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1st Trial Under California Spam Law Slams Spammer
www.sorehands.com writes "In the first case brought by a spam recipient to actually go to trial in California, the Superior Court of California held that people who receive false and deceptive spam emails are entitled to liquidated damages of $1,000 per email under California Business & Professions Code Section 17529.5. In the California Superior Court ruling (PDF), Judge Marie S. Weiner made many references to the fact that Defendants used anonymous domain name registration and used unregistered business names in her ruling. This is different from the Gordon case, where one only had to perform a simple whois lookup to identify the sender; here, Defendants used 'from' lines of 'Paid Survey' and 'Your Promotion' with anonymously registered domain names. Judge Weiner's decision makes it clear that the California law is not preempted by the I CAN-SPAM Act. This has been determined in a few prior cases, including my own. (See http://www.barbieslapp.com/spam for some of those cases.)"
Uhm, you're supposed to post an web or e-mail address link so people can reach you in the summary.
For 1k per I can sure as hell afford a petabyte array.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
This is what should happen for all SPAMMERs. Once this happens to everyone, there would be thicker lines drawn between what is SPAM and whats not. Organizations that do SPAM to provide their advertisements for FREE, even the ones that have the UNSUBSCRIBE button should start getting this kind of penalties.
Well, it seems like California got one right for once. Now, how many more places need similar laws to solve this worldwide problem?
I know the $1,000 per e-mail is supposed to be a deterrent, but no one is ever going to see any real money from this guy. Who keeps the 'spam'? How can they prove they received it once it's gone?
This guy is going to declare bankruptcy as soon as his fine is handed down and the only one who's going to get any of his cash is his lawyer.
In many states, fines that are a result of court judgements against you cannot be discharged in bankruptcy court. Otherwise, you could just rack up ungodly amounts of judgements against you, never pay them, go to bankruptcy court, wash, rinse, repeat as often as desired.
"Slamming spam lands spammer in slammer"
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Its 2010, well over a decade after spam became a prominent problem. Why is this the first successfull prosecution of a spammer? Bit late wouldnt you say? I thought the can-spam act has been around for years. Why arent these guys being taken down sooner? Guess better late than never.
I'll save someone some time- actually, a lot of people a lot of time:
... (x) legislative ...
...
...
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
That is kinda the idea of bankruptcy – once they've taken everything from you, you should be allowed a fresh start.
Federal student loans and, at least in my state (afaik), court judgments are exempt from bankruptcy declarations.
At least for judgments against you, that's actually good. You shouldn't get a fresh start if you have a court-ordered judgment against you.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Who is 'they'? Is it the judicial system, which (ideally) only fines people who have done something wrong? Is it the creditors, who are only loaning you money, and just want it back? Going into bankruptcy means that not only have you exhausted your own supply of money, but generally you've exhausted what other people are willing to lend you. You should not be allowed to just forget all your old debts, any more than a bank should be allowed to forget that you made deposits.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
The wheels of justice grind very slowly, but they grind extremely finely too -- this guy is finding that out.
Ian Ameline
www.barbieslapp.com was not at all what I was hoping it would be about.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
I hate spam as much as the next guy, but $1,000 per e-mail is just as rediculous as the rewards we are seeing for pirating music. Can't we work to solve this problem without making up huge numbers that no one will ever be able to pay anyway?
I didn't RTFPDF yet, but here are my preliminary thoughts. I understand the rationale that the fine of $1000 per email is that it is punitive, but why $1000? $1000 per email seems like an awfully exaggerated fine. Didn't we agree that fines or other cash penalties should be at least roughly tied to the amount of harm done? For example, sharing a $1 song should not amount to thousands upon thousands of dollars in fines. Likewise, a single spam email that costs the victim almost nothing but time, annoyance, and/or fractions of a cent in bandwidth costs probably shouldn't warrant a $1000 fine.
Now if a scam email actually defrauded someone of money (the victim could either be the person spammed or an ad agency), the punishment should be relative to the amount defrauded, plus some significant punitive penalty.
