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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."
God, how many years will the "You've got Mail" voice actor get?
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.
Would be to have the spammers make and eat spam (the meat) all day while the prison guards sing about the joys of spam.
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?
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,
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)
34486853790
Connection too slow for X forwarding? Try "ssh -CX user@host"
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
I read the title as "Virgin Spammers". Well, not for long! Brown wings ahoy!
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?
. . . 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!
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.
...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! ;-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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.
I though in Texas you could shoot anybody, anywhere, for any reason. Isn't that why people live in Texas??
"But this one goes to 11!"
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.
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?
:-P
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
--insert random text from random book--
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
No you can't shoot anybody for any reason, but you can get married without realizing it!
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds