High Earning Spammers Face Tougher Sentences

netbuzz writes "More big-time spammers may find themselves doing longer stretches behind bars if a federal judge's first-of-its-kind sentencing decision in a Denver case becomes widely applied. In a sense, these spammers would be hoisted on their own profits, as language in CAN-SPAM allows the use of their profits instead of the difficult-to-measure financial damage they cause in establishing a prison sentence. The Denver spammer earned $250,000 — and a 20% longer prison stint — using this approach."

Comments

"Hoisted on their own profits"

[base3]

is nice, but until they're hoisted on a gallows (or facing a firing squad, in a pinch), it's not quite good enough, but a step in the right general direction. Hang 'em high--after all, they can then say their penis pills caused them to he hung (yeah, hanged, I know, I know).

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[alshithead]

"is nice, but until they're hoisted on a gallows (or facing a firing squad, in a pinch), it's not quite good enough, but a step in the right general direction. Hang 'em high--after all, they can then say their penis pills caused them to he hung (yeah, hanged, I know, I know)."

Yay! Grammar knowledge goodness.

But, I can't agree with them being hanged as an appropriate punishment. Let's save life ending punishment for the truly worst criminals. I'm also not really sure that longer sentences will be a deterrent. Let's put them to work deleting spam flagged by the major ISP's for the rest of their lives. Supervise them appropriately while they are serving their sentence and allow them no other computer access. A swift kick to the ass on a daily basis might make some spam recipients feel better too.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[beadfulthings]

Rather than hanging, I'd say put the guilty in a room for fifteen minutes with a group of e-mail administrators, network managers, IT security pukes, and assorted other sufferers. These folks would be drawn from a pool of all available qualified persons. (We'd have to work out the details of the selection process, but that shouldn't be too hard.) The only rule would be that the spammer couldn't be killed. I have occasionally wondered what I would do if introduced to a notorious spammer. Leap out of my chair and attempt to claw his eyes out? Aim a well-placed kick at some sensitive area? Find some weapon to use to bash his skull in? Or just sit there and say, "You idiot! Why?"

(I didn't think your post was offtopic. I thought it was funny.)

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[erroneus]

To me there is no greater crime than the one that involves planning and execution, breaking and skirting security measures, taking advantage of and defrauding thousands if not millions of people, and doing so with a sense of entitlement.

They demonstrate no remorse and no regret. They commit criminal acts on a very wide scale and they somehow think it's business. The crime is executed in a cold, calculating and callous manner against people who often go through great and expensive means to avoid their acts only to have those measures thwarted with ever-increasing intent. INTENT. These guys are intent on doing what they do.

They demonstrate skill that could just as easily be used in honest ways. They choose not to for varieties of reasons, but they clearly have options and ignore the legal ones in favor of illegal ones. Why? Because they stand to make more money criminally? That's the most likely reason.

Now let's compare that to, say, armed robbery. Aside from the true professionals, armed robbers are generally pretty desperate people. Very little planning goes into the act. Get get a weapon and engage in violent and brutal behavior to get money... a relatively small amount of money at that when compared the the criminal described above. The victims are limited in number. The victims aren't usually pulled from a list, but rather someone at random... an unfortunate.

And while an armed robber might present the victim(s) with momentary fright or even injury, it's a much more honest and direct crime. It's also far less planned. The degree is intent is orders of magnitude less than that of the criminal described above. The drive for this crime is generally one of desperation; it's emotional in nature -- passionate. And let's face it. If he had better options, he would be doing that at all.

So really... which one is actually the worst person? Which is the worst crime? Is armed robbery worse because it involves fear?! Someone ran a red light and scared me half to death the other morning! By that measure, a red-light runner is worse than a spammer... and let's not forget that more people die in those types of accidents than from armed robbery, let alone spamming. So REALLY. What makes other crimes worse?

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[heinousjay]

To me there is no greater crime than the one that involves planning and execution, breaking and skirting security measures, taking advantage of and defrauding thousands if not millions of people, and doing so with a sense of entitlement.

Holy shit are your priorities fucked.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[Goobermunch]

Hmmm. What is "the one that poses a substantial and unavoidable chance of someone getting killed when it all goes south," Alex.

Come on. Wrap your head around this: Armed robberies often involve people getting shot and killed. Spam, to the best of my knowledge never killed anyone.

And in most (94% or higher) states, the only death qualified felonies (if any) are homicides and rape (especially the rape of children). Spam is simply not in the same ballpark as other crimes.

Now that's not to say that I don't think a good public flogging wouldn't be in order, on the way to the prison . . . . But the death penalty for what is essentially a victimless crime? No.

--AC

In the interest of fairness, I should mention that under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, it is a capital offense to grow pot. To be death qualified, you've got to grow lots and lots and lots of pot (like 200,000 plants). But that shouldn't be the law either.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[DJCacophony]

How about comparing it to murder instead of armed robbery, and wondering why you advocate the same punishment for murder and spamming? Do you honestly think spamming and murder are morally equal?

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[Xtravar]

Everyone complains about spammers, but for fuck sake, I get at least two credit card offers a week which I *have* to shred otherwise someone may end up rummaging through my garbage and taking out a credit card in my name. I get shit in my real mailbox that could easily make me miss a bill payment with all the clutter.

Why the fuck does everyone hate on email spammers when they're easily filtered out (for the most part), but they're okay allowing credit card companies and other companies to spam our mailboxes? I hit delete when I see a stock scam, whoop-de-fuckin'-do! But when I get credit card offers and magazines and shit I never asked for in my physical mailbox, I not only have to throw it away, but I have to make sure that no sensitive information is thrown away with it, AND I have to sort out what can be recycled and what can't be (if I feel environmentally conscious).

Beating up on e-spammers is in vogue, and nerds just eat it up and love it. However, physical spam is legal and done continuously with much greater consequences.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[erroneus]

...how can I put this tactfully... ah!

You're an idiot! An armed robbery resulting in people being shot and killed is MURDER! Capital murder at that! We're talking about Armed robbery. This is where a weapon is used in the commission of the crime of stealing from someone in person under THREAT of harm.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[SL Baur]

Let's put them to work deleting spam flagged by the major ISP's for the rest of their lives. Yeah, that sounds about right, but I'd add they should insert one message every so often that has to be printed out and presented to the parole officer. Make the punishment fit the crime.

TFA said he had made an estimated $250k in profit. On the one hand, dang, that's a lot of v1agra, on the other hand, it said he bought 200M email addresses a few years ago and had been arrested with 7.5M addresses on his computer, i.e. even with a horrible response rate and a >95% garbage mailing list it can still add up. While the economics of email massively favor the spammer, this problem will never be solved.

A swift kick to the ass on a daily basis might make some spam recipients feel better too. That wouldn't make me feel better (and I have no doubt that my permanent email address was one of those 7.5M "lucky" email addresses), but whatever.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[erroneus]

No. Murder is not morally equal. But people are more likely to be murderers than spammers because murder most often involves a momentary lapse of reason or good sense. Spammers are professionally out to get whatever they can, as often as they can at anyone's expense using lies, deceit and misdirection. I find murder to be a lot easier to forgive. Murderers are less likely to have character flaws. Murderers are people like you or your neighbor. They are your boyfriends and girlfriends... husbands and wives... most of the time someone they know is the victim... and often times, there is something resembling deserving or cause!

But the users of the net? The millions if not billions of dollars being spent and/or lost due to spams and scams, security compromises and all the problems caused by spammers. You may idealistically claim to think that no amount of money is worth a single human life, but the facts are not in your favor. If the lives of strangers are so important to you, what are you doing to stop their tragic ends? Trying to stop the war "on terror" are you? I kinda doubt it.

Life and death happens for a variety of reasons and a variety of causes in a variety of ways. Generally speaking, the most pleasant ways to die are those that involve lethal injections or sleeping. Beyond that, the tragedy of death will happen to everyone. It's what's between birth and death that needs to be cared for the most and when a single individual can be responsible for so much expense, trouble and misery spread out evenly across the world. Death is unavoidable. Spam is completely needless.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[Goobermunch]

I'm well aware of the felony murder rule, you arrogant prick.

But the point is that the risk of harm to others is much greater in the case of an armed robbery than in a spamming. Surely, you'll concede such a simple point.

Since a part of the purpose of criminally punishing people is to deter others from engaging in the same or similar conduct, does it not make sense to punish more severely the conduct that, if emulated, poses a substantial risk of escalating into a murder?

But perhaps my point was too subtle for you.

Crimes with guns==dangerous and bad.
Crimes with email==bad.

Execution for spamming==moronic.

That better? ;)

--AC

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[KiahZero]

The parent's point was that the difference between armed robbery and capital murder is generally luck, so saying that spammers have committed a more morally heinous crime than armed robbery is a stretch; spam has a much lower likelihood of ending in death (approximately zero) than armed robbery (some high percentage).

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[jcr]

I rather like the idea of one slap across the face per spam message. If they sent out ten e-mails, they get a sore face for a couple of minutes. If they sent out millions, then they're likely to become a red smear on the floor of the cell.

-jcr

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[SL Baur]

Hmmm. What is "the one that poses a substantial and unavoidable chance of someone getting killed when it all goes south," Alex. Now you're getting into thought crime, which sadly is becoming most fashionable. Justice is getting punished for what you've done wrong, not for what you might have done wrong.

Wrap your head around this: Armed robberies often involve people getting shot and killed. Wrap your head around this: until they are shot and killed, it really doesn't matter. When they are shot and killed, it's murder and we have fairly severe penalties for that.

Armed robbery is taking advantage of the legally disarmed. Put a big sign outside your store (in English and Spanish) - "WARNING: teller is armed" and I'll bet that will be one store that's skipped even by the most desperate wannabe armed robber. Or better still, do like they do in RP and have a uniformed, badged and openly armed security guard at the entrance.