If we think that outrageous fines are unjust and unwarranted, shouldn't we apply this rule across the board? Figure out the actual damages and go from there instead of just slapping a $1000 price tag on each email. Doesn't that make more sense?
YES! Where he used caps implies emphasis in speech. People who complain about this don't know how to read. They can't read something and HEAR the speech emphasis in their mind. So they complain and look stupid.
Over-the-top Response Guy! Giving "Over-the-Top Responses" since 1970.
Dan IS the lawyer. He runs a law firm.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Can I get a "sue" button on my gmail spam folder? I'd love to get $1000 for each of the of spam emails I get everyday.
No, we shouldn't, because we really dislike spam - thus we feel that we can adjust our punitive damages required to fit our dislike. On the other hand, we like illegal file sharing, therefore we feel that punitive damages there should be zero.
At least, I'm fairly certain that's how a lot of people's "logic" goes. :)
For every spam I got, I could buy a nice house in the mountains. If I had a grand for each of them, I could retire the national debt!
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Indebtedness that is the result of certain criminal acts is not usually allowed to be discharged in bankruptcy. If you destroy someone else's property, then declare bankruptcy after being convicted of the crime, you will still owe THAT debt. The risk of not being paid back is supposed to be burdened only by those specifically choosing to do business with the party that might declare bankruptcy. However, this matter still has to be raised in the bankruptcy court. If you are owed money for a criminal act, and the debtor files bankruptcy, and you just sit and do nothing, it could be discharged, and it might not be possible to re-open the bankruptcy (if you knew about it).
Whether spamming falls under this is the big question. I believe there is no case law to test it.
For more information, see "Chapter 7 - Liquidation Under the Bankruptcy Code". The relevant paragraphs are near the end, just above "NOTES".
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
He had to find the guy in order to sue them. That part is done.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Littering is $1000 in California, too. What's the harm to anyone if someone throws a piece of (biodegradable) paper out their window?
The harm is not the 1 piece of paper, it's the 1,000,000 that result if there is no fine. The fine has to be punitive enough to stop the 1,000,000.
Think of this as littering in someone else's inbox.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in filesharing cases, they're usually statutory damages, not punitive, no? In this case, I'd think it's punitive damages, thus allowing the discrepancy in what people are accepting.
Alternatively, if I'm not correct about the statutory damages, in both cases, people are trying to destroy a broken business model. The RIAA's by disallowing massive fines being used as a sledgehammer against people so they can continue doing business the way they want, rather than how the market will allow, and spammers by using fines to break a business model that thrives generally on scams and using other people's resources to promote their business at a greatly reduced cost (tons of spam sent through botnets, after all).
Canada: The US's more awesome sibling.
... won't miss this guy for more than the Planck time.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
This guy is going to declare bankruptcy
A judge still has to grant bankruptcy status. Due to the nature of his problems, its likely a judge will not give him a pass. Abuse of the law to side step the other hand of the law isn't a typical reason allowed for bankruptcy.
Onw - 1 - person being arrested for murder does not mean murder is "solved" for all time. The only real metric is a persistent lowering not caused by underreporting. That is far more complicated than most companies think.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I run the network of a small business. Less than 15 people. Program too. Let me tell you *what* spam costs.
Three years ago, it became a problem that wasn't getting handled by the clients. The CEO was annoyed at having to delete 20 messages a day. He got to deleting things so fast he accidentally deleted a very important message in his hurry. More than once. Cost to the business: ~$50,000 in potential sales.
We bought a spam filtering firewall to handle it. Yes, there's lots of open source solutions--but we had no spare hardware for virtualization, our mailserver was an undocumented mess--and I needed an "on the wire just work" solution. Cost: three hours of research, $500 purchase, $200 a year for a 24x7 warranty.
In 2008 we had our first joe-job--we were running a business class DSL line in the office, 2 Megs, async. The backscatter *took us offline* for over two days. I had BATV installed within four hours, but almost nobody uses it. Oddly enough, postmaster didn't get any complaints that I found. We had to move our mailserver into a co-lo and purchase the bandwidth, as our ISP couldn't filter that out on the fly. And don't start on the poor little firewall appliance nearly bursting into flames as its load went up to 5-6 on a single CPU trying to scan the content.
