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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. '"
...so long as there is one corresponding piece of regular mail, sent to "Resident" if nothing else, at a distinct address in another zip code, for every email.
That would let people express themselves with all sincerity, and help keep the postal system afloat.
An all-around Win!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
The pissed off SOB whose network bandwidth is consumed, the guy who sees a 400-1 spam to signal ratio, and the one who has to actively clean this shit for everyone I host, I'm HEARTILY glad that this fucker got himself leaned over the judicial bench and was probed, rectally, with the judges' gavels.
And the dissenting judge's comments about restraining speech for political and religious spam? If a Hari Krishna or a LDS evangelist, or a Politico I don't like comes to my door, I have the right to slam the door in their face and choose not to "receive the message". And if they drop their crap on my doorstep, I get fined for littering.
People buried under torrents of spam don't get this option.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
1.) The VA Supreme Court made the ruling, not any federal court, and certainly not a jury.
2.) Because it was a state court that made the ruling, what they say about whether or not SPAM is protected free speech is completely irrelevant. State courts have no jurisdiction over federal questions. They can no more declare SPAM not protected than they can declare that you really only have to be 32 to be President.
3.) This will obviously be appealed to the Supreme Court (that's the only outlet left after traversing the State courts), and, my guess is, it'll be shot down. The defendant's attorney is correct when it states that the VA law doesn't make exceptions for explicitly protected free speech, such as political speech, and the Supreme Court's strict scrutiny standard for this kind of thing won't let it through. VA may re-write the law to prevent commercial SPAM as different from SPAM that's simply expressing an opinion, but that'd be open to a variety of challenges as well.
4.) Nine years? What the fuck?! I mean, I hate SPAM as much as the next guy, and I spend a stupid amount of time keeping it out of the inboxes of my users, but nine years?!
Spam is not, and has never been a free-speech issue. It's a property rights issue. The spammers' right to speak does not include a right to use other people's equipment to do so.
This spammer has committed millions of counts of unauthorized use of property, along with fraud.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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 know if you're in the United States or not, but what was the last time you really took a look at all the junk snail-mail you get every month? Try this experiment: save all your junk snail-mail for a whole year, and then weigh it, measure it's volume, and multiply that by every household in this country. Do you really think that the amount of money they're paying to get that unasked-for (lack of) content into your mailbox really does anybody any good? Or is it just a waste of natural resources, and furthermore making an already fat, slow, outdated U.S. Postal Service slower than it has to be?
Neither thing, or it's offshoots (telemarketing, junk FAX, etc) should exist, simply because they're all so highly abused, and it's basically impossible IMHO to regulate them.
My emails to my friends get caught in the aggressive spam filters that they are forced to use. Spamming is depriving me of my freedom of speech. Spam is shutting down email. That is a freedom of speech issue and jailing spammers protects freedom.
Yes. Sometimes there are things in the junk mail that are useful, such as ads from supermarkets. Also, people are paid money to create those ads, print them, address them and mail them. Not only that, the USPO is paid at bulk mail rates for carrying them. If it weren't for junk mail, first class mail would cost considerably more than it does. Junk mail subsidizes regular mail and helps keep costs down. The big problem with spam is that it doesn't cost the spammer anything to send, the costs are spread out among everybody receiving it and ISP fees would be lower if there weren't spam. It's not that it's junk that makes it so bad, it's the expense to the recipient.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
There are very much files that the existence of the file is illegal:
"Illegal pictures"
Specifically, pictures of people under 18 years of age in certain states of undress, or having sex.
What is worse is when the act itself is legal, but a picture of that act is illegal, like a 17 year old taking a picture of their genitals.
My big problem with having entire categories of illegal files is that it is easy to frame someone. Just copy some files off a memory card, or spam someone with images, and then they can be charged with several felonies.
Sexual assault is something else, and that should be illegal. But someone taking a picture of themselves and then because of that getting convicted of a felony? That is just insane
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
Ah, I see. I would agree with your original argument in spirit at least, but in practical terms it would never work because you'd more or less be asking spammers to self-regulate, and historically speaking it's already been proven at least a million times over that they're unwilling and incapable of doing so. That leads us right back to where we already are. Really it's a case of excesses, and this chap who is going to be doing jail time is as good a poster-boy for these sorts of excesses as any other spammer could be. Beyond that, if there was some sort of actual cost involved in mass-market direct emailing, then legitimate operators still wouldn't go for it because in their perception they'd be spending twice as much to accomplish the same thing, whereas the draw of spamming is that it costs little to nothing comparatively.
It's not a free speech issue, it's a harassment issue. We all know that there are limits to speech when someone else's livlihood is at stake (shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, to use the classic example.) To say spammers have the right to spam is like saying the first amendment gives someone the right to follow you around with a megaphone shouting advertisements into your ear.
An object at rest cannot be stopped.
