able to do whatever they want, which forces others to take time and effort to stop it? Bull.

This is where my analogy breaks down - as does any analogy under close enough scrutiny. I was illustrating the point that the service is invited, not that it's free. I understand that the use of resources makes it more complex, but the receipt of any email, legitimate or not, welcome or not, requested or not, requires the use of your resources. If you want to prevent anyone using it without your permission, you have a virtually closed system (again, losing some of its benefit). Unfortunately email is open to abuse, and the abuse of that system - spam - is already illegal. Again though, that doesn't make it trespass, any more than it makes the email from a friend you haven't seen in years trespass.

Which is why analogies in general stink. Their purpose is to illuminate, and if they don't as you say, what was the point really? Of course whenever the analogy breaks down, the person which started it says 'oh, well my analogy breaks down' never 'opps, maybe it IS holding up, but I cant accept that conclusion.'

At any rate, more email requires more resources. And again, did you READ the law defining trespass for the state in question? If it really includes a part (and since the judge seems to have quoted the law) that says 'unwanted use of private property' clearly spam DOES fit that definition.

I think I've answered that one. They also have a right not to be spammed with illegitimate mail headers - but again, this is already covered by appropriate laws. Why does that mean that this is trespass? You have knowingly invited email from a service which does not discriminate, even though it is possible for you to make the service discriminate. Your openness is being abused, but you did make it open. It sucks, yes, it's illegal, yes, but it isn't trespass.

No you haven't, because I don't think you read the law defining trespass for the state in question. I've said that a lot in this post... I'm hoping the repition will cause you to do just that: READ THE LAW. To your second point, every one knows about spam, but they can't chose to make it non-open. Users can't change the protocols. The fact that its open with no real way for users to close it doesn't mean its ok to abuse it. So what's the equivlent, secure alternative to email? There is none.

Since it seems to be the unpermitted occupation of property that's confusing everyone, I'll use another analogy.

I'm not even going to bother reading the rest of your post; its another crapyp analogy which is trying to frame the argument in your favor while ignoring the real issues we are discussing. I think others call it a Straw man argument. If you can't argue this point within the confines of this discussion, perhaps you need to take a long hard look at your position. But before you even do that, READ HOW TRESPASS IS DEFINED IN THAT STATE.

Re:Oh, come on!

[plague3106]

I'm not saying that it isn't the sender's fault that the email arrived at its destination. That is their fault, and that's why we have spam law.

What I'm saying is that it isn't trespass

Have you read the law defining what trespass is in the state which the judge is presiding?

As for the postal worker, you're butchering my analogy worse than I did.

That's your fault for inappropriate use of an analogy. Don't blame me because you can't limit your discussion to the facts at hand without inventing another story for me to attempt to tear down. Besides, maybe I didn't butcher it at all; maybe your analogy is good, but it just happens to prove the point I wanted, and not your side.

The fact that spammers are also abusing this service in a way that is harmful to you is illegal as covered by anti-spam law, but it is not trespass.

Again, did you read how trespass is defined in that state? I'm betting you haven't. Let me spell it out, the relevent portion is "unwanted use of private property." Spam by definition is unwanted. The computer used to check the email and the account are private property, private property being owned or leased by an individual. Yes leasing is covered; police need a warrant to search your car, even if you're leasing it. Hence, private property. So what part doesn't fit in your mind?

Re:Oh, come on!

[budgenator]

Well the purpose of a SMTP server is to recieve Email so sending Email to an SMTP server isn't automaticaly tresspass; however when you falsify Email Headers i.e. disguise the origin it implies that you not only know that the permission to use that server has been withdrawn from you but that you have taken active measures to circumvent the consequence of the withdrawl of that permission. There is a body of law and tradition that draws a fairly clear line between what is SPAM and what is not, An Email that is soliciting business from me when I have had no business relationship with before, that has forged or specificaly missleading header information is spam; Aunt Millie's send an Angel's Blessing to 10 friends E-chain-mail is just annoying but not tresspass.

Re:Oh, come on!

[tygerstripes]

Of course theft of service is a theft. Abuse of service, however, is not. It's still illegal where such provisions are made by the law, but it is not theft.

Every one of your analogies pertains to theft of service, not an abuse. It seems clear that your conception of theft is incorrect.

If someone saps power from your supply, as you say, they are stealing it. That's theft. Well done. If, however, they merely keep running past and deliberately tripping your security light so that you use more power to support the service that you have installed, they are NOT stealing power. They are abusing your service (the security light) and thereby causing you a loss of resources (money is merely a nebulous representaion of resources, so whether someone steals your money, your power or your phone line, it's theft). Do you understand that? They are not misappropriating your resources, but they are deliberately causing you to expend more resources than is necessary purely for the sake of doing so. THAT is an abuse of service, NOT THEFT. The have not appropriated anything of yours.

There are provisions in law to prevent this kind of abuse - anti-spam being one of them. Where there are no direct provisions but you are still being deliberately caused unreasonable loss (of time, sleep, money, power, whatever) as a result of someone's actions, they may eventually be prosecuted for harassment or somesuch, and you can then seek compensation for that loss in a civil suit. They will not, however, be prosecuted for theft.

*After* clearly showing you how the ISP is suffering a very real monetary loss, there is no theft of service ? Try using the lame "abuse" excuse when it comes to making illegal connections to your neighbours phone lines, power lines, cable connection and see how far you get.

This illustrates your lack of understanding perfectly. In the first example, the ISP is suffering financial loss because the spammer is causing them to use more resources than is reasonable. The spammer is causing the ISP loss by abusing their service, but they are NOT stealing anything from them. In the list of services that follows, you mention making illegal connections for the specific purpose of appropriating a service for which the appropriator has not paid. This is, yes, theft of service. Two completely different legal situations. The latter will get you prosecuted for theft, the former will not.

Why is this such a difficult distinction for you to comprehend?

To put it plainly, for a spammer to "steal your service", they would have to actually gain access to your mailbox or your bandwidth and use it as their own, not merely cause you to use it more than you had intended. They are clearly not doing this. They are not "stealing your service".

Your understanding of theft is over simplified. There is a clear distinction between theft and abuse, and your lack of ability to comprehend it is sad rather than amusing. Clearly, YANAL.

Re:Oh, come on!

[tygerstripes]

There's no need to talk-down - being patronizing does not necessarily mean you have a greater understanding of the issue.

What doesn't fit is your subjective view of "unwanted". Any criminal conviction (except for the very few laws involving "strict liability") involves two components - the actus reus and the mens rea, or, the guilty act and the guilty mind.
And it's the issue of guilty mind with which I have contention. Trespass is not a strict-liability law, so it must be proven beyond reasonable doubt that (as well as performing the act) the perpetrator was aware that their use of the plaintiff's property was "unwanted" by the plaintiff. In the case of email this is basically impossible - not because it can't be shown that the mail was unwanted after the fact, but because it is not possible for the plaintiff to show that they were explicitly opposed to the act before it was committed. Law cannot act on retroactive subjective perception. Trespass is not a convictable offence unless it can be shown beyond reasonable doubt that any reasonable man in the position of the perpetrator would have been aware that their imposition was unwanted.

Now to you or I it would seem to be common-sense that spam is unwanted, but the law is not so subjective, and indeed cannot afford to be. This is not a clear-cut issue in the case of email - even spam. If a spammer gets a couple of successful hits from their emailing, they can show they have reason to believe their service or whatever is wanted by some people in spite of the public image surrounding their activites. It is not enough to say that "most people don't want it", because this does not provide explicit display of unwelcomeness in any given case. Therefore it is reasonable to have doubt (not complete, granted, but doubt nonetheless) that the perpetrator believed they were acting in a fashion unwanted by the plaintiff, ie that they committed trespass.

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't understand the concept of trespass (although, like just about everyone on /., IANAL except in my own armchair), it's that I also understand the legal requirements to fulfill that concept to a legal standard. Spam sucks a$$, in a big way, but the state would not prosecute for trespass in such cases because it would be too easy to defend. That's why anti-spam laws were created.

I'm really not trying to say that it shouldn't be viewed as gravely as trespass, but legally speaking, it just isn't all there. That's why I think it's a strange and foolish thing for the court to say. If the state really views this crime as trespass, why not convict it as such?

Re:Oh, come on!

[plague3106]

There's no need to talk-down - being patronizing does not necessarily mean you have a greater understanding of the issue.

Hopefully talking down will help you realize what a silly position you're taking.

What doesn't fit is your subjective view of "unwanted".

Its subjective because its up to the property owner to determine what is unwanted.

Any criminal conviction (except for the very few laws involving "strict liability") involves two components - the actus reus and the mens rea, or, the guilty act and the guilty mind.
And it's the issue of guilty mind with which I have contention. Trespass is not a strict-liability law, so it must be proven beyond reasonable doubt that (as well as performing the act) the perpetrator was aware that their use of the plaintiff's property was "unwanted" by the plaintiff.

No, the trespass law in question doesn't seem to stipulate that. Indeed, I would say that the law assumes that any use without permission must be assumed to be unwanted use. Personally I would love to see tougher trespass laws; for example, I have a fence around my entire property. From that, it should be clear I don't want people on it.. yet I still have to post a sign (this is in another state from the one in the article).

If the spammer was really worried about trespass, he would have taken effort to find out if sending spam to this person was an 'unwanted use of private property.' Any reasonable court (and yes, most are) would say a message asking that would not fall under trespass, since they are making a reasonable attempt to find out if the person wishes to receive spam. Since the spammer didn't do this, and spammed away, they are guilty of uwanted use of private property, or in this case, trespass, since that is a definition of trespass in the state.

[ignoring rest of post, as I've covered that]

Don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't understand the concept of trespass(although, like just about everyone on /., IANAL except in my own armchair), it's that I also understand the legal requirements to fulfill that concept to a legal standard.

As do I. The law seems pretty clearly written in this case. The spamming was 'unwanted use of private property' and trespass is clearly defined to have that meaning. Therefore the spamming was trespass.

I'm really not trying to say that it shouldn't be viewed as gravely as trespass, but legally speaking, it just isn't all there. That's why I think it's a strange and foolish thing for the court to say. If the state really views this crime as trespass, why not convict it as such?

Sure it is. The law is clear in this case. Obviously the state really views the crime as trespass, which is why the spammer was found guilty of trespass!

Re:Oh, come on!

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Christian, I find this appalling.

as a non-christian, i find your being a christian apalling.

Since it's virtual trespassing...

[Opportunist]

...am I allowed to virtually shoot (i.e. DDoS) him? Just tell me, trigger fingers are ready and armed...

Re:Since it's virtual trespassing...

[ohearn]

No, a virtual shooting similar to someone trespassing is just a regular DoS attack. When you go for Distributed DoS attacks its more like a firing squad.

Re:Since it's virtual trespassing...

[hotdiggitydawg]

...and so DRDOS is death by firing squad ricochets? Bad Analogy Central, here I come!