Spam, to the best of my knowledge never killed anyone. I wouldn't be so sure of that. I wouldn't be surprised at all if there were victims of overwork (a fairly common problem in Japan, past PM Obuchi died of it) in Japanese ISPs due to stress and overtime involved with fighting spam. I'd be more surprised though if news of that actually reached a newspaper. And yes, under those circumstances, I would consider it fair to charge spammers with murder.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently, your butler isn't doing a very good job. He should have filtered out all the spam in your snail mail. Fire him and get a new one.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[SL Baur]

Erroneus' original question was (which I think is a thought-provoking question):

So REALLY. What makes other crimes worse? and neither did he write anything about punishment nor did you answer his question.

See my earlier post in this thread for my thoughts on a comparison between armed robbery and spamming.

Your question is:

Do you honestly think spamming and murder are morally equal? I wouldn't, unless as a result of the consequences of the spam, someone died. I think with high probability unfortunate engineers in Japanese ISPs (and elsewhere) have died from overwork combatting spam. They call it Karoshi in Japan http://www.apmforum.com/columns/boye51.htm and the Prime Minister around the turn of the century, OBUCHI Keizo, is a recent extremely high-profile victim.

He wasn't offering moral comparisons though, only the amount of intent involved. I would imagine more effort, planning and callousness go into spamming than nearly any premeditated murder.

Think outside the box for a moment. Murder is ending the life of an individual, in effect stealing time from their life away from them and their loved ones. Spamming is stealing time from the lives of millions of individuals and the overall costs to society as a whole may well be greater.

And the more I think about it, the more I want to hear your answer. What makes you think that murder is morally worse than spamming? Just asking.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[SL Baur]

Why the fuck does everyone hate on email spammers when they're easily filtered out (for the most part), Ay, there's the rub. You still have to do a quick scan to make sure your filter didn't misroute a message.

but they're okay allowing credit card companies and other companies to spam our mailboxes? I hit delete when I see a stock scam, whoop-de-fuckin'-do! But when I get credit card offers and magazines and shit I never asked for in my physical mailbox, I not only have to throw it away, I'm not. However, for me, email addresses are far more permanent than meat space addresses. Since I've had my @xemacs.org mailing address (1995), I've had 12 meat space addresses (hey, I'm a contractor and I move around a lot).

My first piece of mail in Japan, once I got a visa and permanent address, was a flyer from an English Conversation school with Celine Dion's picture on it. The horror, the horror ...

The US is far, far the worst place I've ever lived for junk mail. I've lost bills while out of town due to my tiny mailslot filling up with junk. The kicker was one time when I was down to check my mail at the same time the garbage^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmail man was delivering and I told him don't give me that crap (he had two big bags, one of real mail, the other of bulk garbage), I don't want it and he basically told me off ("I'm required by law to give this to you, yadda, yadda, yadda"). Wonderful.

Both junk email (taking time away from me to get rid of it) and bulk postal mail are irritating nuisances that take at least as much time to get rid of as smoking supposedly reduces from one's life expectancy, so why shouldn't they both get the same penalties that the US tobacco companies got?

However, physical spam is legal and done continuously with much greater consequences. It's worse, it's required by US law. You cannot opt out.

The couple of years I spent living in the jungles of Mindanao were great. No mail delivery, no junk mail. No landlines, no telemarketers. Sometimes the 3rd world can be bliss...

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[KDR_11k]

Let's not forget the way they abuse public infrastructure making it almost unusable. While I think capital punishment is too much, 25 years in jail does sound reasonable considering how much damage they do.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[KDR_11k]

You can call spam many things but victimless is probably the least applicable. How is it victimless to DDoS mailservers and inboxes while attempting to get data for identity theft? If that was done by a govt it would be considered an act of war.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[bit01]

spam has a much lower likelihood of ending in death (approximately zero) than armed robbery (some high percentage).

You are ignoring the statistics. Spam affects millions. It is a statistical certainty that some people have been affected in a life threatening way, whether it be a naive person who wastes time on a useless medicine or a person who misses an important life-or-death email because it's been spam-filtered.

---

Astroturfing "marketers" are liars, fraudulently misrepresenting company propaganda as objective third party opinion.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[Anonymous Coward]

It is a statistical certainty that some people have been affected in a life threatening way, whether it be a naive person who wastes time on a useless medicine or a person who misses an important life-or-death email because it's been spam-filtered.

This is a bit thin. You could also say it's a statistical certainty that some people who refuse to go to a doctor will buy a genuine life-saving medicine due to spam, or a person who misses an important email may have their life saved because they then miss going to a meeting which they would have been in a car wreck returning from (excuse clumsy construction).

Beyond the obvious effects of wasted bandwith, time, storage etc. the effects of spam will tend to be random sideeffects which may be good or bad and probably cancel out.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[Anonymous Coward]

It only seems unbalanced because you are comparing spam to a crime that doesn't really affect you. If people in your family or your friends were getting murdered, I am sure spam would fall to the bottom of your list.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[MicktheMech]

I assume you're talking about those very important "forward this to 10 other people or you will die in seven days" e-mails. Life and death indeed.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[Goobermunch]

You're entirely overlooking the deterrent purposes of penal punishment. The punishments for armed robbery are higher because armed robberies are more likely to turn into murders than spamming. By punishing armed robberies more severely than, say unarmed robberies, the state is saying "this is bad behavior. Don't do it!"

While we can argue about whether deterrence actually works, that's the purpose. It has nothing to do with thought crimes. It has to do with serving the purpose of criminal punishment--preventing future crimes.

The four basic principles behind our system of criminal punishments are: retribution, deterrence, rehabilitation, and incapacitation. Retribution is an easy one. It's society's need to inflict suffering on the person who hurt it. Rehabilitation is pretty simple too. Take the broken person and try to fix them. The last two are a little more complex. Incapacitation works by taking the known criminal and diverting them away from society at large. If the criminal is locked in an 8'x 8' steel box, he or she cannot hurt anyone on the outside. Deterrence is simply the use of the criminal's example to convince others not to engage in the same or similar conduct.

Finally, punishing criminals for what they're thinking when they commit a crime is nothing new. It's what has always differentiated between murder and manslaughter. A murder is a homicide committed with "malice aforethought." It's punished more harshly solely based on what the murderer was thinking when he committed the crime. That's not a thought crime. That's recognizing that people who mean to kill are more dangerous than those who accidentally do so.

--AC

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[dintech]

a person who misses an important life-or-death email because it's been spam-filtered.

Dear Friend,

I am writing to you in relation to a proposition I hope you can help me for. I am current on holiday in a famous African country of which I am visitor. Recently the president has become angried and left with him a letter declaring that one thousand (1000) foreigners to be executed. I was hoping that you would call our embassy and ask for them to assist me in the next four (4) hours before I am shot. For this I will share with you my holiday spending money of eight hundred (800) dollars. I am happy awaiting your responses.

Thank You.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[Anonymous Coward]

No, thought crime occurs entirely within the confines of one's own head.

The reason armed robbery carries a higher penalty than, say, burglary is the greater risk to others. Nothing to do with thought crime.

I'm guessing by your suggestions that more people be heavily armed as a deterrent to crime that you must be an American. How's that whole 'right to bear arms' thing working out for you so far? Nice, low crime rate? Hardly any violence? You guys must be closing prisons almost daily, right?

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[Dragonslicer]

I understand the hatred for junk mail, but there is one significant difference. Spam is sent out by thousands of zombie computers, using the resources of the owners of the computers and the ISP's. The head of the spamming operation makes all the money while using little to none of his own time, effort, or money. Bulk mail like credit card offers, however, are paid for by the company sending them out. With physical mail, a large amount of the operating costs are in going from one place to another (city to city or home to home), regardless of how much mail is being carried, so all of that bulk mail helps subsidize the postal system to some extent. Spam email is entirely a win for the head and a loss for everyone else, while bulk physical mail is much closer to breaking even.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[Cornelius the Great]

Apparently, your butler isn't doing a very good job. He should have filtered out all the spam in your snail mail. Delete him and install a new one.
There, fixed.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[beadfulthings]

It might be helpful to you to know that there's an opt-out list for physical junk mail. Do a hunt for the Direct Mail Marketing Association. Their mechanism has been in place for years, and I have read that it actually does work, though it takes a while. If you're longing for more dead-tree stuff, you can also opt in. As for the credit card offers, begin reading the tiny print before you shred. Somewhere on there is a phone number. You can call it and demand that they quit sending you the offers. If it's not there, call whatever number is on there. I believe (though I am not sure) that they're legally required to comply with your request--simply because every time they mail you one, it means they've checked your credit, and credit reporting agencies keep track of the number of times that happens.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[jcnnghm]

Put a big sign outside your store (in English and Spanish) - "WARNING: teller is armed" and I'll bet that will be one store that's skipped even by the most desperate wannabe armed robber. A liquor store that I go to occasionally recently switched ownership to a retired marine and his son, whom both open carry handguns on their waists while they are working. From the looks of them, you'd be a fool to even consider robbing that place. I also understand that a bunch of the issues that store used to have disappeared almost overnight.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[ultranova]

By that measure, a red-light runner is worse than a spammer...

He is. He is deliberately endangering other people's lives to save a few seconds of his time. Children are especially likely to simply cross on green, making them especially vulnerable for these kinds of assholes.

A red light runner should lose his driving license for good. If he can't be trusted to obey such a simple rule with such a high chance of someone getting hurt as a result, he can't be trusted with a car, period.

and let's not forget that more people die in those types of accidents than from armed robbery, let alone spamming.

