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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.)"
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.
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.
It would be great to group all emails marked as spam by gmail into one folder, group it by spammer (or just main contents of message) and make those emails available to lawyers / forensics experts hoping to do some investigative research and bring a class action lawsuit.
If they simply picked the most "popular" spam message every week and got an award of $1000 per email when they located the spammer (keeping say 10%) it would be a nice profitable business.
Have ISP's take offline every machine that has been proven to issue spam until the owner cleans it to the ISP's pre defined and posted rules are met.
Any ISP that is found to NOT enforce these rules is fined 1,000 for every spam that is found to originate from their network.
Once these conditions are met and enforced heavily, ISP’s will go out of their way to assist identifying the origin of the infections that are causing the spam. We then hand down sentences requiring that every individual prosecuted for spam must go door to door with a representative of what ever ISP and clean peoples computers of the software issuing the spam. If the software can not be cleaned, the person that has been convicted and is cleaning these computers MUST pay to have these machines reformatted and reloaded to factory defaults. That means if there are no OS cd’s, the person must purchase them.
These rules would accomplish a couple things.
1). Make ISP’s responsible for keeping their networks clean.
2). Make individuals responsible for keeping their computers clean.
3). I’m hoping by a spammer having to clean peoples computers that some of them get the living shit kicked out of them by angry individuals.
We have industry wide enforcement, education of individual users, and retribution sentences that make the person committing the crime to interact with his/her victims.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
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."
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