Because of SPAM, I can't run an open relay, and my users have to connect either via VPN to a trusted open LAN submission service, or I have to install passwords in the outbound SMTP system. Both of these take configuration changes. Because of SPAM, users on aircards can't follow their ISPs email instructions--I've got domainkeys--they need to send mail from *my* mailsystems.
So yeah, SPAM costs our company alone a minimum of $200 a year just in subscription fees and maintenance. In practice, it's cost a lot more, and has taken us offline. What do you think it costs a company the size of IBM, or the state of California?
I'm just grateful I'm not in an industry where I'm required by law to archive all these things. And you are aware storage is *expensive* right? Yeah, I can get a cheap ass drive at home for $100 for 1 TB. But at work--high availability systems, high availability storage, tape archiving, backups, redundancy. Now--not everything needs this, but even the cheap cable attached SAS drives aren't coming in for less than $200, and those don't have much capacity and are like 7200 RPM. To actually benefit from those, I need at least direct attached storage, or a NAS device-- $4000 - $20,000+. Of course, I *could* build it myself and end up with no warranty or support contract...
Now, to capitalize on this and back it up, I'll need either a tape backup system, shipping, or a high speed fiber link to somewhere.
Lest you say all of this isn't caused by one spam--it's well established in the US that the "weak skull defense" is *not* valid. If it's the last spam that caused my firewall to crash, or forced me to invest in the firewall--they are liable for it.
Anybody who runs a megacorp network want to tell mr speedy exactly what spam actually costs their company? Don't forget the extra AV licenses you probably had to purchase for the distributed scanners...
One case involves a clear for-profit motive. If something is profitable (and sharing out files for free generally isn't) then it makes sense to have higher fines to balance the higher reward. It also prevents some extreme cases where breaking the law turns a profit.
There's a degree of pragmatism here. The ratio [spam sent] to [court cases won] will be lower than 1000:1, making the per-email judgement, in most cases considerably lower than $1 a message. Of course, a class action could destroy somebody, but then, that's kind of the idea. Deterrent.
by getting a job.
If you could do that it would cripple civil lawsuits. Then we'd have to make even more things criminal to deter people so they could be punished (by throwing them in jail, which you can't do with a civil lawsuit).
I think I can make a case for far more than $1000 in lost wages (as a male prostitute) after that male enhancement spam turned out to be fake.
If the spam is fraudulent, then each email is an attempt to actually defraud someone (albeit an amateurish, pathetic attempt most of the time). That's a far more serious offense than sharing a song, isn't it? I think it warrants a punitive fine.
You have to admire Daniel Balsam for his tenacity. It sure sent a message to would-be spammers that it is neither lucrative nor desireable to engage in such practices.
I'd be willing to split the take with anyone who wants to chase down and cash in on these guys. Hell, even at $500/per, I can retire in just a few weeks...
The article says its damages, presumably payable to the person spammed by the spamming company. Given that the CA law also says its a misdemeanor, that would imply that individuals can be fined or jailed. Cali might be able to start prosecuting these guys and generating some revenue. Or maybe they'll stick with the easier to prove and more lucrative dwi cases.
From 17529.5. http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/cacode/BPC/1/d7/3/1/1.8/s17529.5
(a)It is unlawful for any person or entity to advertise in a commercial e-mail advertisement either sent from California or sent to a California electronic mail address under any of the following circumstances:
(1)The e-mail advertisement contains or is accompanied by a third-party's domain name without the permission of the third party.
(2)The e-mail advertisement contains or is accompanied by falsified, misrepresented, or forged header information. This paragraph does not apply to truthful information used by a third party who has been lawfully authorized by the advertiser to use that information.
(3)The e-mail advertisement has a subject line that a person knows would be likely to mislead a recipient, acting reasonably under the circumstances, about a material fact regarding the contents or subject matter of the message.
(b)(1)(A)In addition to any other remedies provided by any other provision of law, the following may bring an action against a person or entity that violates any provision of this section:
(i)The Attorney General.
(ii)An electronic mail service provider.
(iii)A recipient of an unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement, as defined in Section 17529.1.
(B)A person or entity bringing an action pursuant to subparagraph (A) may recover either or both of the following:
(i)Actual damages.
(ii)Liquidated damages of one thousand dollars ($1,000) for each unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement transmitted in violation of this section, up to one million dollars ($1,000,000) per incident.
(C)The recipient, an electronic mail service provider, or the Attorney General, if the prevailing plaintiff, may also recover reasonable attorney's fees and costs.
(D)However, there shall not be a cause of action under this section against an electronic mail service provider that is only involved in the routine transmission of the e-mail advertisement over its computer network.
(2)If the court finds that the defendant established and implemented, with due care, practices and procedures reasonably designed to effectively prevent unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisements that are in violation of this section, the court shall reduce the liquidated damages recoverable under paragraph (1) to a maximum of one hundred dollars ($100) for each unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement, or a maximum of one hundred thousand dollars ($100,000) per incident.
(3)(A)A person who has brought an action against a party under this section shall not bring an action against that party under Section 17529.8 or 17538.45 for the same commercial e-mail advertisement, as defined in subdivision (c) of Section 17529.1.
(B)A person who has brought an action against a party under Section 17529.8 or 17538.45 shall not bring an action against that party under this section for the same commercial e-mail advertisement, as defined in subdivision (c) of Section 17529.1.
(c)A violation of this section is a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of not more than one thousand dollars ($1,000), imprisonment in a county jail for not more than six months, or both that fine and imprisonment.
just as stupid as the $25,000 per song rulings. maybe this is indicative of how much their judges make, that $1000 doesn't seem like much to them?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
File sharing doesn't tend to involve fraud but instead non commercial infringement, for most people profit motive matters.
File this one with all the others who think they will get money out for punitive damages from spammers. We all know in the end it won't work, the plaintiff won't see any money; hence don't hold your breath for your "share" either.
Of course, IANAL, however we see that the PDF states the lawsuit (note it was not a criminal trial) was against a company. If the company doesn't have any responsible staffers in the US, then this suit isn't worth the paper the ruling was printed on. Furthermore if the company goes under then the payment for the ruling will be decided in bankruptcy court (though only if they are a US-based company).
The plaintiff(s) would have been wise to just save their time and not bother bringing a lawyer into the matter, as in the end they will likely end up paying a lot more money to that lawyer than they will ever see form the company they just sued.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but in filesharing cases, they're usually statutory damages, not punitive, no?
Well, correction.
Both copyright damages and these spam damages are statutory damages (i.e. specified by statute, as opposed to discretionary), and both are intended to have punitive value (i.e. you will only enforce the claim against a tiny minority of offenders and therefore it's the risk and cost of being caught that has deterrent value). Neither are punitive damages (i.e. additional damages beyond what is restitutionary or compensatory owing to specific misconduct by the defendant).
The GP's point is spot on for many people here (though there are also many who have no problem with the penalties and enforcement structure, and instead have issues [some legitimate; many not] with the substantive laws that give way to the penalties in the first place).
If your worried about the consequences then don't do it, it's pretty simple.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
He's a spammer, he's rich.
And concealing assets, even ill-gotten gains, from the court in a bankruptcy proceeding is bankruptcy fraud, which is a federal offense you can go to prison for, not just get the crap fined out of your balance sheet.
It's an attempted scam of 1000's of dollars. If you try to murder someone, but fail, you still get screwed.
I don't know if increasing punitive damages to fit our dislike is illogical, or even necessarily a bad idea. Punitive damages DO in some sense measure the strength of the public's dislike for an action; the purpose of establishing punitive damages is to reduce the occurrences of a behavior that society deems undesirable. It makes sense that we would want to more strongly punish actions that we dislike more than actions that we actually like. There is no 'objective', 'purely logical' reason to assign any specific value to punitive damages (otherwise they would be compensatory damages, ie equal to the monetary value of the harm done). Therefore, any argument as to how much punitive damages should be assessed for various infractions would logically be based on how badly society wants to prevent the action from happening.