If you run the red light and kill someone it is not an accident, any more than a doctor who decides to skip the examination and just write a random prescription which ends up killing the patient is killing that patient by accident. If you choose to deliberately endanger others for your gain, and they end up dying, you should be tried for murder; after all, you knowingly and deliberately engaged in the course of action which you knew would kill them with reasonable likelyhood.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[Anonymous Coward]

Fucking moron, thats why all those school shootings and otherwise end up deadly. Let's have nice safe "gun free zones" and the criminals with guns will magically be barred from entering said barrier. Go stick your Euro-trash bullshit up your ass. Criminals have no regard for the law thats why they are criminals. Two world wars and governments that stare up your ass 24/7...Yeah you guys are so fucking progressive. Yeah go ahead and talk about Iraq but how many atrocities is Europe responsible for. It was your fucking quick "holier than thou" thinking that created iraq and tried to carve the world out in whatever way you see fit. Now you wonder why much of the world is in 3rd world turmoil. Europeans, even more than the most sadistic Americans, are like the plague. Every country you touch you infect into shit. You guys invite yourself into a country and set up camp like a fucking parasite (Especially the fucking brits) playing chess with the local population and profiting from it. Need I go down the list of African countries you've fucked up? Stay in your own side of the world, you guys really fuck things up 100 fold more than the worst Iraqi conflict.

If the US is fucked up, think about who invaded the continent like the fucking plague.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[CoderDog]

But, I can't agree with them being hanged as an appropriate punishment. Let's save life ending punishment for the truly worst criminals. I'm also not really sure that longer sentences will be a deterrent. Let's put them to work deleting spam flagged by the major ISP's for the rest of their lives. Supervise them appropriately while they are serving their sentence and allow them no other computer access. A swift kick to the ass on a daily basis might make some spam recipients feel better too.

I'd settle for sending them to jail and forcing them to ingest dick-growth pills until it's long enough they can use it to climb down from a 4th floor window. 'Course, if the pills actually worked, that'd be the end of it. Except, after tieing off to the bars of a fourth floor window, they'd need a knife to cut themselves loose.

Aw, well. Such are the things that "Reality TV" programming is made of.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[SL Baur]

Finally, punishing criminals for what they're thinking when they commit a crime is nothing new. ... A murder is a homicide committed with "malice aforethought." It's punished more harshly solely based on what the murderer was thinking when he committed the crime. That's not a thought crime. Eh? How do you define "thought crime" then?

I wrote:

Justice is getting punished for what you've done wrong, not for what you might have done wrong. If it were up to me, I'd eliminate the thought crime variants of murder that you outlined. I have pages and pages of notes on this when I was trying to draw up a basic penal code for the fictional nation I created on NationStates, I'll have to dig those up sometime. So basically you are dead wrong here:

You're entirely overlooking the deterrent purposes of penal punishment. Nope, sorry. You get behind the steering wheel of a car[1] and kill someone? That's murder and it should be punished as such and that's how I define deterrence. Contrast to a burglar (armed or not) or a drunken policeman[2] entering your home and threatening you and/or your family? Is lethal force in self defense permissible in that case? I think so. Colorado thought so too when they enacted their "Go ahead, make my day" law several decades ago.

The sticking point I had was getting a reasonable-to-me definition of self defense that would work in the event of defending against an invasion.

We won't ever have real peace until killing people in anything other than self defense is Just Plain Murder.

Would it constitute deterrence if we executed all of the US legislators who voted in favor of an aggressive[3] war in Iraq and the soldiers who carried out their orders (just following orders was no defense in the past)?

[1] Automobiles kill far more people than firearms do except when you factor in war.

[2] Been there, done that and I'm not sure of the exact translation. He was a Kagawad, an elected high law enforcement official authorized to carry arms by the government like a city sheriff. (And he did it twice). The first English language hit I see on it is from Yahoo! Answers, a source as dubious as Wikipedia http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20071205140300AACNZm8

[3] It wasn't punitive. The official list of the guilty of the 9/11 incidents were Saudis. It wasn't preemptive in the sense of get them before they use their weapons of mass destruction before they kill lots of people, there weren't any weapons of mass destruction. It wasn't deterrent in the sense of curtailing terrorism because there's been more terrorism than less since the start of the war.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[SL Baur]

Q.E.D.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[Seraphim_72]

You have got to be kidding me. Company X sells product Y. But to sell it Mr Z has to wash it first. Some A' keeps getting Y dirty. So Mr Z keeps washing, and washing and washing till he dies. So in your opinion A' is guilty of murder, but Company X, who let Mr Z work himself to death, never getting him an assistant or figuring out a better way to produce product Y goes scott free. Sounds to me the ones guilty of murder are the Bosses of Mr Z and Mr Z himself for being so dumb as to work himself to death.

As to your sign in front of the sore, you are partly right. It will keep out the unarmed and the armed with a knife crowd. But at the same time it will become a magnet for those that need to 'prove' themselves, and they will be heavily armed and with a purpose.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[Anonymous Coward]

no, but Gruel and usuall PUN-ishment is good enough for me.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[TheRaven64]

Eh? How do you define "thought crime" then? Thoughtcrime, from the Orwellian definition, is the crime of thinking something inappropriate. A thoughtcrime is one in which no physical crime is committed, but the perpetrator is guilty of inappropriate thought. A modern example of thoughtcrime is the apostasy statue in Saudi Arabia where changing your religion away from Islam is punishable by death.

There is a world of difference between this and altering the punishments based on intent. Do you think that someone who buys a gun for the express purpose of murder and then uses it to kill someone is as guilty as someone who is negligently handles a weapon on a firing range and accidentally kills someone? Should they both be subject to the same punishment?

Ignoring the moral aspect, the first person in the above aspect has demonstrated that they are guilty of premeditated killing and is likely to be a future danger to society. The second person has not (although they might be dangerously incompetent).

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

Fine. Then we'll just punish spamming with the clearest, most obvious and appropriate punishment. Walrus sodomy.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[Translation Error]

There's no aspect of "thought crime" whatsoever involved. Putting people at risk is doing something wrong. That's one of the reasons there's a difference between robbery and armed robbery, or why you can be arrested for DUI even though you haven't crashed into anything or anyone.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[Translation Error]

Not allowed to kill the spammer? That's cruel and unusual punishment for the IT people.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[SL Baur]

Company X sells product Y. But to sell it Mr Z has to wash it first. Some A' keeps getting Y dirty. So Mr Z keeps washing, and washing and washing till he dies. Company X being the ISP selling email services among other things, Mr. Z being the unfortunate salary man in IT culling out spam and A' the spammer. O.K.

So in your opinion A' is guilty of murder, but Company X, who let Mr Z work himself to death, never getting him an assistant or figuring out a better way to produce product Y goes scott free. I never wrote that, but let's follow it to some sort of conclusion. The intent of A' is to make Mr. Z's job impossible - he wants the spam to get through to as many people as he can. Company X responds as in your scenario by laying off employees B, C, D to make room for assistants for Mr. Z - they're on a tight budget. Because we're talking about Japan, employee C doesn't lose his and his family's health insurance, but he has to move to Kansai to get a new job. His eldest son becomes despondent not having a father around and one day plays Samurai at his Juku to deadly consequences.

So yes, I would consider A' as having the primary measure of guilt. It was his intent to cause misery for anyone attempting to block his attacks and currently thought crime is in fashion.

Sounds to me the ones guilty of murder are the Bosses of Mr Z and Mr Z himself for being so dumb as to work himself to death. You've obviously never had children. If it comes down to me working myself to death to preserve my children or death to my children, there's only one choice. (And right now, my youngest is very sick and although covered by PhilHealth, it doesn't cover everything).

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[pretygrrl]

actually, the "felony murder rule" has a pretty specific meaning, and doesn't mean what you think it does.
its not just a "rule" about murder. its a rule that deals w. accomplices and how they are punished.

the dictionary people. its so easy. not misusing any word ever again = EASY!!!

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[SL Baur]

Thoughtcrime, from the Orwellian definition, is the crime of thinking something inappropriate. Well, there you go. Perhaps you are confused on the definition of "inappropriate"?

Ignoring the moral aspect, the first person in the above aspect has demonstrated that they are guilty of premeditated killing and is likely to be a future danger to society. The second person has not (although they might be dangerously incompetent). I would argue the same thing with your second point. If someone is lethally negligent once, they are likely to do the same thing in the future.

I don't see the difference. The escalation of the criminalization of BAC was solely due to serial drunk driving murderers.

I've never killed someone directly. At "best", I was a cold warrior contracting to DoD in the 1980's, so it is likely that some system that I contributed code towards has killed someone, so my hands are probably not clean there. In order to maintain my blue passport I've remitted taxes to the US government which have been used to sustain murder^H^H^H^H^H^Hwar in the middle east. That doesn't seem any different to me than what is called "Conspiracy to Commit Murder" and I feel guilty and ashamed. I've written against the Iraq war since before it started and I've voted against it. Does that matter? Not really, IMO. One day, there will be an accounting. Blowback is a bitch.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[SL Baur]

There's no aspect of "thought crime" whatsoever involved. Putting people at risk is doing something wrong. That's one of the reasons there's a difference between robbery and armed robbery, or why you can be arrested for DUI even though you haven't crashed into anything or anyone. And this is where you have been brainwashed. To use an extreme example, if someone drinks until they are falling-down drunk, drives to the nearest liquor store and buys more booze and drives back home without hurting anyone, what crime has been committed?

It is thought crime.

"Endangering other people" is such a nebulous concept that it can be applied to anything and that makes it worthless as a criteria for determining criminal intent.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[Z00L00K]

There are several different options left as a punishment, even if you can't prove every detail you can set them free - in northern Alaska (time of year at leisure). If they survive nature they have shown that they may actually have skills enough to get by but if not - well it's their problem.