Re:Appropriate Response

[Fordiman]

Judge Wolf: (this law is too broad because) "You purchase an e-mail address list, alter the transmission information in the header of your e-mail to avoid retaliation, and on Easter morning send out a three-word e-mail to thousands of people: 'Christ is risen!' You have committed a felony in Virginia,"

Well, yeah. Religious spam is still spam, you hick.

Re:Appropriate Response

[Rob T Firefly]

I wonder if Judge Wolf has gotten any mail from those Nigerian spammers who append "God blessing you" to all their 419 scams.

Wow, now the taxpayers of Virginia have to pay for

[antifoidulus]

their upkeep. Keeping a prisoner isn't cheap either, and really, is prison the answer? Prisons are already overcrowded, not to mention a breeding ground for HIV. While I hate spammers, I don't think they deserved to be shived or deserve to contract some horrible disease(which puts a further burden on the already overburdened health care system) because they spammed.

Garnishing their wages for the rest of their lives and a significant period of house arrest either without an internet connection or with a heavily monitored connection(with restrictions on the services they can use) are both cheaper and more humane without letting the spammer go off scott free.

Jailing spammers

[massysett]

I really see no point in jailing spammers. Sure, I hate spam, but come on, is it worth spending tens of thousands of dollars a year of public money to house and feed a spammer? It would be better to impose monetary penalties, or to take measures to ensure the perpetrators won't spam again. Put them under court supervision.

Jailing people is expensive, and it should be reserved for persons who are a danger to the safety of others. Jailing a spammer is a waste of money--those tens of thousands of dollars would be better spent on funding technological anti-spam measures.

Re:Jailing spammers

[speculatrix]

Jailing a spammer is a waste of money--those tens of thousands of dollars would be better spent on funding technological anti-spam measures.

Spam is as much a social problem as anything - it's the willingness of people to buy things from unknown sources, and the willingness of the greedy to make a fast buck, that causes the problem.

Tech hasn't solved spam despite the massive amount of time and effort put in; it's a moving target. If anything, the advance of technology has also made it easier for authorities to invade privacy by scanning the content of *all* emails if they want under the guise of spam detection.

Re:Jailing spammers

[nocloo]

It's a good deterence for future spammers to know that they will end up in jail if they break the laws. There're hundreds millions of dollars spent already on spam fighting and the fight will continue until we find a solution to this problem.
So you are telling that the recipient of the mass mail should bear the cost, while the spammers can do it with impunity and get away with it ? Or simply take the monetary damage as a cost of doing business.
This is a great precedence and hopefully a few more spammers will end up in jail and getting their asses ramped so they can think a bit before joining the venture. I'm all for jailing them and take all theirs assets away to fund more spam fighting initiatives.

Re:Jailing spammers

[hackstraw]

Jailing people is expensive, and it should be reserved for persons who are a danger to the safety of others. Jailing a spammer is a waste of money--those tens of thousands of dollars would be better spent on funding technological anti-spam measures.

This is way offtopic and a complete topic into itself, but yes, jailing/imprisoning people is expensive, but it is the current mantra in the US for dealing with people that counter our society. It fulfills a few basic human desires 1) Its quick and easy. 2) The perception of the problem is now physically "removed". 3) Prisons and the legal system are lucrative industries and a current part of society. 4) The revenge factor is priceless.

Its no accident that the US imprisons more of its population than any other society.

Re:Jailing spammers

[Khyber]

is it worth spending tens of thousands of dollars a year of public money to house and feed a spammer?

Hell yes. Let the people who were jailed for possession of a PLANT free and fill the empty spaces with spammers, who just annoy, spam, spread malware, and worse.

Re:Jailing spammers

[Steve B]

is it worth spending tens of thousands of dollars a year of public money to house and feed a spammer?

Good point. The assets of the spammer should be confiscated to pay for his imprisonment. If the state can figure out a way to make him pay for the air he breathes, add that to the bill.

Re:Jailing spammers

[tqk]

I really see no point in jailing spammers. Sure, I hate spam, but come on, is it worth spending tens of thousands of dollars a year of public money to house and feed a spammer?

Yes. Jail one spammer and it makes the others take notice. Jail ten spammers, and it makes the others fearful. Jail all spammers, and anyone considering spamming will know they'll end up in jail when they spam. The principle is that of deterrence, which is an essential part of the justice system. Cops clean up the mess after the fact. Judges mete out punishment to those determined to have been guilty. Punishment of the guilty encourages deterrence of potential future offenders.

It would be better to impose monetary penalties, or to take measures to ensure the perpetrators won't spam again. Put them under court supervision.

Why? What reason is there for us to go gentle on what is, and has been for about a decade, a scourge of the net? Since before the Greencard Lawyers, it's been steadily escalating to the point that UCE/UBE is now ca. 65% - 80% of network traffic. Russian mafia are hijacking millions of innocent machines for use in botnets, all to leverage more spam onto us. Spammers send, and we pay for its delivery regardless of its worth to us, and we've no say in the matter?!? No. That bird doesn't fly here. The time for half measures are over, senator.

Jailing a spammer is a waste of money--those tens of thousands of dollars would be better spent on funding technological anti-spam measures.

We've done that. For myself, the spam problem is solved, after years of research and learning how to use the best tools for the job. Still, hundreds of spam land on my ISP account intended for me, only to be immediately sent to /dev/null. Multiply that by the number of customers my ISP has and you begin to see the problem. Multiply that by the number of ISPs there are and you ought to come away reeling. Consider the resources expended the world over by providers just to keep the net at all usable. Many Windows users (poor, pathetic souls) have come to the conclusion that email's no longer usable. That's what spammers have cost us. My ISP is fearful of losing any legitimate email, so they won't drop anything that isn't obviously UCE/UBE, meaning their need for resources just keep going up, meaning my bill keeps going up. This is hardly something that encourages me to think softly of spammers.

Draft Windows-to-Linux Guide [http://smileystation.com/]

Bookmarked, thanks. :-)

As for any of you ambulance chasers out there who're considering taking this on, I have extensive archives going back over years detailing the problem, including the original spam, reports sent to http://spamcop.net/, procmail logs, and fetchmail logs, all providing a "paper trail" of their activities. I would love for you to make me rich off all this. Ask, and ye shall receive.

Hmm

[Turn-X Alphonse]

How come telemarketers who really disturb your life in some way get jackshit yet spammers get all hell let loose on them? Maybe it's just me but does anyone else find spam is a non-issue when you have a good spam filter kept up to date and get to laugh at the odd one or two a week that do get through?

Also what are these "damages" for exactly? Having to use 10 seconds of your time to delete an e-mail and use up a tiny bit of extra bandwidth?

Sorry but this just doesn't make sense to me. Yes I hate spam, yes I think it should be stopped but this is like claiming someone poked you and it shattered 3 ribs and put you in hospital for a month.

Re:Hmm

[thej1nx]

Also what are these "damages" for exactly? Having to use 10 seconds of your time to delete an e-mail and use up a tiny bit of extra bandwidth?

Or, if you gave it some thought, actual financial loss from the wasted bandwidth.

The bandwidth I use, has been paid for, by *me*. For my personal pleasure, so use as I see fit(as long as such usage doesn't encroaches on rights of others or is not illegal ofcourse).

So technically, if I, or say even the ISP, is paying moolah for say 1GB of that bandwidth and a chunk of it is wasted transmitting *your* unsolicited spam so that *you* can make money... yes a damage has occurred.

Bandwidth is not free. Even if you are offered unlimited bandwidth, it just means that your ISP is paying for it in bulk, without lettng inidividual users worry about how much they download. *Someone* is keeping those cables repaired, those servers up and running paying up the elecric bills for them, and paying the network engineers. And it is definitely not the spammer. And as far as the ISP is concerned, even a hundred 10Kb spam mail to every 10000 of its users every day, means 3GB bandwidth usage loss every month, that was not available to its paying userbase. They had to pay for it, but got no revenue for its usage.

The tiny bit of bandwidth adds up. Especially when you consider that many ISPs have userbases running into tens of thousands and more. Since all such extra losses get passed finally to the end customer(for every business wants to maintain its profitability), it is finally I who ends up paying extra for your get-rich-quick scheme.

If this was a bank, and you were shaving off 10 cents from each of ten thousand of its accounts every day via electronic fraud, the damage to individual account holders might not be *significant*. But you would still be going to Jail for stealing 30,000 dollars from bank every month... for a long long time. You can't say then, that "oh it was just 10 measly cents dammit!". Right? Right?

Re:Hmm

[Seanasy]

How come telemarketers who really disturb your life in some way get jackshit yet spammers get all hell let loose on them?

I put my number on the national and state do-not-call registry. I haven't heard from even one telemarketer since. Even when I did get telemarketing calls, they were never for porn or drugs and were rarely phishing scams. SPAMers have no such inhibitions. The medium makes it far easier to deceive, cajole or harass. The vast majority of telemarleting these days are from legit businesses. The same is not true of SPAM. That's why.

Re:Hmm

[WarpSnotTheDark]

I basically agree with what you've written - I'm only speaking to the question you've posed: "...what are these 'damages' for exactly?" For you and I and, I imagine the majority of the at least somewhat savvy internet users, spam is a non-issue. I receive approximately 90 spam messages per month and I just don't care - I take a second to add it to the blocked addresses list and I move on with my life. My family, however, and many of my friends are not so savvy and I have seen people I care about getting sucked into Pyramid schemes, Chain Letters and even having their computers compromised due to foolishly downloading some stupid attachment simply because they thought it might be coming from someone they know. I remember when I got my first computer a few years back, every email I received about a special offer or a secret opportunity - I believed and got a bit messed up. As I have learned and seen, spamming can facilitate theft-by-deception, fraud and maybe other things I'm not thinking of at the moment. This is not to say that all spammers should be punished equally - let the punishment fit the crime: Some schmuck trying to sell Viagra or bolster a stock price should be punished according to the laws they have violated or are attempting to violate, with the a factor of the crime committed being spam, spam not being the crime itself. I think it's more important to base the punishment on the intended outcome of the spamming - not the spam itself; I know this can't always work because if I sent you spam urging you to shoot your neighbor, how would fault be assigned - obviously, the jerk who did the shooting is at fault and blaming it on someone else is very lame. If people were to get put in jail for years simply for being annoying; I could find myself in real trouble.

Re:Hmm

[apendrag0n3]

Alphonse,

I couldn't agree with you more about the telemarketer end of the house. I worked for a telemarketing company for approx. 2 years and ran one of their teams. I taught the team about ethics and true marketing and knowing their "target audience". They were not allowed to call at dinner time (5 to 7 pm in whatever time zone they were dialing). I re-worded "prepared scripts" to be less deceptive and to make it easy for the call receiver to know that this was a marketing call. In the end, my marketing team had the highest call-to-sale ratio in the company and had NO complaints lodged against them in the 2 years I ran that team.