In the case of illegal filesharing of copyrighted work, it is hard to make an argument that any member of society is suffering a great harm that is higher than the compensatory damages equal to the purchase cost of the downloaded work. In fact, until the illegal downloader is caught, the offended party is unaware that a crime has even taken place! From the "victim's" perspective, the world where the illegal download took place and a world where the downloader had never even been born are absolutely identical. It is hard to make an argument that there should be large punitive damages to prevent something that has such an unnoticeable effect.
Spam, on the other hand, causes people anguish long before the criminal is caught. A world where spam is sent and a world where all the spammers were never born would be a completely different world. Society would certainly notice the difference, and would be much happier in a world where spammers had never been born. It makes perfect logical sense to want to increase the punitive parts of the damages.
I did a little searching for relevant non e-mail equivalents.
Sending Junk snail-mail doesn't seem to be against the law in most jurisdictions.
The closest equivalent I could find is laws against sending junk faxes, which can result in damages of several thousand dollars per page in most jurisdictions.
So yes, $1000 per e-mail is not without precedent.
--------------
With the file-sharing thing, suppose you're in trouble for 10 songs. You could have stolen a CD, get caught, charged with Petty theft, and let off with community service...
Or you could have used a file-sharing program, and had your life ruined in the ensuing lawsuit. The punishment is not only completely out of proportion to the crime, it flies in the face of all precedents for dealing with similar crimes offline.
Now to counter my own argument (because I like to do that sort of thing):
You are totally stacking the deck by choosing this type of argument, and abusing the particulars of the crime of copyright infringement.
By choosing to compare a world where the download takes place and a world where the downloader was never born, you state that, to the copyright holder, the world is exactly the same. However, it isn't; there exists one less potential customer in the world. Now, you might say that this one customer is such a tiny fraction the world, and anyway the likelihood that he or she would become an actual customer are pretty low. While the chance of this person being a customer, while certainly less than 1, is most likely higher than that of a random person in the world (they show some interest in content by illegally downloading it). Now apply this little thought experiment to ALL downloaders; now the world either has all these people downloading music or all those downloaders were never born. That is a LOT less customers in this new downloaders-never-born world. To act as if the worlds are the same is a bit disingenuous. Whether these damages are greater or less than what is assessed can be argued, but it is not as simple as saying the worlds would be the same.
...why $1000?
Maybe they're trying to assign a cost according to the RIAA per-song tariffs.
This is not brilliant logic here, and if you really go by this, go for the entertainment on the People's Court.
Making money on spam is not really the thing to find through the court system. Jello isn't either.
This is all fucked Jello talk that has just been stamped. To rebut your statement, this is not 'logic.'
"Damages" in a civil complaint, despite legal theorems, has two components. The obvious one is the the costs suffered by the plaintiff. The other (less often explicitly acknowledged) is the punishment to discourage future repetitions.
Suppose some extremely-clever human-engineered phish or spam yields on average more than the fraction of a cent cost that span penalties might obtain. There would be no disincentive for spamming
Of course, spamming today has essentially no cost to the perpetrators. When there is an international corps that track down spammers and either puts a bullet in their brains or shuts off internet connectivity to their entire country, operating characteristics will change.
Fat chance with many employers requiring a goddamned credit check before giving you a job.
God i swear you people are so ignorant of reality.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Tell that to SCO.
E-mail and Faxes are both covered under 'electronic communications' for unwarranted transmissions laws.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"I guess you should have thought of that before you sent deceptive spam to the whole world."
In general, if you're unable to pay your judgment in a lump sum, the court will work out a payment plan for you. They'll garnish a set amount out of each paycheck (usually depending on what you can reasonably afford) and give it to the plaintiff. Sure, you might be paying $50 every two weeks until you die, but. . . that's where my first sentence comes in.
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
First off, they're going easy on the guy. The 1995 TCPA allows for up to $1500 damages per offense, payable to the plaintiff.
