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4th Circuit Court Sides With a Spammer
bulled writes to tell us about coverage on CNet regarding a ruling a couple of weeks back that allows a spamming company to procede with their suit against a spamfighter. The 4th Circuit court ruled that the U.S. CAN-SPAM Act, much derided here, trumps the Oklahoma law under which anti-spam activist Mark Mumma sued Omega World Travel for spamming him. The ruling allows Omega World Travel's countersuit, for defamation, to go forward. From the article: "'There's been a lot of activity in the states to pass laws purportedly to protect their citizens' from spam, said Eric Goldman, a law professor at Santa Clara University. 'The 4th Circuit may have laid waste to all of those efforts.'"
and rot in hell...
FTA
This ruling could prove to be a setback for other antispam activists for one major reason: It suggests that, thanks to the Can-Spam Act, state laws prohibiting fraudulent or deceptive communications won't be all that useful against junk e-mail.
Basically, as far as i understand it, states will have a much harder time of protecting their citizens from spam.
"No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture." - Learned Hand
I was getting a bunch of these for a few days. The text was just some random "story" that started mid sentence. I just kept having gmail send them to the spam folder. I guess it has learned now because I don't get them in my in-box anymore.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
anti spam "activist"? wow, some people have really fucked up priorities. who cares?
Try modding these messages down next time, and you might get less of them...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I've been seeing untold thousands of "XXXXX wrote:" through and blocked, both. They are all coming from desktop-looking IP addresses, so it's a bot army, methinks. Today, they were from Greece, the UK, some from the US, but the largest number were from Asia. Yes, started about a week ago. That, and a flood of messages with a reply-to that always starts with "debora[h]" and a domain name that looks scraped from industrial manufacturing lists somewhere. In other words, just another day in spamland. At least it's different, and I get to get angry all over again.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
If he sued a company under an existing law, and a court later found that a federal law outweighed the state law, how can the person suing possibly be held responsible? How can it be considered his responsibility to know the judgement of the circuit court before he even filed the case in the first place?
The laws of probability forbid it!
In that case, I guess the judges shouldn't object if we forward our spam to them.
allows a spamming company to procede with their suit against a spamfighter
Really? Why? Is the spamfighter bald?
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
is quoted. That strikes down the application of Oklahoma's law, which the judge ruled
And then, the judge ruled that it didn't violate the CAN-SPAM act (The apellant, mummagraphics argued that the senders of the e-mails mislead mummagraphics as to the origin of the message, when the judge pointed out that it was a marketing e-mail- hence, it had all sorts of links and phone numbers and stuff to contact the people who had sent it.)
With all that established, the appellants had no case.
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this, unless you have a problem with the doctrine of preemption- and if you do, that's a much, much larger issue than just spam e-mail.
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
I wonder if Judge James Harvie Wilkinson III would be interested in letting me deposit sixty millions of American dollars into his bank accout for my deceased Nigerian prince brother while increasing the size of his manhood and curing any desease.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote this opinion in the 4th circuit. He's Reaganite authoritarian on the most "conservative" appellate bench in the country. You might remember him as the brave patriot who upheld the right of the executive branch of the US Government to indefinitely detain any US Citizen with no access to counsel, court, or any legal process to challenge that detention.
Basically, the 4th circuit is an incredibly hostile place for "the little guy" when challenging a big business.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
Ironically enough, when I read the article, and advertisement for www.cruise.com, the spammer in question, appeared at the bottom of the page. I wonder how many people will read this article and then feel inspired to shop for a cruise from them?
I can't understand why spammers aren't prosecuted as organized criminals. They hijack other people's computers as a business.
And isn't spam any unsolicited e-mail? How this didn't violate CAN-SPAM is amazing. Like to see this go to the SCOTUS.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Finally some sanity from the judiciary.
The judge wouldn't want to endanger his primary source of r0ga1n, v1agra and c!a1is now, would he?
From TFA
"The Can-Spam Act essentially protects the e-mailer; it doesn't protect us," Mumma said.
Yup, typical Bush bill. They say it's for one thing but actually for big business.