If you run a blaring loudspeaker van through a residential neighborhood at 4AM it doesn't matter whether the material you're playing is "constitutionally protected speech" or not. You're still subject to noise abatement laws.
The whole issue of freedom of speech is a red herring.
Four years ago my wife and I moved into a house, having lived in an apartment before that, and discoverd that the amount of junk mail we were receiving was much much more. Within a short time I was getting so upset about it I was going to put a No Flyers sign out (Canada Post and many flyer delivery companys in Canada won't leave unadressed junk at your home if you simply put a sign saying "No Flyers") when my wife stopped me, explaining that while she disliked the quantity of crap we were receiving, there were certain flyers she had to have and as such a "No Flyers" sign was unacceptable.
I shudder to think of how many trees died so my wife could know what was on sale each week at Zellers and Walmart.
> Jury Finds Spamming Not Protected By Constitution
No. The jury found him guilty. The judge disallowed his First Amendment defense. Constitutionality is not a jury question.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Because it's $42.95/month instead of $32.95 you blithering idiot.
Yes, I'm using ad-hominem because throughout this entire thread all you've done thus far is piss on all logic that's been presented to you. You have no idea about the costs of running a business, no idea of how an ISP works, no idea about the demands of a real-world e-mail server with or without spam protection measures and no idea of any of the costs involved. Those costs are passed on to the END USER along with the bottom line of the recipient ISP and all ISPs in the transit stream. This is ILLEGAL, and the proof is in all other mediums; fax spam and telemarketer calls to cell phones are illegal because the RECIPIENT pays, not the sender. Do you understand that?
You say the spammers pay for bandwidth? Do you know how SMTP works? That a spammer can send a single e-mail to HUNDREDS OF PEOPLE at THEIR EXPENSE? Do you understand that the majority of all spam e-mail comes from the bandwidth of other END USERS on compromised machines? That spam is such a large black market business that there are gangs of programmers out there creating trojans and bot-nets for the express purpose of creating armies of spam bots to satisfy the demands of pieces of garbage like the one on trial at the moment?
Do yourself a favour and shut up. You're embarrassing yourself and god are you ever annoying in that whiny brat in the supermarket cereal aisle kind of way.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
the "broken glass" fallacy states that a broken window is good for the economy because someone has to make a new window, someone has to make a hammer and nails to hold in the new window, someone has to install the window, etc. This destructive act - breaking a window - is a boon.
The reason that it's a fallacy is that it assumes the money spent on repairing the window wouldn't have been spent somewhere else, somewhere more productive. In an economy, it is always better for a new thing to be created than for an old thing to be replaced.
This isn't exactly what we're talking about with junk mail, but it's close. Yes, regular mail would be more costly, but the post office would also be spending a lot less on gas to lug all that junk mail around. Yes, junk mail designers would be out of a job, but their skills could be employed somewhere else, potentially somewhere more productive. The fact - and it is a fact - that junk mail has positive benefits does not mean that it is optimally beneficial.
Thomas Galvin
No they don't. They infect machines through viruses/trojans/whatever, creating botnets that proceed to send spam for a short time until they get blacklisted. My boss at work took one a few days ago, resulting in out whole network being blacklisted. Along with our mailserver (YAY!)
ISP fees would be lower?Yes, no need to set up complex antispam systems, fund independent systems that keep blacklists of hosts, use spamtraps etc etc. Most professional installations of mailservers do use paid RBL sites.
Expense to the recipient?To go back at my work example. I hadn't blocked access to port 25 through the firewall because some people in the office check/use their private mail, not passing through the company mailserver for sending stuff. Then my boss got a virus, everything got blacklisted and basically we had to sustain the following expenses:
How about coming back with some facts next time?
nbody2002:If you can read this you may be addicted to the internet
It's nowhere near a broken glass fallacy. This isn't a case of an illegal act, it's a case of a legitimate business model that employs many. If the postal service wanted to do away with it all they'd have to do is stop accepting it and it'd be over with. They don't. Why? Because it subsidizes their business model, it keeps their employees working, it fills in the gaps in their daily routes (eg; long stretches of houses that otherwise wouldn't receive any mail on a given day) thereby making the routes more predictable and efficient.
As to the inception; the ads you get in your mail are paid for by local businesses targeting specific areas of interest. A window company working in the area offering a promotion so they can employ their guys in a centralized area thereby keeping costs down and passing them along to the residents, a car dealership offering a sale for residents in their vicinity, a snow clearing service, etc. These businesses pay for this mail to be created thereby creating jobs in the printing and postal industry AND if they've done their homework and targeted properly they'll increase company revenues thereby creatinug work for their employees and increasing their own bottom line.
With recycling programs in high gear in most(?) heavily populated areas the resultant flyers are generally disposed of in the "blue bin" (or the local equivalent) and recycled to create new products and new employment opportunities.
There is no "broken window" fallacy here because the money was intended to be spent on targeted advertising in the first place. Try to do some research into retail outlets' advertising strategies and you'll see what I'm talking about.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.