Second, the amount of "hurt" of the penalty should be standardized. A megacorporation that gets fined a grand for some act of wrongdoing isn't going to care, and is therefore likely to continue committing the offense, writing the penalty off as a business expense, because it's likely that the business is making far more money off of breaking the law than it is losing in penalties. That same $1000 applied to a burgerflipper at McDonalds is going to hurt a lot more.
(And since corporations insist on being treated as individual people, I would say the doctrine of equal treatment under the law should come into play here, and it's certainly not equal treatment to fine the McDonalds guy 200% of his paycheck for the same offense that you fined the corporation 0.0000001% of its daily earnings, eh?)
Point being, the $1000 fine depends on how much this dude earned. Some spammers earn a hell of a lot of money sending that crap out. Why should they get to keep so much of it after breaking state (and federal) law literally millions of times?
"I disagree with you" does not equal "flamebait."
No, the point was that if the cash penalty is disproportionate then the case should be tried in a criminal court with criminal standards of proof.
(Yes, I reluctantly agree that this should apply here too.)
I used to work for Cisco in San Jose. I was part of the group that ran the Unix email systems for the entire company. Cisco is a company of 60,000 plus people around the world. All the email for Cisco goes through Sun Jose. In my group we had 9 system admins and 1 manager who were dedicated to handling spam. When I was there (2004 - 2005) we had a dozen top-of-the-line IronPort anti-spam servers. We were adding an additional one every couple of quarters. I don't really know but an educated guess would be that the spam consumed a very large part of the bandwidth the San Jose campus used, I'm sure it was more that 40%. Now think about what it cost to pay 9 very experienced system admin and 1 manager (salary, benefits, stock options, office equipment, etc) not to mention the equipment and bandwidth costs, just to deal with the spam.
If it was not for the spammers, Cisco and other large companies could be putting that money into new products. Instead the money is spent to deal with idiots who, were it not for our anti-spam group, would be wasting the productivity of the entire company.
Since spammers are, in fact stealing bandwidth, I have often thought that they should be charged, at the very least, with theft of service or grand theift.
Another day closer to redwood heaven
In 2008 we had our first joe-job--we were running a business class DSL line in the office, 2 Megs, async. The backscatter *took us offline* for over two days.
I own a domain for private use, which is hosted by a friend. It's set up so that all mail to any address at that domain is delivered to me.
I was the victim of a joe-job a few years ago; at the height of the problem, I was getting 2000-3000 mails *per day* from the backscatter and spam to the faked from addresses. It didn't knock anything offline, but it was pretty bloody annoying. Thankfully it has since dropped to maybe a couple of dozen per day.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
...
So yeah, SPAM costs our company alone a minimum of $200 a year just in subscription fees and maintenance. In practice, it's cost a lot more, and has taken us offline.
...
Your story is interesting and it's clearly costing your business money but it still doesn't add up to anywhere near $1000 per email.
Let's say that you have ten people (you stated less than fifteen) and they all recieve 20 spam a day (what you quoted for the CEO). That's roughly 73,000 emails a year.
You listed a one off loss of a $50,000 sale, a one off purchase of a $500 filter and $200 per year maintenance. I'll add in $500 per year per staff member to filter email and general pain. Taking the one offs and assuming they occur every three years we get $55,700 in cost per year.
The magic figure out of all this very rubbery estimation is 76 cents per email. Lets call it a dollar, it's a nice number and nobody will rationally argue that it costs more than $1 (USD) to handle a single piece of spam.
Now let's look at what the legistlation puts him on the hook for and compare it to everyone's favorite boogy man, the copyright infringement minimums.
Cost: Spam = $1, Copyright = $1
Minimum damages: Spam = $1000, Copyright = $750
So there are a few options for people on this site:
Personally I think both are too high. The very concept of a minimum punishment is insane and ties the hands of the Judge. It doesn't work for criminal cases (three strikes etc.) and it doesn't work in these cases. The punishment should be applicable to the details of the particular case, including the damage, financial gain, intent and position and history of the perpatrator.
