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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. '"
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!!!
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.
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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.
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