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Anti-Spam Lawyer Loses Appeal, and His Possessions
Techdirt is reporting that one particularly rabid anti-spam fighter has not only lost his case, but most of his worldly possessions as well. James Gordon tried to set himself up as an ISP to get around the conventions of the CAN SPAM act in order to set up a litigation house designed to sue companies that spam. Unfortunately a judge did not take kindly to this trick and ordered him to pay $110,000 to the firm he was suing, a decision that was not only upheld on appeal but accompanied by some very unkind words trying to shut down litigation mills like his. "But, perhaps even more fascinating is that the guy, James Gordon, didn't just lose the lawsuit, it appears he lost most of his possessions as well. Remember that ruling telling him to pay the $110k to Virtumundo? He refused. The company sent the debt to a collections agency, but told Gordon they'd call off the collections agency if he dropped the appeal. Gordon didn't."
If you leave a communication channel wide open, expect people to message you whether you want it or not. You give implied consent to fill your inbox by setting up a daemon that copies all incoming message data to your mail.
Loudspeaker trucks are in the real world where people can't sleep because there's noise. Spam is in the Wired, where it's completely optional whether you want to listen or not, and it's your responsibility.
These laws are ridiculous anyway. Someone writes a program that saves incoming system messages for later. 40 years later, it becomes illegal to use this program too often. They would have laughed you out of the room if you tried to tell them about CAN-SPAM, and not just because of the name. "What? Don't use it then!" they would have said.
You don't have to run a mail server, and if you do you don't have to accept mail from untrusted hosts. At most, spam should be covered under denial-of-service for putting unreasonable load on receiving mail servers. Fighting email spam is a technical problem, not anything that has ever hurt anyone. Cost to business? Their own problem for inviting it. You don't set a plate of cookies outside with a big sign pointing to them and call that cost to businesses when the next day they're all gone. If businesses opt to set up open mail servers then they can't complain when people use them.
Yes, I understand that it is a problem and it does cost businesses a lot of money, so congress has an interest in legislating it. But I do think my free-cookie analogy is valid, because the system is just that broken. The system is specifically designed to make it as easy as possible to send as many emails as you want to whoever you want. There are endless propositions to make email work, and just about any of them would be a vast improvement. Here are a few short ideas off the top of my head:
Completely toss the idea of accepting mail from anybody. We already use a Web of Trust model for the Web, do something like that for email. Make sure people understand that they're not going to be able to communicate with people not set up as a trusted contact unless they're vetted by a trusted provider. This doesn't have to be hard. Your ISP knows you're a real person, and has strong incentive to restrict your outgoing emails to a few a day if it wants to keep its certificates. Scared of lock-in? This could work just as well with third parties. I can see myself only trusting a high quality trust-provider with a reputation of brutally dropping anything remotely resembling spam.
Allowing a non-trusted person to email you can be as easy as PMing/texting/businesscarding them a little 6 or 7 digit key. High-volume business email like Amazon's customer service or something already deals with lots of spam and could just be configured to use traditional filtering to completely avoid the possibility of losing business.
That's all random-people-connecting-with-businesses by the way. Social communication is much easier. For IM just require friend approval before they can message you. Other stuff like email can be done like a darknet, where you trust just friends you know. Then you can route Trust through your friends, and set how many degrees of separation you want to accept. Just two or three friends out and you've probably encompassed everyone you know, even if you haven't personally contacted them online. Everyone else can either get vetted by a trusted provider or they can just be screwed because nobody should expect to be able to communicate with anyone randomly without being trusted.
We have the attitude completely backwards. Instead of eliminating spam we don't want, we should be behind an interview table squinting and asking "So mr freeman why do you think I should accept mail from you?" or maybe more realistically "So, info page from major free Trust provider, why should I use you and not your competitor?"
It's actually the other way around, 98% of lawyers ARE decent people. 2% are dirty evil rats who want to screw everyone as hard as they can, we just hear about them more because guess which type of lawyer most big litigation happy corporations are interested in hiring.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
but you can't make him piss. The jackass had numerous chances to settle and he just wouldn't do it. Whether out of spite or principal I dunno but he's without his stuff. Bottom line: Wadda maroon.
"If you want to know what happens to you when you die, go look at some dead stuff."
Wrong Python. Graham Chapman provided abuse. :)