Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!)
Regards,
MBC1977,
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??
Meta will eat itself
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.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
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.
Monstar L
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.
Penny - plain text accounting
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.
Does everything include nothing?
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.
if they arent making money spamming, wtf are they doing spamming?
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.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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...
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.
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.