On the score of spammers, however, I find myself disagreeing with you. I work for an ISP now. If you had any concept of the amount of money and manpower that is expended in an effort to curtail inbound spam to our customers, you might re-thing your statement. We are currently filtering more than 80000+ spam messages a day at our mail gateways - and STILL some manages to slip through. We have churches and school systems that are our customers (among others). It's not just a fight to stop spam from coming INTO our servers either. We have to closely monitor servers and customers to make sure that one of our CUSTOMERS isn't some spammer in disguise.

Between personnel time, software, and hardware used to fight the in-flux of spam, and the cost of bandwidth that the spam chews up in the course of a day, our small ISP setup could save an average of about 80k to 100K per year if we did not have that as a problem to contend with. Heck, I could hire on another Network Admin for that amount of money.

Just some of the "OTHER SIDE OF THE COIN" perspective for you to consider.

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Also what are these "damages" for exactly? Having to use 10 seconds of your time to delete an e-mail and use up a tiny bit of extra bandwidth?

Will $22 Billion a year qualify as "damages" for you?

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.j html?articleID=59300834

Still too harsh of a penalty?

To confirm you're not a script, please type the word in this image: sympathy
No, spammers don't get any from me.

Re:Hmm

[Copid]

Littering isn't that big of a deal either. What's a McDonald's bag in terms of clean up effort? Why the $1000 fine in CA?

Of course, if everybody litters willy-nilly, the answer to that question becomes obvious.

Too long.

[bo0ork]

Nine years in prison for spamming is too much. Heck, two years is too much as well. You can get off easier than that for killing people.

Re:Too long.

[1u3hr]

Nine years in prison for spamming is too much

He's still on bail. I'll be surprised if he ever sees the inside of a cell. And if he does, he'll probably be out in a year or two, rested and fit and start all over again.

This guy made MILLIONS. If he'd been prosecuted for each act of fraud he committed he'd be in jail till the sun went cold.

Prosecutors said Jaynes, whose Internet name was Gaven Stubberfield, was grossing about $750,000 a month by selling through spam items such as penny-stock pickers, an Internet History Eraser program and a work-from-home Fed Ex Refund Processor that claimed people could make $75 an hour by processing Fed Ex refunds....Virginia outlawed spamdefined under the law as sending at least 10,000 forged, unsolicited e-mails in a 24-hour periodin July 2003, making it a felony. The person sending the spam must hide their Internet identity, known as an IP address, to be charged.

Re:Too long.

[plague3106]

Nine years in prison for spamming is too much. Heck, two years is too much as well. You can get off easier than that for killing people.

For murdering, that's not true. If you're refering to manslaughter, there's a reason you don't go to jail as long; you didn't intentially kill the other person.

Re:Too long.

[ebvwfbw]

Nine years in prison for spamming is too much. Heck, two years is too much as well. You can get off easier than that for killing people.

You only get 2 years for killing someone? Where is that? As someone that has had to deal with this type of spam as an e-mail user and an administrator, I think he didn't get enough time. Lock 'em up for 30 years, hard labor or at his option execution. They have wasted way too much of other people's time and resources. We never get compensated for it either. Sometimes we also have to deal with users that are totally pissed at getting spam. For some machines that they take over, it can become a legal issue. I bet if you found your machine being used to send out viagra advertisements and you coulnd't use your own machine you would feel differently. That would only be the beginning. Then you would have to deal with the people that got the spam. It isn't any fun. The people that it happens to are usually not very computer literate at all. Sort of like using a car and finding advertisements all over it that you didn't put there, and then people wanting to beat you up for it too. So you clean up your car and it happens again and again and again. Unless you have a better method to stop people from spamming, jail is the only real way we have to deter them. Studies show that jail does work. Not putting them in jail simply encourages them.

Tell us the truth, are you a spammer?

Re:Too long.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nine years is far too little, if comparable wrong should be meted out to him.

By spamming millions of people, he's undoubtably wasted far more than nine man-years of the lives of others in his fraudulent schemes, one stolen minute at a time.

I seriously think an execution is probably fair punishment, if punishment is what you're after.

However, since I believe justice, deterrence, and rehabilitation are far more important than punishment, and should always be the true goal of law enforcement, nine years is OK with me for the first widely publicized case.

Next time, we shouldn't be so lenient.

Re:Too long.

[lightspawn]

Nine years in prison for spamming is too much. Heck, two years is too much as well. You can get off easier than that for killing people.

Can you really get off easier than that for killing ten million people per day?

In Virginia . . .

[bblboy54]

. . . All actions one can perform will land you in jail. Also, even those actions that you do not perform you will pay a fine or fee of some sort for.

Really... I never knew it until I moved here!

WTF?

[aliendisaster]

How can you sue someone or imprison them for sending spam? For one, thats the exact same (as many people have already said) as sending a lot of pizza coupons in the snail mail. If thats legal, then spam is legal. Also, the internet is an isn't owned by anyone, any country, maybe even not this world. The internet belongs to everyone. With this, you can not censor anything on the internet including spam. This is worse than the stupid christians trying to move all internet porn to .xxx domains. This is just stupid. Oh yeah...I hate spam to but I accept it like everyone else should.

Re:WTF?

[Robmonster]

Its not quite the same since you do not have to pay for people to put mail through your letterbox. You do have to pay to receive email

Re:WTF?

[aliendisaster]

Actually, you do pay for to recieve your mail. You either pay for the P.O box or you pay for taxes to have the mail delivered to your address. Either way you are paying for it which makes it the same thing. Just one is physical and has been around for longer so people have learned to deal with it. Email on the other hand hasnt been out to the illiterate masses for as long so they assume spam is a new concept that should be destroyed.

Re:WTF?

[1u3hr]

How can you sue someone or imprison them for sending spam? For one, thats the exact same (as many people have already said) as sending a lot of pizza coupons in the snail mail.

RTFA. He forged his address. He didn't give away pizza, he defrauded tens of thousands of people.

Re:WTF?

[aliendisaster]

It doesn't matter what he did. He could have sent satanic porn to the pope. It's the internet. The internet is freedom. There is no jurisdiction over the internet.

Re:WTF?

[1u3hr]

There is no jurisdiction over the internet.

Tell it to the judge.

Re:WTF?

[Overzeetop]

No, you don't pay for spam in your mailbox, except as (a) trash and (b) time to get and sort. Your taxes don't pay for the postal system, as it is an independent entity. You have to have a mailbox to get any mail, so that's not an issue.

The real issue, and the one that keeps spam in your real mailbox at a certain level, is that espam costs a negligible amount to send whereas dead tree spam has a signiciant cost in both postage and printing. Perhaps you might view it differently if you look at the relative costs to each side in processing spam. For the sender, the cost may be in the 0.001c range, whereas for the recipient the cost is likely to be a couple of cents. For physical mail, the cost to send will be closer to 12c for the simplest of forms (and 25c-50c for anything worthwhile), while the 2-3c end user cost remains about the same.

Re:WTF?

[aliendisaster]

Ok. You are correct with that. I retract that statement. Spam is different then junk mail it that aspect. However, the real issue isnt that spam is different than junk mail. The issue is that this is completely wrong as no one has the right to say "you can't do that" on the internet.

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to the RIAA...

Re:WTF?

[Apocalypse111]

The internet itself may not be owned by anyone, but the hardware that lets the internet work most assuredly is owned and operated by real individuals, who not only pay for its purchase but its upkeep and bandwidth. So no, this is not exactly the same as sending things over snail mail. Using snail mail, you pay a certain amount in postage fees for the mail to be delivered by a certain amount in postage fees. Email, however, does not require the spammer to pay anything other than the miniscule electric and bandwidth costs, and does not reimburse all the machines between himself and his targets for using their services. This would be analogous to having a piece of junk mail go through the hands of every person between the spammer and the target without paying the middle men for their time and travel expenses. That analogy is a bit of a stretch, I admit, but it shows that it is *not* exactly the same.

Also, why *should* we accept spam? Why should we have to just sigh and give up on fighting this plague of the internet? Think of how much faster the net would be if all the equipment on the backbone were not bogged down with all this traffic that is both not wanted and deleted upon receipt? How many man-hours would be saved each day if every person with an email account did not spend 30 seconds deleting spam? This may be a small problem on an individual level, but its impact on a larger scale is huge.

Re:WTF?

[aliendisaster]

I agree. Spam sucks. But there is really no way to stop spam. Spam is a good way of advertising. There are so many people out there that dont think and simply click because they truely believe they can get a bigger penis by eating horny goat weed pills. The only way to stop spam without completely removing email is to educate the poor smucks and cause spam to not make money. Spam is a part of the internet, like commercials are a part of TV, junkmail is part of snailmail, telemarketers are part of phone service, and sales people are part of shopping. Spam will always exist just like stupid chainletters from stupid coworkers will always exist.

Re:WTF?

[Apocalypse111]

Actually, spam isn't a good way of advertising, esp. not any more. Its been a number of years since internet usage hit the mainstream, and the number of people who fall for blatant advertising has fallen dramatically (phishing doesn't count here). Further, spam blockers are becoming more and more common. Even those that bother to open spam are likely to be distrusting of V!@gr@ and C1al!5, if they can even read it. Also, the number of companies that are willing to pay spammers for their "direct marketing" service is dwindling, and the spammers themselves are having to start paying for services overseas to continue to spam. All this is contributing to make spamming a less and less profitable endeavor.

Re:WTF?

[Overzeetop]

BTW - you're the first /.er I've seen with a 7 digit UID.

Anyway, you're generally right. The right to do anything generally stops at the right of other people not to be injured in some way. Injury can simply be the loss of a service or time (=money) which is excessive or beyond what society deems as such. VA has drawn their line further than you feel is reasonable. I think it's a good like to draw, though I'd rather see larger monetary fines or internet access injunctions rather than long jail sentences (1-3 months is good enough for me - jail is a very depressing place).

Re:Appropriate Response

[Anonymous Coward]

The appropriate response to Judge Wolf would be that Christ told us to visit those in jail, not to keep them out in the first place. Break the law, go to jail *is* part of Christ's message.

In jail...

[Toxicgonzo]

the spammers might get some "unwanted e-mail" in their "maleboxes".

9 years?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate spam as much as anyone else, but 9 years is fucking ridiculous. It's just another draconian law which isn't designed to actually stop the criminal, but to give the impression that the politicians are being tough on crime. Of course, this type of law enforcement never works because very few criminals actually think that they are going to get caught, so however draconian the punishment is, it won't actually cut down on the number of spammers out there. Mainly because spammers know that cheap ass taxpayers and pandering politicians won't increase any funding to law enforcement agencies to actually try and tackle the problem.

Re:9 years?

[base3]

Any increased funding to technological law enforcement would be used to prosecute the new criminal copyright infringement statutes and provide more teeth to the DMCA, not to fight spam. The victims of spam don't donate as much as the corporations (who have spun themselves as "victims" of "theft") do.

Score 1

[kahrytan]

Score one for the Commonwealth. And people say Commonwealth governments are fucked up.

And I am glad to see Robert McDonnell (Republican) is doing the job I elected him for last november.

When in jail, Jaynes should be required to help anti-spam software companies make better filters in exchange for a shorter setence.