What makes crime worse - it may depend on the circumstances. The drop of water that hollows the stone may be as mean as the shotgun that blows it apart. If they make money from the spam (the usually do) there has to be intent behind the crime. The way they spread the junk is also important - it can be a range from illicit use of computer resources to intrusion and destruction of property.

Anyway - an explicit death penalty may be too harsh, but a considerable penalty isn't bad.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[BaseSequence]

I think a more suitable punishment would be to give the spammer a paper cut...a minor inconvenience...a tiny pain...for each spam message that was sent.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[Mexican]

WTF is your problem? I'll tell you. You never had anything real and violent happen to you that affected you. Maybe perhaps you have had some horrible event affect a alleged "loved one" in your life but for some reason you did not feel it. Or not, maybe you live in a world where parking tickets, RIAA concerns, and SPAM are the worst of your concerns.

I, and anyone sane, know that death is a constant. However, individuals that choose to cause death for the most trivial reasons are abhorrent. You seem to be defending them. How do I go there? Even someone who is "poor" or "disadvantaged" who causes a death to another for minimal profit is DISGUSTING.

You have some stupid temporal opinion about a call to "stop the war 'on terror'" as some justification for your arguments. Just the kind of idiot that would equate having to delete a few hundred spams a month to the horrific circumstances surrounding the death of a loved one.

Perhaps you are loved by no one and can thus have no empathy with a UNTIMELY and UNJUSTIFIED death of another at the hands of another HUMAN being. I guess that was the motivation for your empty, detached post.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[erroneus]

You *must* be a spammer or involved in some sort of email marketing.

People who are close to the problem know there's a LOT of issues in dealing with spam and it's more than annoying emails selling viagra. It has grown into some serious security issues whereby spam is used as a vehicle for other criminal acts such as the creation and maintenance of botnets. Network security on private and public networks are being compromised by and for spam and its content. It has grown WELL beyond the triviality of the occasional junk mail. It is trashing the public internet in ways that people simply aren't away and it is truly wasting hundreds of billions of dollars each year in its wake.

It may have started with a few annoying emails, but that was more than 10 years ago. The problem has evolved far beyond that point now and has the potential to shut down entire network infrastructures or even disable the entire public internet. And if you think for a moment that "no one will die from that" you're wrong.

But I am here to say that from a global perspective, individual murders are trivial. But interrupting and interfering with the global economy can lead to the loss of billions of lives, not just the inevitable few.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[GeckoAddict]

The ftc and the credit agencies set up a site for... well just about everyone: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/credit/prescreen.shtm

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[Translation Error]

The crime is putting people at unacceptable risk. By your argument, it should be perfectly legal to run around firing a gun in random directions until you happen to hit someone. Yes, "endangering other people" is a subjective term--that's why we have lawmakers who (in theory) create rules that exlpicitly state what the community considers acceptable.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[SL Baur]

The crime is putting people at unacceptable risk. "Unacceptable risk" is just too nebulous to define reasonably. You have either committed a crime or you haven't.

The United States is supposed to be a nation of laws not men, and interpretations just invite misunderstanding (or misunderestimating as the case may be).

By your argument, it should be perfectly legal to run around firing a gun in random directions until you happen to hit someone. Yes, "endangering other people" is a subjective term--that's why we have lawmakers who (in theory) create rules that exlpicitly state what the community considers acceptable. True and I also would consider someone running around firing a gun randomly to be impolite at best and a public nuisance. But unless she kills someone, she's not guilty of murder.

I compare this case directly with President Ahmadinejad, who has been accused by the United States government of doing essentially what you're describing. Disregarding the fact that United States intelligence said this week that he neither has a loaded gun nor ammunition, they're still determined to deliver the death penalty to his nation.

When you start expanding laws into what people might do, you end up with an overcrowded prison system. Be proud fellow Americans, there are more people locked up in American prisons than any nation has ever done before in history. You also end up with wars like the war in Iraq where millions of women and children are paying for the crimes officially committed by Saudi Arabians with no ties to Iraq.

It's better in my opinion to concentrate on what people have done. This spammer cost many millions of people, including almost certainly me, an untold amount of time sifting through his garbage (refining procmail filters, etc. etc.) to get email we need. He has committed a crime equal with murder. He has stolen time away from people that they could have spent with their families and vice versa. That's not his decision to make, nor yours, nor mine. And there is nothing theoretical about it.

He bought a 200M list of addresses almost four years ago that was 95% garbage and refined it to the 7.5M addresses that worked. Do you have any idea how much working time that took? How much network resources were consumed processing the bounced emails, etc.? All for the express purpose of sending email to people who didn't want it on their dime. That's evil.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[UbuntuDupe]

Hm, you're intelligent and articulate, you largely agree with me ... why did you foe me? It's about Ubuntu, isn't it?

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[bit01]

Beyond the obvious effects of wasted bandwith, time, storage etc. the effects of spam will tend to be random sideeffects which may be good or bad and probably cancel out.

Not unreasonable but I disagree; on average spam will cause more problems than it solves, because on average spam is deceptive junk designed to advantage the spammer and disadvantage the receiver. If the average spam was neutral, non-manipulative and non-deceptive your position would be valid but in general this is not true and the side effects do not cancel out.

---

Has your software been deliberately crippled?

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[simaul]

Hanging them upside down from highway overpasses, wearing an "I SPAMMED" banner, would serve as a deterrent.As you drove by you would look up and see what happens to spammers.

But to avoid getting the government involved in a sensitive death penalty issue like this, the work should be done by vigilantes.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[alshithead]

"It is a statistical certainty that some people have been affected in a life threatening way, whether it be a naive person who wastes time on a useless medicine or a person who misses an important life-or-death email because it's been spam-filtered."

Life or death email? Who would send an email in a life or death situation? What if your ISP is down, what if a backhoe operator got drunk, what if you use Lotus Notes?

Please, get a grip, any life or death situation is dealt with by phone or in person unless you consider death to be an acceptable result.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[SL Baur]

I did that around a time you were complaining about the treatment you got on the Ubuntu help lists and the posts you made were linked. I only `foed' you when you continued to complain after many people here attempted to explain just how much help you actually got and how little assistance you gave those who were trying to help you. I'm a developer of (usually, but not always) Open Source and dang it, we're volunteer engineers not mind readers.

You brought back memories of the time (when I was not being paid to work on XEmacs) of a guy who had a problem with a Solaris XEmacs and insisted on repeatedly emailing me coredump files[1] even though I asked him not to and didn't answer the questions I asked that might have helped me figure out what the problem actually was. I had limited bandwidth and his useless coredumps were severely impacting my work.

So yes, it was over your Ubuntu[2] issues. Otherwise, you seem like a reasonable person.

[1] Coredumps only work locally. There is a slim chance that they can be debugged remotely, but that chance is 0 if you do not have access to a machine with an identical configuration, which I didn't.

[2] I'm not an Ubuntu person, though I have nothing against it personally. I despise apt (and apt-based Linux distros) for all the pain and suffering it has caused me in the past. I like rpm and can work well with it, so sue me.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[UbuntuDupe]

How much help I got? I gave them the specific error message I got, and then:

-They NEVER gave me anything that addressed that error or even said what it meant, or followed up when I tried a related link.
-They repeatedly suggested things I already tried.
-They wanted to know which OS I had installed -- you know, the OS that it never gets an option to load.
-Every solution assumed I had a CD burner -- you know, the one that I could no longer access thanks to installing Ubuntu while following the instructions I supplied.

If they had just addressed that error message, the problem would have been solved!

Second, there is a REASON I keep bringing it up. It's because people make the exact same criticisms I made of Ubuntu, in other contexts, and get modded to five. It's like single-point-of-failure only counts as acceptable design for stuff that I use.

So, I will GLADLY shut up about this when either a) people stop making those same design criticisms (I'd say for a year), or b) I get my gold-plated apology for crappy design that they expect the masses to use. I don't think that's unreasonable.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[alshithead]

"But people are more likely to be murderers than spammers because murder most often involves a momentary lapse of reason or good sense. Spammers are professionally out to get whatever they can, as often as they can at anyone's expense using lies, deceit and misdirection. I find murder to be a lot easier to forgive. Murderers are less likely to have character flaws. Murderers are people like you or your neighbor. They are your boyfriends and girlfriends... husbands and wives... most of the time someone they know is the victim... and often times, there is something resembling deserving or cause!"

Huh? Just because someone becomes emotionally upset enough to kill someone does not make the act forgivable. Murderers are less likely to have character flaws? Hello, I'd consider murder a serious character flaw.

"Murderers are people like you or your neighbor." No, murderers are not like me. I respect life. If I have to kill someone in defense of myself or someone else, that's a different story and not murder.

"most of the time someone they know is the victim... and often times, there is something resembling deserving or cause!" Please, explain to me a deserving cause other than defending yourself or someone else for killing someone.

"The millions if not billions of dollars being spent and/or lost due to spams and scams, security compromises and all the problems caused by spammers. You may idealistically claim to think that no amount of money is worth a single human life, but the facts are not in your favor."

What facts? The first sentence is a fragment so I can't know where you were going. But the second...dude, you're telling me you can put a price on a human life? What is your life worth, your mom's?

You are out of your fucking mind. While I'll agree that someone is more likely to be murderer than spammer...spamming takes technical knowledge while murder takes only a weapon and opportunity, you must be an amoral, naive, moron to think that murder can be more forgivable than spamming.

