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

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.