He didn't "go to jail"

[1u3hr]

Maybe the submitter, or editor, might have RTFA:

Jaynes was sentenced last year to nine years in prison on three counts of violating the state's anti-spam law and was allowed to remain free on $1 million bond while his case was appealed.

He's still on bail. Let me know if this fucker ever does go to jail. And even if he gets a judgment against him, you know he'll never pay a cent, like OJ.

But don't let me stop anyone making "pound him in the ass federal prison" jokes.

Re:He didn't "go to jail"

[geminidomino]

Except his case WAS Appealed, and he lost. That's what this story is about. Now he's gotta either appeal again, if he can, or end up in the shitcan.

Re:He didn't "go to jail"

[1u3hr]

Now he's gotta either appeal again, if he can, or end up in the shitcan.P? Right, and he is appealing. (He earned millions from spamming, he can afford to.) So no jail until thst's resolved.

Re:He didn't "go to jail"

[geminidomino]

It might be resolved very quickly, if the next court (virgina state supreme court? I dunno.) refuses his appeal.

Why Jail? Take their money!

[lokiz]

In my opinion jail is for when someone is a danger to society. IE: they are going to physcically hurt someone, etc. I hate spam, wouldn't mind if they all rot in hell, but do we really want to waste our money locking them up? It really is more of a civil issue. They should have to pay a crap load of money back to the government for having to get involved in the first place, let the isp's, etc who's servers got clogged up with their crap sue, and be done. Greed is what motivates these spammers, so take away what they value most, MONEY.

If spam didn't make people money it wouldn't exist. If the law takes away all their money from spam, it will go away. Now if we can just get the idiots who buy stuff from spam to stop, it would be dead sooner rather than later.

Re:Why Jail? Take their money!

[wizkid]

Take there money, and send them to jail. A lot of people don't see the expense, wasted efforts etc by the ISP industry to try to filter spam. Billions of the GNP are being wasted. For What, so russians can phish attack, and floridians can sell fake pills, etc. I think being bubba's Boy is fitting punishment.

Re:Why Jail? Take their money!

[Anonymous Coward]

If the law takes away all their money from spam, it will go away.

Look at it this way: I've got a modest amount of money, $20,000 say, to start with. I set up a spamming operation and make $750,000 a month (as per this case). I squirrel as much of it away as possible in obscure accounts, gold, abroad, whatever. If the only penalty possible in law is fines/confiscation of assets, I've got virtually nothing to lose. The authorities will in all probabilty never find all my assets. Even the absolute worst case is lose $20,000 and get made bankrupt. The best case is virtually unlimited riches.
You really need to have the threat of jail time** to balance the equation or else the benefits are far higher than the likely costs.

** With the proviso that most or all of it can be substituted for lots and lots of useful community service, to save taxpayers' money, and jail only comes into operation if this is not fulfilled.

Re:Wow, now the taxpayers of Virginia have to pay

[Rocketship Underpant]

I'm actually against prisons, period. They punish the victims as well as the criminals (through costly taxation), and never fit the crime (with the possible exception of kidnapping).

A spammer should be made to pay for the resources and timet he has cost every victim. Have him send five bucks to every resident of Virginia and let him make an honest living after that.

First Step

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, it's not arresting them, hacking off and forcing them to eat their own fingers, disemboweling them, beheading them and placing their heads on pikes around the city as a warning to other spammers but it's a good start.

You have another choice

[njdj]

Telemarketers though, I have to choose between getting up during dinner / sleeping to answer the phone or dealing with the damn thing ringing every 5 minutes.

Another possibility is to leave your phone permanently connected to an answering machine. The message tells the caller to communicate with you by email.

You can take it off the machine if you are expecting a specific call.

I'd guess from your post that you would feel uncomfortable with this solution - you may feel that if someone wants to be able to reach you urgently, they should be able to do so. I'm just pointing out that this is your choice.

Re:You have another choice

[Copid]

Likewise, it's my choice to wear a cup to protect myself against random people kicking me in the balls for no reason, and if I don't, its my own problem. If it were necessary for me to do so, it certainly wouldn't be any indication that the person doing the kicking is an inconsiderate asshole, right? No, it's definitely all on me.

Is this kind of like apologizing to Dick Cheney for being shot in the face by him?

Re:Wow, now the taxpayers of Virginia have to pay

[Silver Sloth]

Prison, as you point out, is seldom the appropriate answer. It is horrendously expensive and has a high recidivism rate. However it does satisfy the Laura Norder brigade and the very human desire to 'lock them up and throw away the key'. No politician ever won votes by proposing that prison sentences be replaced by more effective means of punishment, and, at the end of the day, that's what counts.

But I love spam.

[thbigr]

I like spam and eggs. I like spam and spam.

I will take your spam if you don't want it?

The Advertifascists...

[PopeRatzo]

Now you're on to something. Leave it to a US Marine to get right to the heart of the matter (thanks, MBC1977).

We are assaulted every minute with billboards, radio & TV commercials, ads on web pages, promotional t-shirts, commercials in movie theatres where I've just paid $10.00 to see a movie (with product placements).

The proliferation of advertising affects our lives far more, and with much worse effect, than terrorism (despite the fear-mongering from the Right).

I'm not saying we should close up the free market, but we should at least be having the conversation about the damage this supposedly "free" market is having on our lives and the lives of people living in complete poverty around the world.

I know they say it's not possible, but I try to do my best to not only ignore advertising, but to behave in the opposite manner from its intended purpose. I will never again go to Burger King, McDonald's, get insurance from Geico, etc etc.

Re:The Advertifascists...

[budgenator]

That's like so totally Mid '60s cool dude, now that the kids are wearing bell-bottoms again I was wondering when the hard-core anti-advertising/establishmentarism would start to kick-in. All we need now is a modern replay of the Nixon/Humphery election.

If they break the law!

[www.sorehands.com]

In the USA, if these telemarketers break the law, you can sue. That is the idea behind the law -- if you don't obey, there is a penalty.

At the penitentiary...

[Billosaur]

Murderer: What you in for, boy?

Spammer: Uh... I... I, uh... sent people spam emails... lots of 'em...

Murderer: That make you feel tough, boy?

Spammer: Oh no... no... not at all... got pretty rich though...

Murderer: That so? Well, Daddy's gonna make you his pretty little rich boy... [resting arm on Spammer's shoulder and winking]

Spammer: Guard!!!! Help!!!!!!!

Re:At the penitentiary...

[Frosty Piss]

So, you think prison rape is funny?

Re:At the penitentiary...

[Beefslaya]

Apparently somebody does...It got modded Funny.

I think the dark humor behind this is funny, yet sad.

That we have to resort to prison sentences for things like small time marijuana possession and spamming, costing us more in Tax dollars to get separate facilities for little shit bags like this.

If we'd all take a second look at our mail servers, and quit whining about a few false positives from companies that have dumbasses for IT staff that doesn't know what an RFC rule is, we'd all have a lot less spam, and a lot less of our money spent on guarding ourselves.

Re:At the penitentiary...

[Dun Malg]

So, you think prison rape is funny?

Well....yeah, in this context. People also think fatal motor vehicle incidents are funny:
Q:What's the difference between a dead snake in the road and a dead lawyer in the road?
A:There are skid marks in front of the snake

See, humor results from the creation of a novel paradox in the brain. Conflict between acceptable situations and normally unacceptable situations. Seriously, do you really need someone to explain the mechanics of humor to you?

Re:At the penitentiary...

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you subscribe to prison rape web sites? Oh yeha, it's funny stuff!

Re:At the penitentiary...

[FusionDragon2099]

And the prison guard looks the other way
because he's the guy you sent a spam to the other day
I hope this helps to emphasize
I hope this helps to clarify
I hope you die

Apologies to the Bloodhound Gang.

what about can-spam?

[Anonymous Coward]

What I want to know is how did the Virgina law avoid the pre-emptive effect of CAN-SPAM? (Anyone got a link to the court decision itself?)

Why does everyone hate spam so much

[91degrees]

Seriously - It shouldn't be the problem that it quite clearly is. People complain about the time spent dealing with it and the cost of bandwidth, but these are really quite small. In fact, most people's entire bill for all internet services and total bandwidth used for all email is a drop in the ocean. I'd imagine people would satill be upset if they only received a single spam email a day. So, what is the real issue with it?

Re:Why does everyone hate spam so much

[Tim C]

I hate spam because some lowlife scum-sucking excuse for a human being decided to use my domain in the forged From: header of their spam. I now get in excess of 1500 spams, viruses, bounces and various other crap every single day. It takes me time to deal with it all, and there is a small but real chance that my spam filters will falsely tag a mail I want as spam and I'll miss it.

Before this shit-eating moron did this, I got maybe a couple of dozen spams a week, and I couldn't care less about them.

That's my issue with spam; other people's mileage may vary.

Re:Why does everyone hate spam so much

[91degrees]

Reasonable. And I can see how this causes direct harm. But I got annoyed when I got one spam (Yes. I started using email pre-spam). I'm justtrying to work out why.

Re:Why does everyone hate spam so much

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, try being me for a day as I travel around trying to get e-mails on my GPRS mobile phone, 99% of which are: a) spam b) full of images c) cost me money to download d) cost me time to sort through since the criminals sending me the spam KNOW I am trying to avoid it and thus obfuscate it with random words in order to evade my filtering. Not to mention the various times I have had an e-mail go astray due to an overly eager baysian filter falsly classifying it. All this across several e-mail address for several businesses I run. Spammers would do much better if they had an opt in list, since they would then have access to a target audience which actually wanted to read their messages and would provide them with a better strike rate for follow through purchases. Instead, they use underhanded tactics to evade filtering because they know that the recipients of their junk don't want it. They are robbing me of time and money; it doesn't matter how much, it's criminal behaviour.

Re:Why does everyone hate spam so much

[91degrees]

But do all the people who complain about it use a GPRS phone for their emails? If they do then their complaints are legitimate, but I expect they're in the minority.

Re:Why does everyone hate spam so much

[Anonymous Coward]

So people who merely waste their time dealing with it aren't entitled to legitimacy of claim? Ridiculous.

In this capitalist society that we embrace so readily if you want my time, you pay me for it. Simple as that. If you take it without my consent then you are stealing from me.

Studies that show how much time is being stolen from individuals and companies dealing with this shit reveal it adds up to hundreds if not thousands of hours. That's a lot of money being stolen.

Re:Why does everyone hate spam so much

[91degrees]

So people who merely waste their time dealing with it aren't entitled to legitimacy of claim? Ridiculous.

Indeed it is ridiculous. But I didn't say that thiur claim wasn't legitimate did I?

In this capitalist society that we embrace so readily if you want my time, you pay me for it. Simple as that. If you take it without my consent then you are stealing from me.



Fine. How much time do you waste dealing with spam? How much time do you waste queuing? Do you get as annoyed by the banks not supplying as many ATMs or the supermarket not having more checkouts? Would you just laugh it off if you only got a handful of spams per day?

