Court Finds Spamming Not Protected By Constitution

eldavojohn writes "In a split (4-3) decision, a Virginia court has upheld the verdict against the spam king making it clear that spam is not protected by the U.S. Constitution's first amendment or even its interstate commerce clause. 'Prosecutors presented evidence of 53,000 illegal e-mails Jaynes sent over three days in July 2003. But authorities believe he was responsible for spewing 10 million e-mails a day in an enterprise that grossed up to $750,000 per month. Jaynes was charged in Virginia because the e-mails went through an AOL server in Loudoun County, where America Online is based. '"

Comments

Others Pay for It...

[Phoenix-IT]

When you're sending millions of messages a day to people who don't want them and other people (usually the ones footing the bandwidth bill) are paying for the connection, you are guilty of stealing at the very least... And in the case of mass spammers you're stealing a whole lot of bandwidth you're not paying for.

argh

[nomadic]

Can we get a little editing please? You don't have to be a lawyer to know that a jury would never be able decide on the constitutionality of a statute, so you should know something is wrong with the headline right off the bat. The Virginia Supreme Court is not a jury.

Re:My first "You're advocating a ..."

[_Sprocket_]

Great job! Except for the niggling fact that they did, in fact, catch him.

No Jury

[frovingslosh]

Leave it to slashdot to get the headline dead wrong. Actually, this was an appeals court decision, there was no jury involved in this ruling. A jury finding of guilty was several years ago, and the spammer has been out free on appeal enjoying his ill gotten gains ever since. The ruling on interstate commerce issues and first amendment issues was not made by a jury. Curiously, there seems to be no word on him actually reporting to serve his sentence, so he may still be free.

Re:You should be able to send all the spam you lik

[techno-vampire]

I don't know about you, but I, at least, would not find one First Class delivery a week acceptable! I get checks, appointment notices and medicines from the VA through the mail and would prefer to continue to receive them in a fairly prompt and timely manner, TYVM.

AIUI, junk mail helps keep First Class rates down because that's the way the bulk mail rate was designed. It's less than First Class, but more than it costs to process, leaving some extra to help defray other expenses. The way it works is, bulk mail must be pre-sorted by zip code in order to qualify. This cuts down on the amount of work considerably, so that even at a reduced rate, bulk mail costs the Postal Service less to deliver than they charge. Also, of course, much of it is sent locally, which lowers expenses even more.

Re:You should be able to send all the spam you lik

[NetSettler]

Do you realize that 'mail to resident' is where SPAM first got started, all those years ago? If it weren't for that then it's postulated less likely that email SPAM would have ever been conceived of in the first place.

I don't think you're selling people short. I think it's "obvious" that it was inevitable that it would be tried. I'll explain why...

I think where you're right is that there is a commonplace two-step meta-pattern where an idea is tried for an innocent reason and after succeeding someone tries to repurpose the idea for other purposes. So in your case, you're suggesting that if 'mail to resident' hadn't happened, variations and repurposing would not have been able to happen. Probably. But 'mail to resident' wasn't a one-time shot that if it didn't happen on a certain day wouldn't exist. It would have come another day. And even if not, other equivalently powerful and repurposable ideas would have.

For example, 'mail to many' is capable of being repurposed in the same way. Multiple-recipients could be said to be just as enabling. It wasn't in paper mail, after all--a piece of mail mostly went to one recipient (except those interoffice memo things where you could keep re-forwarding the same junk, checking off your name). So once the cost of sending to many was lowered to just naming who gets copies, that was also an enabling factor.

Many years ago (somewhere around 25 years ago, I think), when email was still young (not brand new, certainly, but still not heavily evolved) and when there were not many machines on the then-ARPANET, I obtained a piece of software written by someone at a certain texas university that was on the net. I wanted to reach the author, but had no idea how to find him. So I sent an email to smith, asmith, bsmith, etc. up to zsmith hoping to find someone at that site that knew the guy I wanted to reach. We didn't get tons of email back then, so this wouldn't have been obnoxious like it was now... There was no web back then, and no search engine. I don't even know if there was the 'postmaster' convention yet. (Maybe if there was I'd tried it and failed to get a response.) And hsmith replied, by the way, offering just the helpful info I'd hoped for. The rest of the mail bounced. I never used the technique again, but would not have hesitated to recommend it to another if they were desperate. My point in telling the story is just to say that ideas like this do present themselves when people are faced with barriers. It's the natural way things go.

So I doubt any claim that if 'mail to resident' hadn't happened, SPAM wouldn't have either. Because if someone could come up with the idea of blasting out a query for benign reasons, someone could conceive of pushing that to whatever limit made financial sense.

You could almost make the case that if 'mail for free' had not been invented, no one would have wanted to send tons of mail to people who might not care. That would have reduced volume. But there is a large and thriving junk mail industry even when stamps cost money, so even that isn't true.

I do think that "free email" is the real culprit. We all say we like it, but most of us pay more per year in time and money getting rid of spam than we would pay to deliver mail. In effect, we all subsidize spam in the guise of getting something for free... On net (pardon the pun), we don't get email free, and it would be lower cost if we charged for it.

The same is true for physmail junk mail, by the way: We subsidize it by the lower prices it gets. That's a business decision by the post office, but in the interest of the overwhelming resource usage and waste disposal concerns, I think it's ever more clear it should be at least the same price, if not much higher. But the problem isn't (any more) send to resident, since now they all swap mailing lists. The problem is, again, 'send to multiple'. And with global warming upon us, the stakes are even higher than with email spam.