Let's put it this way. If someone murders your mother, will you forgive them more quickly than you would forgive someone who spams your mom? Try putting things in perspective. Spam sucks but you can delete it. Murder sucks worse, you can't bring someone back.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[alshithead]

"And this is where you have been brainwashed. To use an extreme example, if someone drinks until they are falling-down drunk, drives to the nearest liquor store and buys more booze and drives back home without hurting anyone, what crime has been committed?

It is thought crime."

Whoa! The crime committed is drinking and driving. Just because you aren't caught doesn't mean a crime hasn't been committed. The law says if you drive at .08 or higher you are driving drunk. You committed the crime, you just didn't get caught. The law was still broken.

""Endangering other people" is such a nebulous concept that it can be applied to anything and that makes it worthless as a criteria for determining criminal intent."

I'm sitting here responding to your post. There is your anything. Now, try and apply it as "endangering other people" in any shape, form, or context under existing US laws. Bet you can't even if you try and pull into the issue my using electricity or bandwidth for the post.

If you think that breaking the law doesn't happen unless you get caught then you have some serious morality issues. I sure wouldn't hire you for even walking my dog.

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[SL Baur]

Whoa! The crime committed is drinking and driving. Just because you aren't caught doesn't mean a crime hasn't been committed. The law says if you drive at .08 or higher you are driving drunk. You committed the crime, you just didn't get caught. The law was still broken.

I meant committing a crime in the more abstract sense of what harm has been done? I don't really want to get in a discussion pro or con of the nuances of US laws as they are only getting more broken as time passes, but ...

What difference does it make that a crime has been committed that cannot be prosecuted? Let's take a different and less extreme example. Traffic violations are something that everyone does, whether it's going a mile or two above the posted speed limit, not coming to complete stop at a red light, not stopping a proper distance from the limit line/cross walk, etc. What difference does it make that a traffic violation has occurred if there is no accident and you are not stopped? What difference should it make? What is the moral thing to do if you realize you just did a California stop?[1]

The United States constitution used to provide for due process, rules of evidence, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, etc. In that sense, it was the law of the land that if proper procedure was not performed by the arresting officer, the crime did not occur. That's how the "Miranda rights" were named as one example.

I'm sitting here responding to your post. There is your anything. Now, try and apply it as "endangering other people" in any shape, form, or context under existing US laws. Bet you can't even if you try and pull into the issue my using electricity or bandwidth for the post.

Sigh. All I can say is you asked for it... You would be endangering the planet with your carbon footprint and facilitating Global Warming which will kill many unless Something Is Done. The Kyoto Protocol hasn't been formally ratified by the United States Senate, so it isn't a binding international treaty, but depending on the jurisdiction (the governor of the state of the address on my passport has committed California to abiding by it) you may be bound to it any way.[2]

There's growing evidence[3] that radio waves from wireless networks, WiFi and cellular phones, may have damaging effects on people, particularly children. If you're using WiFi and have small children or anyone other than you around, you may be endangering them with your network. There aren't any specific laws against that though, other than whatever child/spousal abuse laws exist in your locale.

I favor drawing a legal line very close to a criminal act rather than extending it into some grey area beyond. Having a politically incorrect amount of alcohol (or any of the other "controlled" substances) in one's bloodstream if one does not do any harm to others is not something I would consider a crime. To be sure, if you get behind the wheel (drunk or otherwise) and hurt someone, I favor the death penalty, or at least the amputation of both hands.

I only used that example because I was stopped my first Golden Week (I had bicycled to a nearby park and had perhaps oversampled the sake I brought along and was weaving on the sidewalk about a block from my apartment) by a Tokyo policeman also on bicycle. After he examined my gaijin card, he politely suggested that I go straight home.

What is moral and what is legal are not necessarily the same and the farther away the two become (as it has in the United States) the more problems the society will have. In my opinion.

[1] I would say, "whoa, slow down there Steve", but I'm not going to drive to the nearest koban (or police station if I was in the US at the time) and try to talk an officer into giving me a traffic ticket. And I'm certainly not going to call my insurance company and demand that they raise my rates.

[2] My personal feelings towards the Kyoto Protocol, that it's International Welfa

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[alshithead]

Thank you very much for a well stated response. I should have put as much thought into mine and I probably flew off the handle a little...a couple beers under my belt and I certainly saw your post as stating that no crime has been committed if no one gets hurt.

Your drunk driving analogy is, with all due respect, a bit off. In reference to your Tokyo experience, that's a good cop versus the some fraction of bad cops out there...especially here in the US. If you had been driving I think his response would have been different. If I remember correctly, and I may not, the first drunk driving conviction in Japan is mandatory loss of license for life. As it was, you weren't a danger to anyone else and probably only minimally to yourself. My case is that driving drunk and not hurting anyone is still a violation of law. Just because no one got hurt doesn't mean that the potential wasn't there and the likelihood is significantly greater than the likelihood of California stop causing damage. Driving drunk is a much different animal. I can do a California stop, speed by a few miles an hour, or not stop right on the line all day long and guarantee that I won't cause an accident or kill someone. No drunk driver can say the same. The difference is a rational, observant, and calculated decision versus a mentally and physically compromised ability.

I can certainly agree that the US justice system and political systems are probably almost irreparably broken. Sign me up for the next tea party. Their failures are too numerous to list here but basically boil down to the ability to buy the best lawyers and the ability to buy politicians' influence for your cases and causes without real moral and just conclusions.

You do a good job with bringing electricity generation and use into the discussion. While I have to say I regrettably agree with the global warming naysayers that increased CO2 has not been PROVEN to cause global warming, I also know that is their way of throwing doubt into the situation. There is no doubt in my mind that drastic climate change is underway. I feel that CO2 levels have a significant influence, proven or not. Once our ocean ecosystems are wrecked because CO2 saturated water chemistry doesn't allow shrimp, crabs, and shellfish to build exoskeletons, it will be too late regardless of where the world temperatures are headed. By the same token, sure some glaciers are growing, but most are shrinking. I expect a system as large as world climate to have some anomalies even in the face of an overall drastic change such as global warming. As far as China goes, I can see they don't give a crap about their environment so why would they care how they affect anyone else's?

Thanks again, cheers,

al

Re:"Hoisted on their own profits"

[SL Baur]

Your drunk driving analogy is, with all due respect, a bit off. In reference to your Tokyo experience, that's a good cop versus the some fraction of bad cops out there...especially here in the US. If you had been driving I think his response would have been different. Sadly, I also have direct experience with that. They advertise a zero tolerance approach to drinking and driving (any amount of alcohol is forbidden). We hit a random road block on the way back from a karaoke bar and the test used was to have the driver blow onto the officer's hand, which he sniffed. The penalty for a first time offense for a Japanese in Tsukuba-shi, Ibaraki-ken in winter 1999/2000 was a 40,000 yen fine, two month license suspension and mandatory driving school in Mito (including some proof that you did not drive there). They did not impound the car and the driver was informed to stay there until she sobered up and then go straight home (the policeman left after a few minutes). I suspect an alien would be treated differently, but have no experience with that.

My case is that driving drunk and not hurting anyone is still a violation of law. Just because no one got hurt doesn't mean that the potential wasn't there and the likelihood is significantly greater than the likelihood of California stop causing damage. Driving drunk is a much different animal. I can do a California stop, speed by a few miles an hour, or not stop right on the line all day long and guarantee that I won't cause an accident or kill someone. No drunk driver can say the same. I've been hit multiple times by California drivers at intersections by cars failing to stop at signs/lights and/or making improper turns, one time my bicycle was destroyed, another time I ended up on the hood. Of course the one time I was rear-ended at high speed by a presumably drunk driver caused the most damage to me. He drove away without stopping, no one saw every digit of his license and because we only had 6 out of 7 digits[1] the officer basically told me off (my car was totaled).

[1] It was a White Bronco in Whittier within a few hours before the famous chase played out on national TV. OJ did it!

Which is just the opposite of "regular" justice...

[kclittle]

Steal $15,000, and you get 15 years. Steal $15,000,000,000 (can you say "Enron"?), and you get 2 years plus time spent.
Oh, well, American jurisprudence overcomes all obstacles, I guess.

Suitable punishment

[Scareduck]

Penis enlargement, the hard way, i.e., using a come-along.

Re:Suitable punishment

[Anonymous Coward]

The best punishment is 25 years on viagra in a solitary cell.

Re:Suitable punishment

[Bearhouse]

Sounds like a typical /. contributer
*ducks*

Re:Which is just the opposite of "regular" justice

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention that the first guy goes to a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison, and the other goes to a prison nicer than most folks homes. Yep, justice is indeed served.

Re:Which is just the opposite of "regular" justice

[deniable]

I keep wondering, why do we need to charge the spammers with anti-spam laws. I haven't seen any that aren't drug dealers, stock scams, or outright fraud. Nail the bastards for those with all of the current laws. Funny, the more they made from these, the more counts that can hang them.

If Bob, the neighborhood dealer, was offering as much product as these scumbags, he'd be in jail for life.

Oh well, we have the anti-spam laws now, so we might as well hit them for both.

Sounds like a new incentive to be a tax cheat

[NotQuiteReal]

Understating your SPAM income has just been encouraged.

Of course you have to risk the rath of your taxing authority... but still.

Re:Sounds like a new incentive to be a tax cheat

[Veinor]

Al Capone, the notorious Chicago gangster, was brought down this way. Not through being a member of the Chicago mafia... but through failing to declare his illegal income.

Re:Sounds like a new incentive to be a tax cheat

[Dragonslicer]

Have you ever dealt with the IRS? You're more likely to get away with murder than with tax evasion.

What that says about our country, I'd rather not contemplate.

In a perfect world...

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:In a perfect world...