Studies that show how much time is being stolen from individuals and companies dealing with this shit reveal it adds up to hundreds if not thousands of hours. That's a lot of money being stolen.

But it doesn't take thousands of hours of your time. Sorry, but I don't believe that your anger is purely patriotic fervour on behalf of the total time this is costing your nation. The time takes is a trivial part of the working hours of the world.

All I'm trying to work out is the real reason for people's anger. Everyone comes up with suggestions but they always seem either highly specialised for their own reasons, or ill thought out rationalisations. Not the actual reason.

Re:Why does everyone hate spam so much

[greywords]

The "million dollar issue" isn't directly related to the end users, it's related to the ISPs. When 66-75% of all e-mail through their servers is spam(article), more than two thirds of the processor/bandwith capacity used is wasted. In order to keep the remaining one third (or lower) running at the speed they want users to experience, they have to pay for at least three times the computational capacity that they would otherwise have to. This cost, of course, gets passed on to the consumer.

Re:Why does everyone hate spam so much

[91degrees]

It's a very small part of the overall network traffic though. It doesn't cost that much. Mail server cost is not a substantial part of an ISP's budget.

And there are lots of cost associated with doing business, many of which are the result of people being thoughtless. Nobody gets as worked up about those.

Re:Why does everyone hate spam so much

[greywords]

Personally, I'd like to see some data on your claims.

Assuming you're right, though, note that the computational time spent processing spam is at least as important as the actual total number of bits sent after the headers are read. If 2/3 of the time is spent processing spam message, that slows down the delivery time of other messages unless you increase your overall bandwith (i.e. number of computers processing requests, link speed, etc.). Moreover, the extra machine cost isn't just for an extra stick of RAM or two. All the extra I/O from disk can reduce the mail server's hard disk life, introducing a recurring cost as well. ISPs need to rent larger machine rooms or maintain them on site with greater cooling capacity necessary to keep everything from frying.

With all this extra hardware and network overhead, "Mom and Pop" ISPs can't hope to compete against the big guys who can afford to spend a bit of extra cash on better hardware, and we're left with a sparser set of choices as a consumer.

And there are lots of cost associated with doing business, many of which are the result of people being thoughtless. Nobody gets as worked up about those.
They do if it causes resource needs to triple.

Re:Why does everyone hate spam so much

[91degrees]

So, how much does email cost an ISP. Given the number of companies that can afford to offer an email service for free, I'd imagine that the cost of all the other bandwidth, basic support and infrastructure, cost a lot more. Lycos charge $20 per year for their premium email service. They have all the same spam issues that an ISP has, and they still presumably make a profit. So this means that even if the cost of running a spam free email service is zero, and they have no marketting or any other costs, the total cost of spam to you in a month is clearly less than $1.67.

You probably lose more money than this in a month just through trivial things caused by other people's laziness. Why not demand that the bank keeps track of your account to 0.00001 cent? And the same for the credit card company. And the same for any purchase that includes sales tax? This sort of rounding error costs the public millions. What is the per-person threshold at which it becomes neccesary to imprison these people? Is this $1.67 really the reason people get so upset?

Re:Why does everyone hate spam so much

[Anonymous Coward]

Plainly you did.

But do all the people who complain about it use a GPRS phone for their emails? If they do then their complaints are legitimate, but I expect they're in the minority.

Implying that people who don't use a GPRS phone, and so pay a flat rate for their data transfer, merely spend their time dealing with the spam and thus their claims are not legitimate.

All you are trying to do is to work out people's reasons for their anger?

I gave you my reasons in my previous reply. It costs me money and wastes my time (and my time also costs money). You didn't appear to think my individual case was legitimate so I broadened the reasons to include the costs and time of others.

What more do you want?

Re:Why does everyone hate spam so much

[greywords]

Who's to say they're not operating at a loss and covering the expenses with ads displayed in the margins of the e-mail webapp? Also, no, this isn't the only reason people get so worked up about spam (though 2/3 waste of resources is pretty bad no matter how you cut it). Take a look at the other thread comment here. "Trespass to Chattels" is what comes up here. The spammers are abusing a resource provided by a particular entity (i.e. the ISP) for a purpose it was not intended for.

Re:Why does everyone hate spam so much

[91degrees]

Who's to say they're not operating at a loss and covering the expenses with ads displayed in the margins of the e-mail webapp?

Lycos. Their service promises no advertising.

Also, no, this isn't the only reason people get so worked up about spam (though 2/3 waste of resources is pretty bad no matter how you cut it).

If you cut it as 2/3 of a really a small section of their resources. ISPs offer web access, usenet, and general internet connectivity for apps such as FTP, P2P and usenet into the bargain.

Take a look at the other thread comment here. "Trespass to Chattels" is what comes up here. The spammers are abusing a resource provided by a particular entity (i.e. the ISP) for a purpose it was not intended for.

Yes that is an interesting take on the subject. Seems people should consider this rather than whining about the rather negligible and irrelevant financial cost.

Re:Why does everyone hate spam so much

[91degrees]

My point is that the time spent dealing with spam is typically insignificant. If someone spent a considerable amount of time dealing with spam in their inbox, then I'd understand it, but I can deal with all the spam I receive in about 2 minutes, and I'd imagine that's fairly typical. I don't believe that a waste of 5 minutes each day is a legitimate reason for the furore that spam generates.

Do these people get so upset if they have to spemnd a few more minutes in a queue because the supermarket doesn't open more checkouts? It seems unlikely that they'd expect the imprisonment of the supermarket managers. So the long and short of it is that I simply don't believe you when you say that the time taken is the reason that people get so upset over the spam.

Would you personally be happy with spam if you received one spam a day and it didn't cost you money?

Re:Appropriate Response

[cultrhetor]

I'm wondering why - with all of the concern around here for people's rights to free speech - this isn't posted in the YRO section... I'm no fan of spam, but a spamming e-mail message is just like a junk mail circular - you might get ripped off, you might actually buy something, but most people just delete it, or block it.

Re:Appropriate Response

[cultrhetor]

My fault - my newsreader hadn't caught up yet.

My Dear Old Dad got a stove

[Hasai]

His junk mail got so bad, he installed a small, German-made, wood/coal-burning stove. He now uses all that junk mail to help heat his house.

]XD

There's an easy solution...

[glesga_kiss]

...just talk dirty to them. Ask them what they are wearing. If it's a girl, ask if she is wearing tights and whether she is menstrating just now. They won't be phoning you back ever again and it's not an obscene call as they dialed you. Everybody wins!!

Another classic would be a three-way call, though I've never done this with an incoming sales call. Simply put them through to the customer service desk of one of their competitors. Sit back and laugh as they argue with each other.

Other people suggested get an answerphone. That's just not practical for most people. If the volume of sales calls grows over the volume of personal ones then it might be worth it. But I don't want to spend the rest of my days listening to short "could you call me back?" messages from friends. If I'm going to be doing their tech support they might as well be paying for the call! ;-)

Re:There's an easy solution...

[AceCaseOR]

Why wouldn't an answering machine be practical (at least if you don't already have voice mail)? I, personally, would like to know if I got an important phone call when I'm out of the house, and have the convience of letting the machine get it when I'm indisposed.

Re:There's an easy solution...

[cp.tar]

These are not bad ideas at all.

I don't get many telemarketers calling me (not living in the USA and so on), but when they do, they're annoying... and I even have no-one to complain to, either.

Nice ones, anyway.

Re:There's an easy solution...

[davecarlotub]

...just talk dirty to them. Ask them what they are wearing. If it's a girl, ask if she is wearing tights and whether she is menstrating just now. They won't be phoning you back ever again and it's not an obscene call as they dialed you. Everybody wins!!

I do the same thing, however my twist is to repeatedly ask them "How much for sex?". They always hang up quickly.

Re:There's an easy solution...

[name*censored*]

IANAT-M, but I'd be willing to bet they're too jaded and bitter to care about "company loyalty"... sure they get paid by commission, but when you think about it that way, they'd also be competing against everyone in their company - so there wouldn't be any particular hostility towards rival companys' telemarketers.

Re:There's an easy solution...

[PhotoGuy]

A PC-based phone solution (or probably non-PC based ones) can do some neat stuff. I once had an Asterisk/Digium based system, which made people dial my "extension" to reach me. All my family and friends (okay, not a large set, admittedly) knew the extension, anyone else could leave me a voicemail and the system would notify me right away. But spammers couldn't reach me. Also, the system always answered starting off with the beep-BEEEP-BE-E-EP of a "disconnected number", which supposedly turns away bulk-dialers. (You can buy a device to just do the latter thing, at Radio Shack [errrr, The Source By Circuit City (TM), if I'm not mistaken.)

Re:There's an easy solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

...just talk dirty to them. Ask them what they are wearing. If it's a girl, ask if she is wearing tights and whether she is menstrating just now. They won't be phoning you back ever again and it's not an obscene call as they dialed you. Everybody wins!!

And the ones that answer your questions and do call you back? *shiver*

Re:There's an easy solution...

[QMO]

I have:
    Persistently and politely asked to speak with a manager from the beginning of the call, then when the manager got on explained that I was just doing my part to make the phone call a little more expensive for them.
    Tried, annoyingly, persistently and ineffectively, to sell the telemarketer an 8-year-old computer that was collecting dust in my basement, for only $3000, not including monitor. He not only wouldn't buy the computer, he wouldn't transfer me to anyone that made computer purchasing decisions for the company, either.
    When the telemarketer is calling about financial stuff (credit card/mortgage/etc.) I've asked them if they'd like to discuss their personal finances with me. For some reason they feel like I should trust them with my financial stuff, but they don't feel they can trust me.

Re:There's an easy solution...

[Anonymous Coward]

My question is: "So what are you in for?" Many of these folks are doing time, and telemarketing is their prison job.

Re:There's an easy solution...

[Descalzo]

When she was a telehustler, my cousin used to write down those kind of phone numbers and call them back in the middle of the night from a payphone.

Delicious Important Emails Sending to My Friends

[ronadams]

Dear Friends, Hello good to finaly get this to you i am Al-Zawab Al-Ackbar and are seeking to tell you about emails that should not be sent because of recent US legislations. When you send "to all" you might be prosecuted in courts of US laws. How ever, I have a very large fund from same such emails I would like you to hold for me please reply instant and I can arrage details. Thank you GOD BLESSINGS It was a dark and stormy night. "I do declare, Mr. Horace: the summer is quite hot this year." It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

harm is a relative word

[nead]

and there is no way they can harm you

I run a business where I pay for my bandwidth as well as the salaries of the people who manage it. 40% of email is spam and it costs me $250k a year to manage it.

While there may not be any physical harm arising from this action there is most certainly economic harm. So what is it then, stealing or trespassing? I say both.

Re:harm is a relative word

[tygerstripes]

Neither - it's spamming, which is illegal. It has its own law, which is being poorly enforced by an ineffective and technologically ignorant judicial system. Sounds like a very bad thing for your company, absolutely, but it is covered by neither of the laws you mention. Read about them, for crying out loud.