And I used to think my 5 year old daughter was a drama queen.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Substitute "illegal filesharers" for "spammers" in that sentence and watch the howls of outrage from the slashdotters.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Since when is the legal system supposed to be used to "destroy" someone?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
My post is disputed because of my opinion the user should be held responsible due their machines being infected. lol
Let me clarify here. I think the ISP's are ONE of the responsible parties for spam. I think they should be doing a better job of policing their networks. The reason they most likely are not is due to them being afraid of;
1): Bad publicity due to terminated accounts.
*** Big bad ISP terminates grandma's account because she does not know how to clean machine of infected bot ware.
2). Loss of customers because its not an industry standard to police infected machines.
By mandating that they must police their network and terminate accounts if users refuse to clean up their machines. They can point at the big bad government as their escape goat and clean up their network. They also will not have to worry that customers will go to other lazy/non compliant ISP's that don't care if a machine is infected.
Just prosecuting the spammer is not going to clean up this problem. ISP's need to clean up their networks better. Users need to monitor their machines and clean them. The offenders need to be put into the wild of pissed off users who have been infected by the spammer. The last point would probably do more to stop spamming then anything else.
SCO is strictly a civil case. The current spam laws are criminal prosecutions with the end result being fines. Filing bankruptcy to escape criminal prosecution isn't likely to be smiled on by the state.
Run up a couple million in traffic ticket fines and then attempt to file bankruptcy - see how far that'll get you.
"littering in someone else's inbox"
I like that, it made me think of "going in someone's litter box", which is what spam is, someone is pissing in your inbox.
"The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits." -- Albert Einstein
You're one of "the slashdotters". I assume you'd be howling in outrage as well?
Not sure if Cali is like my state, but if you look at the sign, it says a "MAX FINE" before the $1000. Someone throwing out a banana peel likely won't get fined at all. A bag of fast food trash: $50. A full garbage bag due to laziness: $500. Dumping 100 pounds of trash: $1000. These fines are reasonable considering the damage done, and are in now way proportional to one spam or one song.
I feel sorry for you if your state really does have black-and-white fines.
No, administrative wage garnishments are good, and afaik, judgements don't go down on your credit report. I cannot completely confirm this as I haven't seen my credit report in a few years.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
Part of the rational here is that a single email can do MORE than $1,000 in harm. The most often used example is of a minor getting hardcore porn. Other examples include opening up pornographic email at work (and risking loosing your job because of it).
I have a story on the last one. In the late nineties my Sister worked at a domestic violence support organization. They helped battered and abused women and there children get out of those situations. Part of her job was to be a open contact for anyone suffering abuse, this included reading through her email box and the main companies email box.
Every day she would go through the 2-3 hundred combined emails in those two boxes, most of which were unlabeled porn ads. At one point her boss called her in and "had a talk with her about looking at pornography in the work place". This being the '90s not everyone knew about spam yet. Luckily she explained and her boss understood. She still had to walk around and apologize every time she read through her email though.
Since the Scientologists started absorbing lawyers with their many slimy tentacles.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
Yeah, one lawsuit for $7,000 plus another $50,000 in attorney fees will not break them. What about 100 more of their spam victims filing the same type of lawsuit?
I have a spammer, Dev8 Entertainment, AXS Charge, Datatima Ideas Limited, Liquid Minds, East group, Techie Group, Emanuel Gurtler, and David Szpak (all alter-egos) that I am litigating my third lawsuit against. They decided to default the last two because those judgments totaled only $200k. Since I had a $2M judgment,they decided to fight it.
Of course they are in default again, and this time it will stick. The last time, their lawyer, John DuWors, lied to the Court and claimed that they never received notice of any of the lawsuits. I wonder if the California Bar will suspend him for perjury.
Fight Spammers!
Last year I started getting well over 10,000 per day. Panix dealt with it fine, though they did make me fix my configuration invoking Spamassassin twice per message (which was accidental--whoops!). But since that happened, I've changed to discarding all messages marked as spam, rather than skimming the subject lines each day of only 200-300 messages or so for false positives. Sigh.