.....I have come to the decision to NEVER do business with your company, nor any of its subsidiaries. Your decision to utilize a means of advertising at the expense of consumers highlights the general business attitude your company has taken. Further emails to me will only reinforce this opinion, and quite possibly trigger a public effort, on my part, to make known to as many consumers as possible, via the internet, and any other means available to me, that your company is taking part in illegal activities (email advertising) at the expense of the very customers you are trying to do business with."
I send this to as many spam adverts as I can. I simply cut and paste the exact same reply. And NOT to the address contained in the advert. I look up the SALES dept. address and send it to THEM. In EVERY instance I have done this, the mails stopped.
I know a few of you will probably say "What's the judges email address, let's get him some spam"
It will not work. The judge probably has the best spam filter money can buy- an assistant that prints off legitimate emails for him to read, or deletes spam every morning for him.
That's true for just about anyone who is involved in legislation that can stop spam. Except for their home email account, they are probably ignorant of what the real world is like.
I, for one, believe that the judge took the spam companies offer to help him enlarge his penis.
For some reason my business email which I rarely use started getting carpet bombed with spam a few weeks ago. I get up to fifty emails a day in the bulk folder and some in the main folder. I'd ignore the bulk folder but since it's primarily for business half the needed emails ends up in the bulk folder and I have accidentally deleted good emails. The odd thing is I have a personal email with the same service that gets maybe half a dozen a day. I rarely give out my business one but they got the address off some site because they are using my screen name in the heading. Definately automated because it's not a normal name. I can't believe nothing is being done about this. Business is loosing hundreds of millions, most estimates are in the billions a year, in time lost dealing with it let alone people that get suckered into the scams. If people were getting fifty phone calls a day from salesmen the issue would get resolved. The joke is more email is sent than phone calls so it's a bigger issue. It may seem like an inconvience but with looses between the scams and lost time running into the billions if not tens of billions a year it should be a priority with the government. In a sense ignoring the loss of life looking at strickly the dollar amounts involved we're talking about several 911s a year and no one is doing anything about it.
That's a deceptive misquote of the statute, which actually reads
This chapter supersedes any statute, regulation, or rule of a State or political subdivision of a State that expressly regulates the use of electronic mail to send commercial messages, except to the extent that any such statute, regulation, or rule prohibits falsity or deception in any portion of a commercial electronic mail message or information attached thereto.
The judge then took a narrow view of that language. His reading of the CAN-SPAM act is that "falsity or deception" above must rise to the level of a tort, and that the false information must constitute a "material deception". He then looks at the language of the CAN-SPAM act's criminal provisions, which prohibit the initiation of a "transmission to a protected computer of a commercial electronic mail message if such person has actual knowledge, or knowledge fairly implied on the basis of objective circumstances, that a subject heading of the message would be likely to mislead a recipient, acting reasonably under the circumstances, about a material fact regarding the contents or subject matter of the message". Applying that language to divine the intent of Congress, the judge then rules that deceptive material in a spam e-mail must be believed by the recipient, and about a material fact, to be actionable.
Now, given the facts in this case, that's not totally unreasonable. The e-mails bore a return address of "cruisedeals@cruise.com", which was non-functional. But the messages were, in fact, advertising "cruise.com" and were in fact initiated by the operators of "cruise.com". So this is not an anonymous spammer.
This is key. The CAN-SPAM act protects spammers who properly identify themselves. (Those are today routinely caught by spam filters.) That was the clear intent of Congress, based on lobbying by the Direct Marketing Association. There was no willful obfusication by the sender here; it was clear that "cruise.com" was behind all this.
This decision doesn't provide any relief for anonymous spammers and scammers.
Yes, I was getting about 20 or 30 of these a day until I updated my filters in Thunderbird (since seemingly the junk mail settings in TB had some sort of learning disability with this one.)
I think stock related spam is now the singularly most annoying thing out there.
We need to set up mist net throughout the homes of spammers, and put them out of our misery. A bounty on spammers seems the only way to solve the problem. :)
We cannot claim the reward unless we have 51% of the carcass! —Apu
If they can get you to start qualifying what looks like a legitimate email (just from a fake person and not at all pertaining to you) as spam, your filter might start giving you false positives which would make you more inclined (they hope) to turn off your filter or check your junk folder more often in case you missed something.