It is NOT postal mail

[dereference]

For those who do own their mail servers - corporations, freelancers or other particularly tooled-up individuals - it's like dumping a shit-load of mail on their doorstep - again, through the postal service, which is an impartial, autonomous service that we deeply value!!

Joke? Troll? This is a terribly misguided analogy, as I shall demostrate by haiku:

We pay for bandwidth
consumed by inbound e-mail
but don't pay postage

Big difference. This is why junk faxes are illegal; they use toner, paper, and they tie up the phone line. There are actual real expenses involved with receiving spam. we need more bandwidth and bigger servers. And yes, in cases where end customers are involved, the expenses are passed on to them as well, even though it's not their servers or bandwidth.

Re:It is NOT postal mail

[tygerstripes]

It still isn't trespass, is it? All analogies are flawed when examined to sufficient depth. I was merely pointing out that the sender of spam at no point makes use of your property - it is your mail service that does this, which you have installed and commissioned. The abuse of this mail service is illegal, but that doesn't mean it's trespass, or even theft.

Re:It is NOT postal mail

[Buran]

What?

My computer isn't my property, even though the spammer expects my computer to decode and display the spam, and any images included with it?

Uh.

Yes, they do make use of my property, to deliver their crap to me. Or are you arguing that my computer doesn't actually belong to me?

It is quite possible to have someone charged with trespass even if they had the OK to enter in the first place. As soon as the property owner decides that you must leave, and you do not, you are guilty of trespass. If you do something with someone's property without their permission and they decide that they do not like what you have done, you can be charged with trespass.

If you walk into my driveway and bash up my garage door, you will be charged with destruction of property and with trespass.

Sheesh.

virginia represent!

[Anonymous Coward]

sic semper spammeris

Forum spam? Comment spam? etc

[Anonymous Coward]

So how about spammers who flood forums and blogs? Aren't they putting the same taxes on servers, etc etc?

SPEAKING OF WHICH

[Anonymous Coward]

When will the metamoderation system be back up?!!

Re:SPEAKING OF WHICH

[ConsumerOfMany]

as soon as you log in...

Re:SPEAKING OF WHICH

[spun]

He probably posted anon so as to not get modded off topic. But the meta mod system has been down for two days, in case you hadn't noticed.

i'm ashamed...

[CaptainNerdCave]

to be preparing myself for a career amongst people that are so out of touch with reality (yes, i'm planning on attending law school in the near future).

how long until instant messager spammers are punished?

how about people who spread viruses?

what about the people whose systems are compromised and used to send out junk? aren't they also spamming? being part of a crime is enough to prosecute in many cases.

i'm sure that this was an issue years ago with telemarketers until it was reigned in and control restored, hopefully something like the national do not call list will be enlisted. at that point i could see punishments escalating. as it stands, nothing more than fines would be appropriate, perhaps paying damages. good bye profits

Re:i'm ashamed...

[Sign In Stranger]

LMAO! When I read this I thought it said "Virginia spammers go to hell..."

Re:i'm ashamed...

[Anonymous Coward]

"i'm planning on attending law school in the near future."

Are you trying to get a Troll mod?

Re:i'm ashamed...

[Overzeetop]

how long until instant messager spammers are punished?

not soon enough

how about people who spread viruses?

already illegal, I think

what about the people whose systems are compromised and used to send out junk? aren't they also spamming? being part of a crime is enough to prosecute in many cases.

Good point, and one that should not go unnoticed. Contributory neglegence, or possibly being civilly liable by presenting an attractive nuisance. Of course, I would expect that if a machine was zombied and a patch was not provided, then the OS maker might be criminally liable as well. I like that, too. Would it be awful to have more people without internet licenses (oops, did I just make up a new idea?) so that they couldn't have their own compters connected to the public right of way? Of course they could still use public terminals.

i'm sure that this was an issue years ago with telemarketers until it was reigned in and control restored, hopefully something like the national do not call list will be enlisted. at that point i could see punishments escalating. as it stands, nothing more than fines would be appropriate, perhaps paying damages. good bye profits

Telemarketers aren't really under control, but they're better. A national do not spam list might be good, but I would want to be able to entire domains. I do tend to agree that prison sentenses don't need to be terribly long for these crimes. I've been in a jail recently (design work, not inmate), and although it was a very nice, clean, well run facility it was still one of the most depressing places I've visited in my life. I'd rather see these spammers shackled with a repayment debt for 20 years than spend much time in jail. That and revocation of their internet licence ;-)

ObBash

[xIcemanx]

In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail, and share a cell with many men who have enlarged their penisses, taken Viagra and are looking for a new relationship.


We're getting there.

Re:ObBash

[lightspawn]

In a perfect world... spammers would get caught, go to jail...

In a perfect world, spammers wouldn't get caught, because there wouldn't be any. Spamming would be impossible, and nobody would want to do it anyway.

Re:ObBash

[SanityInAnarchy]

What, and spare us the fun?

Here's another classic:

<foo> Damn, more spam invading my inbox
<Aviator> Nooooobody expects the Spammer's Imposition!
<Aviator> Our two weapons are offshore servers and feeble laws. Feeble laws and offshore servers.
<Aviator> And fake headers. Our THREE weapons are offshore servers, feeble laws and fake headers.
<Aviator> And gulliable horny lamers. Our FOUR weapons are... I'll come in again.
-!- Aviator [dsm@mimas] has quit [Come, Cardinal Bigglesworth!]
-!- Aviator [dsm@mimas] has joined #chat
<foo> Riiiiiight...
* Aviator tortures foo with the comfy V14Gr/ and the soft Debt Consolidation

Seriously, I'm all for world peace, ending hunger, and Linux for everyone, but you have to leave some stupidity in the world, because in a perfect world, all the comedians are hilarious all the time, but that doesn't work, because in a perfect world, there's no good material for them.

Re:Wow, now the taxpayers of Virginia have to pay

[Anonymous Coward]

Garnishing their wages for the rest of their lives and a significant period of house arrest either without an internet connection or with a heavily monitored connection(with restrictions on the services they can use) are both cheaper and more humane without letting the spammer go off scott free.

Hmm... So how do you enforce that?

I think it would be more humane to put them in jail. They committed a crime. Not a violent crime, but crime that causes problems for lots of people. Spammers flood my servers with porn, viruses, stock pumping schemes, etc.. It takes a significant amount of time each day to deal with all the junk that makes it through the filters. If you were to fine them, they'd pay the fine and continue or not pay the fine at all. In other words, it's not a deterrent. If they are under house arrest they'll continue to spam.

Expected listing on EBay

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Sometime in the near future you can see a listing like this on EBay:

Judgement against spammers Sergey Popovich, Kiev, Georgia and Chi Xiangjung, Nanking, PRC. For 1,000,000,000 $. Awarded by Virginia Commonwealth Supreme Court. Buy-now price 5$. Opening bid 1 cent.

Also you will get emails like this:

Allow me to please introduce myself. I am Michael Dewy of Dewy, Chetham and Howe, attorneys at law, Richmond, VA. I have recently won a judgement for 1 billion dollars against two spammers in Taiwan. This is my proposal to you. Please advance me the money needed to finance an expedition collect the said sum from Taiwan and we can share the proceeds 25% to me and 75% to you.

Don't know much about bandwidth, do you?

[Khyber]

I pay for my bandwitdh - *I* choose what I get and don't get. Those who waste my bandwidth that I pay for, are using/STEALING my resources that they're not entitled to use, because they didn't pay for my line, or my install fee, nor do they pay for the bandwidth I use during the course of a day. Not only am I entitled to billing them for the use of *MY* resources, but I can have them jailed for stealing or wasting said resources, which costs me money. I've won this twice in small-claims court, and I'm sure if I went to higher courts the judges would agree as well. While spam email may not be trespassing, it is certainly using resources that the spammer never obtained permission to use, be it storage space in someone's e-mail box, or their bandwidth.

Re:Don't know much about bandwidth, do you?

[tygerstripes]

it is certainly using resources that the spammer never obtained permission to use

So is every email that you did not explicitly request - does that mean they're all trespassing (or whatever)? None of them obtained permission, so by your definition, yes they are.

But they're not, are they. This is why I used the postal analogy. You can't vet these things before they've arrived, so we have laws in place to make misuse or abuse of the services illegal. It's actually a desirable quality of postal- or e-mail that it is possible to send things unsolicited. That is one of its greatest strengths, but also its greatest avenue of abuse - which is why these laws are in place.

You do pay for your bandwidth but, like it or not, your choice over what you do and don't receive is inherently limited. You click on a web-link, you get whatever the web-designer/publisher/whatever puts on there, like it or not. You set up an email service, you get whatever email is sent your way, like it or not.

Stop thinking of your bandwidth and storage as property, and start thinking of it as territory. When your own measures aren't enough to defend it from casual incursion, the common law of the land should be. If the law is not sufficiently upheld, complain to your governor, DEA, whomever the hell it takes to get these things implemented properly. There's no need to muddy the waters by confusing it with other, inappropriate laws - that's all I'm saying.

Re:Don't know much about bandwidth, do you?

[Khyber]

Property, territory, damn near the same thing. My Land>My Property>My Territory.

Re:Don't know much about bandwidth, do you?

[Steve B]

So is every email that you did not explicitly request - does that mean they're all trespassing (or whatever)?

Again, every spam that GETS THROUGH ANTI-SPAM DEFENSES AS THE RESULT OF DELIBERATE AND UNAUTHORIZED EVASION OF THOSE DEFENSES is trespass (specifically, trespass through computer cracking).

Stop thinking of your bandwidth and storage as property

Why on earth should I stop thinking the truth?

When your own measures aren't enough to defend it from casual incursion, the common law of the land should be.

I'm glad that you completely agree with the rest of us.

When you pick my lock to burgle my house and get caught, you go to jail.
When you climb my fence to paint grafitti on my house and get caught, you go to jail.
When you use some crack to slip your spam past my filters and get caught, you go to jail.
What part of this progression eludes you?

Re:Don't know much about bandwidth, do you?

[thej1nx]

Your postal mail example is the stupidest thing I have ever heard.

In postal mails, it is the *sender* who bears the total cost of transmission, via stamps. I as a receipient, have to pay jack shit to receive mails in my post box. In case of postal mail, sure it is just an annoyance, and you are only wasting a lot of my time. The post office is sure as hell not charging *me* to have a mailbox hanging outside my door.

... but in case of online spam, *I* and the ISP are paying for the damned bandwidth. *You*, my brilliantly thick friend, are paying just for *your* end of transmission. You are not paying for the ISPs loss of bandwidth, which runs into several thousand dollars every month. Start sending me and the ISP money for every spam mail you send to me, and *then* talk!

Clicking on a webpage means I am soliciting whatever is being shown. Much like I purchase a newspaper and will read whatever is written. *That*, you idiot, does NOT implies you can start throwing *your* trash in my lawn. Just because I subscribe to some newspaper, means you can throw your rags, dirty trash, last year's molding magazines in my lawn ? If so, you are stupid.