[Shohat]

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

Re:Which is just the opposite of "regular" justice

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

There are some that advertise legitimate products, herbal supplements,vitamins, mortgage refis, things of that nature, even most pr0n isn't strictly illegal. Plus most of the time the Spammers aren't the merchants selling the goods. Even the merchants are really just resellers, that never actually physically possess the products. So yeah, I'd say there is the need for additional laws that punish them for the method of advertising that causes problems people. But yeah, if they violate existing laws as well they should also be punished for those. If nothing else sticks, income tax evasion is an old trick that can put them away for a while.

Re:Which is just the opposite of "regular" justice

[Joe The Dragon]

I hear that at one of them they get to go to the Mayo Clinic.

One Solution

[DynaSoar]

"What we need are a few good old-fashioned hangings." -- FTC Commissioner Orson Swindle, at the 2003 FTC Spam Conference.

Re:One Solution

[Rod Beauvex]

Only in America can someone with the last name 'SWINDLE' get appointed to something called the Federal TRADE Commission.

Re:One Solution

[Dragonslicer]

Only in America can someone with the last name 'SWINDLE' get appointed to something called the Federal TRADE Commission. Well, in Soviet Russia... oh, never mind.

Re:One Solution

[DynaSoar]

> Only in America can someone with the last name 'SWINDLE' get appointed to something called the Federal TRADE Commission.

Funny, but not so. The same happens all over the world. The humor columnist L.M. Boyd used to have several such funny name/job listings every week, and the Annals of Improbable Research carries some still.

But I wouldn't say that to his face. He's a 6 foot something, 200 pound retired Marine who, despite being in his sixties, inserted himself bodily between a spammer and an anti-spammer when at said conference the former attempted to get physical against the latter. His sheer presence stopped the attack cold. That sheds some light on the nature of his comment. I greatly appreciated having a government official capable of and willing to kick spammer ass.

Re:Which is just the opposite of "regular" justice

[Tweekster]

Or how about the numerous crimes involving using botnets etc.

Spam laws are a waste, nail them for the real felonies they are committing to send their crap.

Re:Which is just the opposite of "regular" justice

[Anonymous Coward]

ummm... who exactly got away with 15 billion at enron? if you're going to try to make a point at least take the time to get your facts straight.

Makes some sense, but not much

[jrhawk42]

Well it does seem logical that those who earn more from spam would do longer times, but I'd rather have it based on the volume of spam, than the earnings.

Re:Makes some sense, but not much

[techno-vampire]

Earnings in any mass-mailing campaign (and that's basically what spam is, of course) are provided by the small percentage of people who respond. The more you send out, the more people (assuming a fixed percentage, of course) respond. Therefore, earnings are proportional to the number of messages sent out. In general, it's easier to find out how much a spammer earned than how many spam were sent, so using earnings as a yardstick is quite reasonable.

Can you say screwed?

[Debug0x2a]

Let the punishment fit the crime. Spammers will be sentenced to a prison sentence with cellmates that have taken every pen1s enlargement pill offered, is looking for a hot relationship, and is chalk full of v1agra. 1 cell mate per $100,000 made, minimum 1. ...and you are very bad person.

Re:Can you say screwed?

[Anonymous Coward]

ARGH! CHOCK! The word is CHOCK! CHOCK FULL of Viagra.

Re:dog penis

[Ekhymosis]

What a shitty story. The plot was pure crap, like if monkeys took a dump on their typewriters and sold the output. We should flush out these posts!

Real reason they are coming down hard on Spammers

[king-manic]

Spammers represent a large illicit underground economy, I somehow doubt most spammers are on the up and up with their taxes. Thus many of these laws are just the revenue service finding extra things to press this group. There are several groups you ought never fuck with. The Taxman, The mailman, and The FDA.

Income calculation?

[esocid]

I'm curious as to how they got that "reported $250,000" figure. I read the part about his spamming activities were meticulously documented, but I'm still not sure where the money came from. Do companies actually pay per referral or per email or what? Who is paying this guy? And shouldn't his backers be getting fined or dragged into this at all?

Re:Income calculation?

[penix1]

From what I read, IANAL and all, the defendant stipulated it. He kept meticulous records indicating such as well. Note to spammers, don't keep the logs!

Re:Which is just the opposite of "regular" justice

[Anonymous Coward]

Why charge people for real crimes when we can charge them for exercising free speech in an unpopular way?

Re:Which is just the opposite of "regular" justice

[Anonymous Coward]

as long as people with the most money can always hire the best lawyers, this will always be the case

Won't someone please think of the children^W spam!

[MacDork]

I keep wondering, why do we need to charge the spammers with anti-spam laws.

Because otherwise, you couldn't get slashbots to support the destruction of the first amendment. It sounds a little like, "Won't someone please think of the children^W spam!!!" Yes, we need to stop the email scammers/phishers/trojans, we need to stop people peddling deadly/addictive drugs via email, we need to stop the email pump and dump scam artists.... We don't need to make it illegal to send an email message to 20 million people just because you don't know them.

spam is a shotgun approach. volume = profit

[User 956]

I'd rather have it based on the volume of spam, than the earnings.

The two don't correlate?

Thats True

[rajkarodiwal]

Spammer must have tough sentence http://www.1step4dollar.com/

Re:Which is just the opposite of "regular" justice

[deniable]

In other words, they should be regulated just like any other business. So should their 'ad agencies.'

what good has the antispam law done for the users?

[wikinerd]

Even with the antispam laws, I get more spam than before... So the laws are useless. My antispam filters and smart tricks like fake mx do more than lawmakers putting some ink on dead tree papers.

Re:Which is just the opposite of "regular" justice

[penix1]

Add together Enron, WorldCom, the S&L scams, and the current Housing Market scams, corporate back-dating scams, predatory credit card scams, stock manipulation scams, pretexting ... Shall I continue? All the scamming done by the corporate world nets those doing it very light sentences in comparison to the actual harm done in contrast to what this spammer got. Worse, in most cases it nets no punishment at all because of the deals made for immunity all so they can testify before Congress.

Re:Real reason they are coming down hard on Spamme

[deniable]

Why isn't the FDA at the head of the War on Spam. All it takes is them deciding that these guys are peddling unsafe pharmaceuticals without appropriate regulation. The FDA can then declare that they are doing more for the War on Drugs than the DEA.

Prison, really?

[AnonymousCactus]

Citing Kim's first-time offender status, Babcock sentenced him to the minimum 30 months called for in the more punitive range.

I hate spam, I HATE spam. But, 2.5 years in jail? Seems silly. Here's a guy that could obviously be productive in society if he pursued something worthwhile. So why not levee a large fine, give him some supervision and help him contribute positively. Seems way better than paying $45k a year to keep him.

Re:Prison, really?

[jfengel]

That's the ironic thing about punishment. It doesn't do you any good to punish somebody. It's supposed to be a deterrent, but if the person hasn't been deterred, it costs you more to punish him than to let him go.

But you have to do it anyway, as a message to the next guy that you're serious. The severity of the punishment has zero to do with what this guy did, and everything to do with how strong a message you want to send to the next guy.

In the case of spam, though, deterrence is fruitless. There will always be somebody undeterred, and the economics of spam make that one guy aggravating all out of proportion.

It's why Slashdotters semi-seriously call for much, much harsher punishments. They feel very, very strongly about the message, precisely because they know that it's unlikely to be heard.

Re:Prison, really?

[sqrt(2)]

Punishment does not deter crime. Extreme punishment does not deter extreme crimes. This is one of the most common fallacies I routinely see dragged out when people try and defend the death penalty. The idea that we can somehow make people think twice about the worst crimes, rape and murder, by killing those that we find guilty has been around nearly since the idea of law. It's just as false now as it always has been. We still have crime, we still have the worst crimes. We have more of the worst crimes than countries that do not have the death penalty and have much lighter sentences by comparison. Even our none-death penalty sentences are over the top. Much of the world would consider 25 year and life sentences to be incredibly excessive for the crimes they're applied to here.

When someone is a danger to society, locking them up protects society. Spammers, no matter how annoying are not dangerous to society. Meanwhile, locking them up costs society money. So the best and most effective action that society can take is to fine them. This works especially well for these types of crimes when people are fraudulently making money. Take away all that illegally made money and then some more for our troubles.

Re:Prison, really?

[KDR_11k]

Try abolishing punishment and see what happens. More punishment might not deter more criminals but you have to keep a baseline.

When someone is a danger to society, locking them up protects society. Spammers, no matter how annoying are not dangerous to society.

The traffic and mental workload they cause decreases the productivity of society by requiring much bigger mailservers and time invested into dealing with the crap, never mind the whole botnet deal. They might not beat people up directly but they are definitely a menace to society.

Re:Prison, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

If "Punishment does not deter crime" then how is it that fining them (a financial punishment) "works especially well for these types of crimes"?

Re:Prison, really?

[sqrt(2)]

The crime (spamming) costs us money as a whole, the punishment (fine) allows us to reclaim some of that money.

Re:Prison, really?

[wfstanle]

I agree to some extent. There should be about a year in prison and a fine that takes away all of the profit. This should not be for spammers only but for all white collar and non violent criminals. For example, the Enron thieves (yes I call them thieves because they stole others money) should have received fines amounting to the total amount of the fraud. he government should not keep the fine. The victims of the fraud could file for their money back. Reserve long jail times for violent criminals.

Re:Prison, really?

[Anonymous Coward]

One important distinction (see upthread) is premeditation and desparation. You can't deter someone from crime who has no other options. You can't deter someone who commits crimes as an unplanned, spur of the moment thing. The only crimes you can really deter are those the person who commits them plans as a means to a goal.

Spamming does fit that. But I really doubt that most juries would be willing to impose harsh enough penalties on spammers to increase the downside risk to deter them. While we may hate spammers in abstract, I suspect most people (even a majority of Slashdot readers), faced with a living human being who will be lowered into sulphuric acid because he sent pump and dump spams, would opt for mercy.