Bottles.
I dunno, it's tough to argue with the decisions of a high court...if you've got an argument you can appeal after all.
Sounds to me like a lame law being faithfully upheld by the judiciary...to the deteriment of the people.
Blar.
as I have said many times, america is over
This doesn't work in most cases, since your friends aren't usually going to quote C. S. Lewis at you. Therefore, anything which sounds like classical literature is spam.
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
This is an American law served in America and only involving Americans. Sure you can't expect to police the world but we were told we had a law to protect us and now it's failed.
I usually hate to abdicate vigilantism but it looks like the law was written to protect criminals and I can see why when I look at the number of lawmakers on their way to prison. Maybe its time for real justice? Good advise might just be that if you find a spammer save yourself the trouble and just sneak up on them and blow them away like the sewer rats they are.
Is anyone really surprised that the law is broken?
> This chapter supersedes any statute, regulation, or rule of a state or political subdivision of a state that
>expressly regulates the use of electronic male to send commerical messages...
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
Ok everyone - get on the phone and call the company and advise them there is a boycott and they may lose some business over this.
They need to be hit hard where it hurts, right in their pocket book.
And isn't spam any unsolicited e-mail?
No, spam is unsolicited broadcast email.
Every time you send mail to someone you've never sent mail to before, that's unsolicited email.
Unsolicited broadcast email. Broadcast means it's bulk. More than that, broadcast means it's indiscriminate - real email from your bank telling you about a new branch isn't spam, they're your bank, they have a relationship with you... but the same message from a competing bank, sent to the same mix of people who are largely NOT their customers, that's spam. Unsolicited, of course, simply means you didn't ask for it.
Legislation doesn't work in this case!
The only solution is a free-market solution. Better filtering, blacklisting, etc etc. The free market will sovle the problem eventually because unless we turn the ENTIRE WORLD into a police state, there is really no way to stamp it out.
Libertas in infinitum
Please reveal the falure proof method you have for identifying the jurisdiction of an email recipient based soley on that email address. How do you know Slutty_Panties@Yahoo.com won't be visiting a town that has made the sending of any suggestive emails a capital offense.
Hmm, you don't have one, do you? I guess that means no one should ever send email again, because they can never be sure where the recipient will be when they recieve the email. If you hate spam that much, there's a simple solution, never use an email address. Nobody is forcing you to connect to a mail server and download messages. Once again, pull your head out of your ass and think about what you are asking for.
I suppose it too much to ask for people to think on Slashdot.
I agree with you, but given that Superman is out of town and Batman is indisposed, who are we going to call to scrub the stain of the past 80-odd years from our government and give back our country?
It's a pretty short list of organizations and people who could do it; and I'm not sure I like the possible candidates for the job and more than I like the current bunch of crooks.
If you look at the decline of local control -- which is in my opinion, the only way that's ever showed any success at keeping governments responsive -- it about parallels the rise of the U.S. as a superpower on the world stage. Power was essentially taken from the States and given to the Federal government, in order to make the U.S. more powerful as a large nation, rather than as a combination of smaller quasi-independent states.
The only good thing that I can think might happen as a result of a decline in U.S. superpower status, would be a reconsideration on the part of the people of the powers that were passed up to Washington during the 20th century. I doubt the Federal government will give them up willingly, but perhaps someday local governments will take back what is rightfully theirs.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Domain Name: CRUISE.COM
Administrative Contact:
Lawless, John jlawless@owt.net
Omega World Travel
3102 Omega Office Park
Fairfax, VA 22031
US
703.359.0200 fax: (703) 359-8880
Is that just appropriate, or what? =)
The courts want to rule (again) in favor of profits and rule against the common good of the people, then lets give the judges a taste of whats to come. Since its "ok" to spam under certain conditions, i say everyone, every person on line become a spammer, and dump spam on all the judge's emails. I mean flood these people, render any email address they have useless by flooding it with 1000 spams per hour. Since its ok to spam, there should be no problem. Im so sick of judges siding against the common good of the people, its ruins our quality of life as humans and ruins the quality of life for generations to come.