And choice over what mail we receive is exactly what this law is supposed to enforce! You seem to tout receiving unsolicited email as some sort of "mandate" or "inevitability". Setting up a mail service does not means, that I am signing up for receiving *spam* that I end up paying for. I am signing up to receive emails from my friends and associates. You are a complete tool for suggesting that I should accept receiving mails about "hot x-rated sex" as part of that service. Why should I ? I don't! Which is the reason for legal decisions such as this. To *prevent* spam from being "inevitable".

Typical arguement from spammers : "You have a mail account so you should accept our spam as inevitable".

Why?

Servers are not property? The law and property rights seem to disagree with you, my uninformed friend. And if they were territory, trespass law *still* applies. The spam filters are like gate locks at my farm. If you are trying to break them i.e. my own measures, you are trespassing. A burglar is not permitted to argue "but the lock was too easy to break, and your measures were not enough to stop me, so you can't complain". Heck you get sent to jail for just attempted breaking and entering, if you as much as tried my door lock repeatedly.

Hence this particular law is quite appropriate. Only a complete fool will try and argue otherwise.

Re:Don't know much about bandwidth, do you?

[tygerstripes]

Try and stick to the argument in hand instead of resorting to personal insults, will you? I'm sure you feel very strongly about this, but you seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that I suggested spam is fine, legal, acceptable. I don't think that at all, I just object to the muddying of legal waters. If you can't discuss these things without getting bitchy then you're going to find you "win" a lot of arguments to people who just can't be bothered with your unreasonable attitude.

Firstly, I used the postal service as an analogy to illustrate one point - that of an independent unvetted service. Any analogy breaks under sufficiently detailed scrutiny, so don't think that disproving the complete compatibility of an analogy is the same as disproving the argument it serves to illustrate. Your attempt to do so suggests that you're so focussed on your own agenda that you've missed the point I was making.

I don't think spam is acceptable in any form, whether it deliberately circumvents filters or not, so don't respond as though I'm defending or advocating spam. My only objection was to the comparison to trespass. My point in using the postal analogy was that there are already laws covering the abuse of these communication services (mail-fraud, anti-spam etc). These laws would not have come into being if existing laws already served to make such practices illegal. (As an aside, you try to tear down the postal analogy on the basis of cost, but if direct financial impact were a qualifying criterion for illegality then free webmail, for example, would not be covered - yes, it does have an impact on the ISP or webmail service owner, and thus indirectly on you, but that's not going to cut it in court, and certainly has no bearing on trespass.)

Incidentally, yes, spam is inevitable. Not acceptable, not even tolerable, but it is inevitable. If there is any way of abusing a system, it will be abused - spam is a fact of life that we must combat the best we can. The fact that I accept that doesn't mean I like it any more than you - I'm just a little more pragmatic.

As for this whole "picking my lock" thing: yes, of course the email equivalent is illegal, but that's what anti-spam law is for. Why do you think no spammer has ever been prosecuted for trespass? "He deliberately put his email on my system without my prior express permission". So did your best friend, work colleague, long-lost college-buddy. True, they are not making a deliberate effort to circumvent your filters, while the spammer is. It is, however, that attempt to circumvent using false headers (among other things) that is illegal - not the act of emailing you. That is the act that the spam laws serve to discourage and punish, not the presence of the email on your system. If trespass covered this act, it would already have been tried as such. You're welcome to sue for financial damages in civil court as well, but that is not part of the criminal law process and is incidental.

On a final note, ask yourself this: if you click a web link that falsely purports to be for a list of monosyllabic insults, and instead you get knitting patterns, has the web-site owner committed trespass? Try reporting them to the police and see what happens. I know it's not exactly the same issue, but do you see where this muddying of the legal waters can lead? It's a very slippery slope, my friend...

Mod parent up

[capnchicken]

If 'trespass' was brought up for entering a computer about any other thing in the world except spamming your comment would probably be supported more. Tresspass on a computer is a slippery slope precedent to be setting in any case IMHO. (Unless of course we can use it against the RIAA too :)

EMail boxes soon to fill

[CyBlue]

... with ads to join class-action suits.

Re:Wow, now the taxpayers of Virginia have to pay

[Hokie06]

Yeah the cost to keep a prisoner is pretty high, I've heard upwards of 50k a year. A better punishment would be limiting the guy's access to a computer and maybe a fine or community service. Prisons should be limited to violent crimes and major repeat offenders.

Re:Wow, now the taxpayers of Virginia have to pay

[flooey]

I'm actually against prisons, period. They punish the victims as well as the criminals (through costly taxation), and never fit the crime (with the possible exception of kidnapping).

A spammer should be made to pay for the resources and timet he has cost every victim. Have him send five bucks to every resident of Virginia and let him make an honest living after that.

The big practical problem with eye-for-an-eye solutions like that is, what if he doesn't have that kind of money? You're left with a few options:

You can allow him to declare bankruptcy or otherwise remove some portion of the sentence until you're left with what he can pay. Probably not a choice that's going to satisfy society.

You can force him to pay out basically all the money he ever makes until the sentence has been served. That's forcing someone who already has a criminal history into institutionalized poverty. Not exactly good for getting them to follow the straight and narrow.

You can take something else from him, presumably either life or liberty. I think most people would agree that taking life for being unable to pay whatever fine has been imposed isn't appropriate, so you're left with liberty. Which is the whole problem you were trying to get out of in the first place, with the added problem that the rich are able to avoid having their liberty curtailed while the poor aren't.

For all the ills of imprisoning people, it does have the practical benefit that it's a punishment that can be imposed on anyone in a largely equivalent manner.

Re:Wow, now the taxpayers of Virginia have to pay

[vertinox]

ow, now the taxpayers of Virginia have to pay

Hrm... Often times prison labor makes up for this shortfall. Most prison systems personel that I have had discussions with will note that the majority of activity the prisions do is to earn money for the state or private businesses.

And they don't have to pay them minimum wages either.

Depends on the state on what kind of prison.

Obviously, they can put multi-count murderers in the work field or textile plants due to aggressive behavior.

You must not live in Australia

[Khyber]

Most people there have a maximum amount of bandwidth they can use per month thru ISPs. So what happens when your spam starts eating up more bandwidth than I paid for, and I'm having to foot THAT bill as well, hrm? Many other countries have this bandwidth system as well, so tear your eyes away from the USA and the UK and look everywhere else for a moment, please. The spam issue will always be an issue for those people, and if we ever move to such a stupid pricing scheme here in the States, (wouldn't surprise me with the way comms companies are nowdays) the issue of spam would be an even bigger one, because it's going to cost the customer money for something they never asked for.

Re:You must not live in Australia

[91degrees]

Uhmmm... No.

Most people here are from the UK or the US. A lot of complaints come from people who really are paying a negligible amount in bandwidth costs for the spam. I have a free email account that is dedicated soleley to getting spam. In the last 3 months, I've managed to get 21Megs of spam. How much does that cost? I bet bad HTML costs me a lot more each month.

Re:Appropriate Response

[budgenator]

When a normal, rational, ethical and moral person's thought process gets to the to avoid retaliation part, we tend to reconsider the prudence of engaging in the activity we are thinking about, The Sociopathic personality tends to think about ways of increasing the avoidence punishment. Unfortunately I guess we now have a clue as to Judge Wolf's basic thought processes, it's not normal and even worse it's not sociopathic, she's actually like Nixon, a pragmatist who'll allway argue the ends justify the means.

"police" fundraisers

[mengel]

Last time we got one of those calls, we got as much info as we could from them, and reported them to our local police. I can't say if it's related, but a few months later a group of ex-cons a few suburbs over did get busted for something very similar... Your local police do not like these people; they make them look bad....

Re:Wow, now the taxpayers of Virginia have to pay

[Tweekster]

We are talking about a spammer, who cares about being humane.

Second of all, not every prison is the gang raping shithole you see on tv. Most prisons are not violent or that bad. He wont be going to a maximum security hell hole. he will be in a minimal security prison that has no violent offenders etc.

America has the largest prison population globally

[MacDork]

For approximately the last 15 years, the United States has been engaged in the largest imprisonment program ever attempted by a democratic society.

That was back in the early 90's when the US prison population was around 900,000. In the time since then, the prison population has more than doubled again to nearly 2.2 Million prisoners. To put that into perspective, there is currently only about 1.4 million people on active duty in the US military.

We condemn China for their practices involving prison slave labor, yet we conduct those same practices ourselves... Slavery is back in America, and it's mostly for the poor black people again. Meanwhile, every time we have an article discussing incarceration on Slashdot, we get a bazillion prison bitch jokes that fly in the face of the 8th amendment of the US Constitution. You people KNOW their rights are being violated and you don't care.

"Oh dear they're annoying me with spam. Fuck the 1st Amendment, send them to the salt mines!!" Land of the Free indeed...

First They Came for the Jews

First they came for the Jews
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
and I did not speak out
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.

Pastor Martin Niemoller

In a Perfect World....

[queenb**ch]

In a perfect world, spammers would be caught, stripped naked, coated in honey and tossed into a gargantuan fire ant mound. The whole process would be web cast to discourage any other would-be spammers from following them.

Still, this isn't a perfect world... They'll just do what the casinos did and move off shore to some tin-pot country where they can buy the government.

2 cents,

QueenB

Re:Appropriate Response

[PitaBred]

Wolf ain't a judge, Wolf is the spammer's attorney. They're paid to be sociopathic.

Are you a spammer or what?

[Roadkills-R-Us]

It costs my company several thousand dollars a year to deal with spam. As the IT Manager, I know.

Both here and at home it takes bandwidth, time, and system resources to deal with. All without my permission. Since my time is my most valuable commodity, it's worse than trespass; it's theft of my life.

Trespass YES

[dereference]

It still isn't trespass, is it?

Yes, I think quite clearly it is.

All analogies are flawed when examined to sufficient depth.

Agreed, but this one was materially inadequate, even on its surface.

I was merely pointing out that the sender of spam at no point makes use of your property - it is your mail service that does this, which you have installed and commissioned.

It's not directly, but indirectly. Through intentional actions, the sender causes your property to be used against your wishes, and the sender has every reason to believe this to happen. Nothing is consumed, perhaps, but it is made unavailable for legitimate purposes. CPU cycles and bandwidth are finite (and expensive) resources. If you use them without consent, you indeed deprive me of my rightful use of them.

A somewhat better analogy would be to suppose that I call your mobile phone, for which you've pre-paid for a finite number of minutes each month. Suppose further that I spoof the caller ID, so it appears to you that I'm one of your family members or associates. Now you answer the call, because to you would like to talk to that person, only to find it's just me trying to sell you something. You obviously hang up, but that's a 1-minute deduction from your pre-paid minutes.

I haven't taken your phone, nor have I damaged it in any way, nor did I deprive you of its use. After all, you were the one who "installed and commissioned" (according to your terms) the phone and its service. I didn't even "use" your property directly according to you; I only used my phone to dial yours.