Re:Prison, really?

[olman]

Punishment does not deter crime.

O RLY?

I guess I'll just go out an light a joint then to make this dreadful morning a bit more toleratable. ..Or not, as it would mean probably losing my job and maybe even getting fined. But that's not having anything to do with the choices I make. It's just some free-floating independent moral compass, yes sir!

Re:Prison, really?

[sqrt(2)]

Maybe a golden one, even?

I wish I could get away with sniping at people after quoting four or five words, completely ignoring the qualifications around said words. Unfortunately that wouldn't be very entertaining to read by anyone except people who already agree with me so I'd have to find a way to pad it out with some sort of filler...maybe I should join a political campaign. Any of them.

Anyway, clearly there are people who get drunk/high at work, you may even have seen them before. People break laws all the time. And plenty of things that aren't strictly illegal get followed DESPITE a lack of laws forbidding them; so called "unwritten laws" or common courtesies. If you think you have the moral authority to get high at work go ahead, your boss has the moral authority (and probably the legal authority depending on your locale) to fire you. Even if it were legal to smoke marijuana at all I still wouldn't do it. The fact that it's illegal now isn't stopping me, I'm stopping me. I know a lot of people that ignore that law and smoke pot anyway, if it were suddenly legal they'd probably still do it. Unless it really is just teenage rebellion, which would be strange from men in their twenties.

When the laws differ to some great degree from the "moral compass" (and I HATE that term, it's a gross over simplification with zero nuance) of society at large, that's when the system breaks down. Downloading songs is illegal, people are still doing it en masse. Would that it were that the word of law always reflected the general morality of the country, the two often find themselves at odds, but we get it right on the most serious of matters. There's no where on Earth where unprovoked murder is legal--to my knowledge anyway, if there is such a place please let me know to cross it off my list of places to vacation. Same with theft of property, rape, kidnapping, etc. For those things, yes the individuals sense of right and wrong acts as the first and last necessary barrier from the crime being committed. Making murder a crime doesn't stop murder, it keeps murderers away from society by giving us legal authority to lock them up for an amount of time for them to be rehabilitated (in theory anyway). That is the utility of still having laws against those crimes.

Would you start murdering people tomorrow if congress said it was no longer a crime? I really hope I don't live in a country where people would answer yes to that. If that is the case then I have GROSSLY overestimated the compassion and general decency of my countrymen. I just don't believe I'm working, living, talking and laughing with people every single day who would slit my throat at their first possible chance were it not for the fact there's a law against it!

You might want some new friends if that is the case.

Re:Prison, really?

[olman]

Would you start murdering people tomorrow if congress said it was no longer a crime? I really hope I don't live in a country where people would answer yes to that. If that is the case then I have GROSSLY overestimated the compassion and general decency of my countrymen. I just don't believe I'm working, living, talking and laughing with people every single day who would slit my throat at their first possible chance were it not for the fact there's a law against it!

Some people would. You can find them in most major public companies in the board of directors. Not like they'd kill you for no reason of course, but if they'd see some tangible benefit such as getting your lucrative position or some such.. You thought killer instict was just a figure of speech?

Besides that, most people are kept in line by fear of punishment, some people by sense of community and so forth. There are some people who do not care, thought. If you like, you might say their value system is just so fundamentally broken that they do not function properly in a society unless you find them a suitable niche such as gangbanger..

Re:Which is just the opposite of "regular" justice

[bob shade]

hey man, that's not cool!

Stupid

[rm999]

This mentality is the problem with the justice system in general - jail should not be about retribution. How is an incompetent spammer who spams people about something no one buys (e.g. pogs) any less guilty than a successful one (a viagra spammer)?

And after a spammer stole so much from society, why is even more being stolen from the taxpayer to give him an admittedly longer sentence in jail?

Re:Stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

yep. in total agreement.

spam shouldn't even be against the law. we create a wide open system, with no trust system in place, and we wonder why it's afu?

and the punishment weighed by profits? just as arbitrary as punishment based on a 500:1 quantity threshold for crack:cocaine.

politicians are stupid. people are stupid. look at slashdot...80% of the slashdot comments are about demanding government protection.

morons.

all of you, except parent.

Yet another Slashdot inconsistency

[mi]

[...] instead of the difficult-to-measure financial damage

So, when a lying cheat gets on the hook for "sharing" other people's works of art without permission with millions, Slashdot decries the ruling as "disproportionate to the actual damages" and moreover, that RIAA failed to demonstrate having sustained any damages.

But when a spammer is nailed in proportion to their rake instead of the "difficult to measure" actual damage, we are all cheers...

Re:Yet another Slashdot inconsistency

[KDR_11k]

If the RIAA lawsuit damages were based on the profit the sharers made noone would complain either.

if the spam ads were true

[Phantom of the Opera]

People would show off their new fake rolex and stock portfolio that they put all of their Nigeria money into. They would have ever-erect penises, larger busts and low rate home mortgages. Unfortunately, all their bank accounts had suspicious activity and their unexpected ebay and amazon deliveries hit snags. They could get all the women, men and shemales they wanted, and give them inexpensive holiday gifts. Their computers would all run pirated software are low down prices.

Am I missing anything?

I hate spammers as much as the next guy,

[CCFreak2K]

but is putting them behind bars really a fitting punishment? Yes, they're highly annoying and may even have done some damage depending on their use of botnets and the like, but isn't the whole reason to have a prison to keep DANGEROUS people away from society? I'd sure as hell want a serial killer in there rather than just a spammer. And then there's the argument that prison isn't an effective punishment, but that's beside the point...

Re:I hate spammers as much as the next guy,

[timmarhy]

It's reasoning like that, that makes me hate liberals.

as long as these assholes have their freedoms, they will keep breaking the law. take that freedom away.

Re:I hate spammers as much as the next guy,

[hansraj]

Hate liberals as much as you want, and take the freedom of as many guys you want, someone else will start another spamming business. It is easy money. Spamming is here to stay. Live with it and educate yourselves and others about how to minimize its effect. You can go on pretending that locking spammers in jail will rid the society of spam but it won't. The only thing it can do if make you feel better for taking some sort of revenge on that person.

Why do we see more technical solutions for what is essentially a social/legal problem and legal solutions for technical problems?

This is not to say that spamming should not be made an offense, but for heaven's sake keep in mind that after catching spammers putting them in jail serves no purpose other than extracting revenge. Restrict their computer usage to only supervised settings, take from them more than they earned effectively fining them and put them through some program that uses them in some productive way.

I have never seen slashdot acting like a bunch of medieval barbarians screaming blood, except when spammers are discussed.

Re:I hate spammers as much as the next guy,

[vinn01]

Introduce yourself to the concept of "crime and punishment". They exist in harmony and balance.

To suggest that spamming (crime) should not result in jail (punishment), is out of balance thinking.

Attack the sources of the spam instead.

[miffo.swe]

I really wished the ones using spammers for marketing would be hunted down instead. The spammers are only bricks in the game. If it became a real felony for a company to employ spammers they would find it hard to make any money. Take one spammer away in the US and up pops 10 more in some other country.

That said i really dont think spamming is a felony just as i dont think any other form of marketing should be illegal. Its annoying for sure but the fault lies in our broken emailsystem and with Microsofts crappy security (spammers favourite mailservers are windows boxes). Spam is just symptoms for a bigger issue. Take away the spam and the problem is still there for more nefarious schemes.

Re:Attack the sources of the spam instead.

[Nursie]

There is a difference between putting up a billboard with the permission of the property owner and what spammers do. They deliberately abuse other people's systems in order to force their message on people who are making it very clear (through countermeasures) that they don't want to hear it.

Oh, and your point on Squashing them in the US and them popping up elsewhere is disingenuous - Most spam is sent by and aimed at americans. Squashing them in the US would do a great deal of good.

Re:Attack the sources of the spam instead.

[Anonymous Coward]

i dont think any other form of marketing should be illegal

Prove it: post your street address. I know a few companies that would be glad to send you some marketing literature...

So if I steal a quarter...

[SamP2]

And then buy a lottery ticket with it, and win a million, I'd get a much longer sentence than someone else who stole a quarter and didn't make anything out of it?

Sorry, I'm all for canning spammers, but punishing people based on profit they make from ill-gotten gains, rather than the damage they actually caused, seems to be as violating fundemantal principles of justice.

Re:So if I steal a quarter...

[Nursie]

False analogy.

Spammers profit in proportion to how much they spam, as a rule. Therefore one that makes millions most likely has spammed a lot more than one that's only made a few bucks.

Re:So if I steal a quarter...

[Dark_Gravity]

Sorry, I'm all for canning spammers... I'm all for caning spammers.

Re:So if I steal a quarter...

[zenpickle]

I think you miss the point. This is an attempt to estimate damage. The legislature is saying that profit is a useful metric to estimate damage. The idea is to not let a spammer off because damages are hard to measure. The legislature decided to prevent this with an alternative metric. It is quite reasonable to believe that the profit of a spammer is related to the damage they cause, more profit => suggests more spam => suggests more damage. Basically the legislature, based on evidence presented to them, decided in general that all spam has cost to society and then designed a scale that tries to punish big spammers more than small ones. Profit is an indirect way to estimate damage. This is not only well withing normal practice in designing legislation it seems obviously reasonable to me.

Fines

[Joce640k]

>"So the best and most effective action that society can take is to fine them."

They'll simply ignore fines and say they haven't got any money to pay them.

Nope. What you need to do is take away their chosen lifestyle. No more late night parties, no fancy cars or big TV sets for them, just getting up early in the morning and doing a decent day's work in the community. Every single day. There's a million things out there which need fixing/cleaning up.

Re:Which is just the opposite of "regular" justice

[KDR_11k]

Because freedom of speech is not the freedom to force others to listen.

Re:Won't someone please think of the children^W sp

[deniable]

Free speech does not include commercial speech. Advertising (including spam) has requirements that must be met.

That being said, I'm a fan of punishing the existing crime rather than making up new ones for every circumstance.

Re:what good has the antispam law done for the use

[Anonymous Coward]

Good call! How do we get our cut of the money? Should we forward the spams to the gov't and get so many cents per message?

Viagra requires intent to function.

[Dr_Barnowl]

You actually need to get excited to get a woody with Viagra ; it's one of the things that made the drug so ideal for it's market. All the other medical solutions for erectile dysfunction require mechanical components, or needles, and produce "unnatural" erections which are "up" before they are desired and sometimes persist long past their useful life. Viagra is by far the most elegant solution, in both it's pharmaceutical action and it's function ; the erection is as close to natural in behaviour as you are going to get.

Putting him on it in a solitary cell just guarantees that he'll be able to get a good boner to whack off with whenever he likes.

I suggest putting him in a cell with "Bubba", and injecting him with enough prostaglandin (in the penis) to give him an erection that lasts for many hours... and is, alas, the last he'll ever have in his life. Then he goes through the exquisite mental torture of deciding whether to use it for the last time on Bubba, or never have sex again. I guess you can call me cruel and unusual.

You're talking about

[Emot]

tax collectors, right?

Yes, really.

[Nursie]

Spammers cause problems. Spammers seem to suffer no remorse over causing people annoyance, over costing people money for spam protection, bigger pipes, general hassle etc. Not to mention the stock scams, illegal pharmacies and everything else they're into.

Locking them up will stop them doing it and allow them time to think about what they've done. Remove spammers and you remove a big burden on society, how much do you think companies spend on anti-spam compared to how much it costs to put a spammer away?

What wonderful logic

[Nursie]

"you can go on pretending that locking spammers in jail will rid the society of spam but it won't"

And you can apply that logic to assault, armed robbery, rape and murder.

the point is it punishes the offender and stops them from doing it. If the capture rate becomes a high enough percentage of people spamming then it becomes a true deterrant, even if not it stops that guy that has comitted those criminal acts from continuing to do so.

Re:What wonderful logic

[hansraj]

No. The point in putting the people for violent crimes is (or at least should be) that they are danger to the society and it needs to be ensured that they be kept away.

Punishment is a deterrent only to some extent. So making spammers go to jail for very long time is not going to act as deterrent for everyone else. Like I said, spam is a source of easy money for spammers. You may pretend that punishing them harshly serves any purpose but it does not (other than taking revenge).

Just getting caught and fined would be deterrent enough for the *current spammer*. Besides, you can keep him/her under nominal watch and make them part of some program that actually uses their potential (if they have any). Locking them up is just a feel good thing for everyone else.

Re:What wonderful logic

[Nursie]

"The point in putting the people for violent crimes is (or at least should be) that they are danger to the society and it needs to be ensured that they be kept away."

Spammers are a danger to society. They prove that by continuing to spam people who have anti-spam measures in place, by working around protections, by carrying on doing what they're doing despite it being unwanted and illegal.

Locking them up is of direct good to everyone else - it stops them spamming and takes a belligerent criminal off the streets.

Re:What wonderful logic

[hansraj]

I would reserve the word danger for actual physical danger, but that is a matter of semantics on which we can agree to disagree.

I consider spam to be more of a nuisance. I think that one of the pitfalls of applying "dangerous" to criminals that are at best a nuisance, is that it opens the possibility of labeling almost everyone a dangerous criminal. Someone plays loud music so that neighbors can't sleep. Are they dangerous to the society? In my opinion the society and law are free to (and probably should) make such behavior an offense so that the neighbor can get a remedy but I don't see a point in locking up the guy.

What about religion? If most of the people in a society agreed that religion is a scam, should preachers of any religion be put behind bars or should they rather be just barred from preaching in public?

Democratic mentality

[Migraineman]

It's a very Democratic mentality. Consider the progressive tax - if you earn more, you're capable of paying more, so therefore you have a higher tax bracket. Folks who have less, pay less on a percentage basis. Same basic idea here.

spamming and murder

[budgenator]

Do you honestly think spamming and murder are morally equal?
well ok, people only live for a finite period of time and any time spent dealing with spam is time you'll never get back. The chance of any given person being murdered is relatively small, but everyone has received a spam; assuming a spam consumes 5 seconds, 250,000 spams is likely killing a person 57 days early. So really the question is how long did Kervorkian go to prison for?

when bad things happen to bad people

[Presto Vivace]

sometimes justice prevails.

Idiotic mentality

[Nursie]

No, it's nothing to do with political leanings. Spammers profit is a direct reflection of how much they have been breaking the law.

Re:Which is just the opposite of "regular" justice

[kclittle]

hyperbole
1. obvious and intentional exaggeration.

False analogies

[Nursie]

The priest is exercising free speech in public. The spammer is effectively breaking down the door to the house (anti-spam circumvention) and yelling in your ear. The two are not equivalent.

Spam passed from being a nuisance when it started costing people and businesses vast amounts of time, bandwidth and money.

Spammers are belligerent criminals who will continue to commit their crimes unless locked away.

In your example the person playing the music would have their stereo confiscated.
If they were doing it delibeerately to keep the neighbours awake, continued rebuying stereos and hiding them around their house so that they could continue to annoy their neighbours (or the whole town) even after repeatedly being warned by police and having equipment confiscated then that is more like the spam problem. There would be cause to charge them with harassment. Perhaps there would be injunctions and jail time for breaking them, and it would be warranted, just as it is here.

Re: junk snailmail.

[arbitraryaardvark]

There are steps you can take to reduce junk snailmail.
You can contact the direct mail association and get on their opt-out list.
You can tell the three credit card bureaus you don't want credit card solicitations.
The post office has a form you can fill out to stop getting obscene mail from a particular sender. What you consider obscene is up to you.
If they enclose a self-addressed stamped envelope, you can (after removing your contact info) attach it to a brick or a refrigerator and mail it to them.
You can write the persistent ones a letter saying, "I charge $100 to receive and proofread your mail. You can accept this offer by sending me mail." Then the Bennett Haselton small claims court followup for those who take you up on your offer.
Do I do this? No. I have a compost heap in the flowerbed under my mailbox, with crap from the indianapolis star and advco. My real mail goes to my post office box.
Re: TFA, he got $250,000 and an additional 6 months. So what matters is what jail he went to.
You couldn't pay me to go to jail in Indianapolis. 6 months in Boulder County jail for $100,000, yeah, I'd do that.

Punished by their own methods

[AliasMarlowe]

Hang 'em high--after all, they can then say their penis pills caused them to he hung (yeah, hanged, I know, I know). No need to hang them. Poetic justice would suggest making their penises rapidly smaller. This might require cruel and unusual methods, unless suitably fast-acting pills are available...

Re:Which is just the opposite of "regular" justice

[Dragonslicer]

Why charge people for real crimes when we can charge them for exercising free speech in an unpopular way? Not only does freedom of speech not include freedom to make others listen, it doesn't include freedom to use someone else's resources to make your speech.

Re:what good has the antispam law done for the use

[Anonymous Coward]

Even with the antispam laws, I get more spam than before... So the laws are useless.

That's a logical fallacy.

$45000 a year

[hadaso]

The guy had 2000000 addresses. Let's say he sends only one spam message every week.
That's approximately 50x2000000=100000000 (one hundred million) messages a year. so now suppose that the time it takes to "just hit delete" (that is verify that the message is not legotimate, decide it's safe to delete it and delete it) is approximately 3.6 seconds, just so we have a nice round number. Then it's 360000000 working seconds (100000 working hours) to clean the junk he sends. So if you can get work at less than 45 cents an hour it would cost less than puting the guy in jail (assuming this costs $45000 a year).

The time of most email users is worth much more than 45 cents an hour, so the cost of spam is much more than $45000, even if one includes only the cost of "just hit delete".

You can exchange some of the cost of "just hit delete" by filtering, and then you get the price of false positives and loss of business as a result of lost email. Even the best filtering technology has a small percentage of loss of legitimate email, and for 2000000 recipients receiving billions of legitimate messages per year it would probably mean costs even higher than the cost of "just hit delete".

What amazes me is that the court accepts that lack of evidence of direct cost to ISPs in filtering equipment means they have to use the spammer's income as a last resort, when it is so easy to see that the cost of "just hit delete" is higher than the spammer's income. In advertising it used to be that the advertiser paid for the use of the media (such as for inches or seconds of airtime). Spam is based on stealing the media, and even iof the cost of the media is just the cost of a few seconds of work handling the cleaning up of the junk, it accumulates to huge costs, and there's no need for exact figures when it can be easily proved that the cost is much higher than a very conservative estimate.

Spamming

[pebear]

Crime should fit the punishment. I would say a year in the poke would do. Why the harsh sentences, what does that prove? I personally don't want to spend one day in jail.

Re: junk snailmail.

[Rakarra]

You can contact the direct mail association and get on their opt-out list.

Unless they decide to ignore you and continue sending mail (which they generally do). I tried getting on their opt-out list. They even required me to pay a fee to do so. Did the volume of mail I receive go down at all? Not one bit.

Do I do this? No. I have a compost heap in the flowerbed under my mailbox, with crap from the indianapolis star and advco. My real mail goes to my post office box.

Oh, if only it was so easy for me! But every direct mail piece of junk I get contains some non-compostable, non-recyclable piece of plastic that I have to cut out or just throw away.