But now consider what if hundreds or even thousands of people started doing this to you, you'd have a problem. In fact, have you ever wondered why the first incoming minute of most mobile phone plans does not count against your plan minutes? Well, this is why. Otherwise every wrong number call you recieve could potentially be considered as trespass.

Now, please go read a nice summary of what the term Trespass to Chattles means, and maybe it will clarify the situation for you.

That's bull shit, spam's not tresspassing

[NemosomeN]

It's conversion. String 'em up.

Re:Appropriate Response

[spun]

But, but, but saving your eternal soul is infinite ends for finite means. Anything is justified! Including holding you at sword-point, forcing you to convert, and then lopping your head off so you can't recant. Yay! Your eternal sould has been saved. Sorry about the decapitation, but you'll thank me in heaven. Not that any Christian has ever or would ever think of doing something like that, that's what those heathen Taliban extremists do. Inqui-what? I CAN'T HEAR YOU! LALALALALA.

Spammers go to Jail? Fine with me...

[ClemensW]

Sorry, but no sympathy from me. For all of you who think that's too harsh: Have you ever calculated the damage done by spam?

Spammers steal your time: Sure, it's just 10 seconds to read a mail, make a decision and press the delete key. But it's not just *your* time, any other recipient also wastes 10 seconds.
So, if a spammer sends 10.000.000 mails per day and every recipients wastes 10 seconds, you get
10.000.000 mails * 10 sec/mail ~ 3 years, 2 months of wasted time.
In other words, every month this spammer wastes more than a full human lifetime. In my eyes, that's the same as if they would kill someone every month with their own hands.

Spammers steal computers to send their spam: Most spam is sent by trojaned machines. A small botnet able to send the 10.000.000 mails/day would likely consist of ~10.000 machines. Assume 3 hours to clean a machine and prevent it from being re-infected. Assume 10$ per hour. Total cost:
10.000 machines * 3h/machine * 10$/h = 300.000$

Spammers steal bandwidth: Though many people believe that bandwidth is free (flat-rate), it really isn't. ISPs or anybody with more than a DSL line do have to pay per GB. Even flat rates are just hybrid costing, basically an amount $x for the DSL line plus $y/GB multiplied by an average usage of z GB/month.
Now, for the spammer:
10.000.000 mails * 20 KByte/mail * 0.50 $/GB = 100$/day ~ 3.000$/month

Spammers steal ressources from the recipients: 75% of all email is spam. Without spam, all mailservers could be sized significantly smaller. Assume 500$ savings for smaller hardware. Assume 3 years (36 months) lifetime. Assume 1.000.000 mail servers.
1.000.000 server * 500$ savings/server / 36 months ~ 460.000 $/month

And that's just the beginning. There are the costs of spam-filtering software, costs of maintenance for hard- and software, costs of lost business due to false-positive filtering (be it manually or automatically), costs, costs, costs....
And let't not forget the costs of psychiatric treatment for admins suffering from burn-out syndrome due to constant nagging of their PHBs that they either a) receive too much spam or b) didn't receive an important email :-P

Obligatory "Rejected" reference

[neuro.slug]

Leader Cloud: My anus is bleeding.
Clouds: YAAYYY!
Leader Cloud: My anus.. is bleeding!
Clouds: YAAYYY!
Leader Cloud: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AND ALL THAT IS HOLY, MY ANUS IS BLEEEEDING!
Clouds: YAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY!
Leader Cloud: Waaaaaa--!

So appropriate.

Re:Obligatory "Rejected" reference

[Anonymous Coward]

Rejected is great, but i don't see how it's so appropriate.

But now you started it: I'm feeling fat and sassy.

Re:Wow, now the taxpayers of Virginia have to pay

[rho]

Why should I be bothered by a recidivism rate? If they're back in jail again, it's likely because they are not good people. I am utterly uninterested in reforming criminals. If they are capable of reform, they will most likely do it themselves. If they are not, they need to be seperated from society.

Also it only costs a lot of money to imprison somebody because there are quite rigorous standards that must be met for prisons. Relax those standards and you can imprison somebody quite inexpensively. See the Arizona sheriff who runs a work camp with little more than tents.

And unwanted commerials on my TV is tresspass too!

[Anonymous Coward]

Cause email is just email, but TV is SACRED!

ACLU sided with the spammer

[crucini]

Note that the ACLU sided with the spammer. I guess it's official: spammers can now be classed with Nazis, pedophiles and terrorists.

Re:ACLU sided with the spammer

[HiThere]

I'm rather glad they did. I'm glad that the spammer was convicted, but SOMEBODY has to step up an ensure that the formalities are properly followed, even when someone is accused of somethien despicable.

The ACLU serves a magnificent purpose, and if I weren't donating to other similar organizations (like the EFF), I'd certainly donate to them. Pray that you never find yourself in a position to need their support, because they are so stretched that most who need them don't get any support. They must defend cases where new ground is being broken by legal cases. They can't choose which cases they will get, because they need to fight on more fronts than they have coverage available...so they must choose only the most significant ones...which are usually against despicable people, whether they're right or wrong.

Re:Wow, now the taxpayers of Virginia have to pay

[antifoidulus]

Yes, but shouldn't the restitution go to the victims instead of not even covering the state's expense for the prisoner? This isn't a violent murderer. With things such as ankle bracelets and work release it would be much cheaper and easier to keep him in his own home where he can do a lot of the same labor(such as credit card help and whatever else the prisoners do) or let him work in the prison for 8 hours a day but then you don't have to feed him, don't have to shelter him, you have to pay less guards etc. If he fails to meet the requirements then they can throw him in prison.

CL@$$ act10n L@wsu1t!!!

[VorpalRodent]

You too can get.rich.quick. Simply join this class action lawsuit against many spammers. Sign the petition at htp:/alksuehrlhkjvas.eoaijsldcv.cz. By joining, you can get deep discounts on V1@Gara, V1c0din, and hundreds of other deals.

--insert random text from random book--

Virginia have to pay

[Anonymous Coward]

So now the punk-bitch gets to paint his lips red with cherry cool-aid before Tyrone gets to drop a load spiked with HIV in his brown-eye; after that he goes to work at $0.28 an hour so he can pay his $3.00 medicaid co-pay and get his meds which might keep him alive untill he gets out. Garnish his wages, dude its income from illegal activity, they can seize all his assets, charge him room and board, charge him for his Parole Officer's time after he gets out not to mention restitution and victim's right's fund; people don't have any Idea how bad your screwed when you go to prison. Garnishment only takes 25%, this is typically half and it'll probably be a parole violation to be unemployed and be next to impossible to get a job anyplace except for a sadistic asshole that can't keep anybody else working for him.
When he fianlly can't take it anymore, it's wash rinse repeat!

I'll stick with the traditional ham thank you

[binarybum]

Wow, I've never even gotten a chance to try this virginia spam and they're allready getting sent away to jail. I guess that's what happens when you try to compete with the long-standing Ham curing industry in Virginia.

Caller ID

[Ironsides]

I've found Caller ID usefull. I've learned the numbers/areas that the telemarketers usually use and just ignore the calls at that point. It's also useful when a friend/relative calls and I can pickup say, one sec or I'll get him, and hand the phone to the person they usally call to talk to. After a year, they all knew we had caller ID and did't care.

ObLyon

[Anonymous Coward]

They should pay us for all of our overtime, lost sleep, and lost social life (if you had one before). They should be sent to a prison that has no electronic devices (computer, phone, gameboy, radio, etc.) and only communication device is a chalkboard. Yes chalkboard.

LUCKY ME!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been keeping all my SPAM from the last 4 years for this very reason.
I have about 300,000 pieces of evidence!

I'M GOING TO BE RICH!!!!

Re:Appropriate Response

[Anonymous Coward]

It is if you send it to Jews. Or just about any other non-Christain faith.

How much of this country would go apeshit if Muslims started spam mailing out "Allah Saves!" E-mails during their holidays?

Re:Wow, now the taxpayers of Virginia have to pay

[Anonymous Coward]

If the cheapest solution is all you're interested in ... then just put a 49-cent bullet through his skull. (It's doubtful they'd have to pay for an executioner, as there would undoubtedly be millions of volunteers for the job.)

RE: Disproportionate Punishment?

[Dudukain]

Look, we all hate spammers, but doesn't this seem a little nuts? A felony charge AND being sued by people? That'll ruin someone's life. Plus, they were AOL CUSTOMERS. No one cares about AOL customers.

Class action suits against spammers?

[Anonymous Coward]

So maybe I should start saving my spam, so I can legally prove unauthorized use of my computer resources (since the headers prove each spam's origination and pedigree)?

I like it. The more spam I save, the more resources I use, the more I have been harmed :-)

and the bigger the payout!

another option

[Xtifr]

> "is it worth spending tens of thousands of dollars a year of public money to house and feed a spammer?"

Capital punishment is much more cost effective, and tends to have a fairly low recidivism rate.

But even cheaper would be to simply declare them vermin, and allow them to be shot on sight. Ranchers in southwest used to hang coyote skins on their fences to scare away other coyotes. I think a few spammer skins hung on the fences of Research Triangle and Silicon Valley businesses might go a long way towards solving the problem of spam. :)

Email bandwidth is free - attention is expensive

[billstewart]

Unless you're strictly in the business of providing email service, or paying by the kbyte on some overpriced cellphone data service or dialing a long-distance call, the bandwidth consumed by receiving spam costs so little that it's essentially free, to you and your ISP, and certainly costs a small fraction of what you're using for web browsing.

What costs you time and virtual money is dealing with the amount of junk in your mailbox, building filters to kill it and deleting the stuff that got through, and losing the occasional real message that got caught in all the noise, all because some miscreant doesn't mind wasting 100,000 people's time to reach the one sucker who really would buy Nigerian Herbal Fake Viagra.

My email addresses probably receive 1000 spams a day, almost all of which are blocked automatically. That's 10 MB/day. If all of them actually got carried on my DSL line, instead of blocking at my ISP, that'd be under 100 seconds/day, or about 0.1% of the bandwidth I have. In reality, I probably actually receive 10 spams/day that get through my filters (mostly to the admin address of a mailing list I run, which I don't filter heavily because most of the real traffic is from unknown addresses, e.g. the work address of somebody whose home address is on the list.) That would still be mildly annoying on dialup, and my ISP still pays for the bandwidth on some of the 1000 spams (unless they got rejected at the IP or SMTP header levels), and the CPU power consumed by SpamAssassin is contributing to Global Warming and the Heat Death of the Universe.

Re:Appropriate Response

[Fordiman]

Eh. I get annoyed at any religious spam. Being not-religious, and all.

Creative sentencing

[sjames]

Instead of jail, they should house arrest. Every day, they should be forced to scan emails and manually mark them as spam or ham. Every error should add another day to their sentence (to ensure they will do their best). To minimize privacy concerns, they should be the last resort filter, only looking at mail that has already been marked as spam by automated filters. They must do this until they have removed twice as much spam from the world as they added.

For maximum effect, they should be offered a simple opt-out procedure for their sentence. If they follow it, their sentence is doubled.