[T]he copyright owner may elect, at any time before final judgment is rendered, to recover, instead of actual damages and profits, an award of statutory damages for all infringements involved in the action, with respect to any one work, for which any one infringer is liable individually, or for which any two or more infringers are liable jointly and severally, in a sum of not less than $750 or more than $30,000 as the court considers just.
(change in emphasis mine).
This means that you would still be liable for up to $30,000, but in that case you might be able to talk the judge down to the $750 minimum. If you were to pay the 'actual' damages into court, the RIAA might be hard pressed to just accept that and walk away themselves.
From what I can read, they seem to be talking about any sort of anonymizer. The original application talks about phone systems. It's very specific, including saying that the intermediary would get the phone number of the caller from the phone system. This pretty much rules out things like The Internet where the calling system identifies itself in the TCP/IP Headers.
If you broaden this to include any sort of anonymizer, including the 'Net, then I'd say that anonymous remailers would also classify as prior art. anonymizing proxies might also classify.. As would Microsoft's Passport wallets.
Either this thing doesn't apply to 3rd party internet purchases, or I'd say that there's a boatload of prior art.
If you really want to hurt a spammer, get thousands of people to order a product, then send it back and charge-back the order on their cards. Creditcard merchant accounts have limits on the chargeback rates, and when they get too high the merchant provider will cut you off. Of course you have to front the money and the hassle, and at the end of the day there's only 1 less spammer out of a million (unless he tries to find another merchant provider and succeeds).
This idea may be INCREDIBLY productive... There aren't millions of spammers... Current intelligence indicates only a hundred or so. Pulling their credit card rights would make internet business almost impossible for them, and it would only take a dozen or so chargebacks to get their credit card rights pulled (if some of the stories I've heard are accurate).
I'm guessing that most of their victims are simply to embarrassed to admit to the credit card companies that they think their dick is so small that they bought those silly pills. --- or worse yet, that their dick is still too small.
If I am a soldier and (in war) I take an action which sinks a ship and drowns (say) 200 of my enemies, am I evil? Most people would say no.
If I, a civilian, set off a bomb and kill 200 random adult civilians, am I evil? A lot of people would probably say yes.
Almost everything occurs in context.... For example, killing in self defence is not considered as evil as killing in 'cold blood'. If you want to OK things outside of context, then I'd have to guess that you'd classify 9/11 as not evil.
Some people consider the bombing of Hiroshima to be not evil -- or, at the worst, a necessary evil. If japan had had the bomb to use in reply, theiy might have nuked New York (or more likely LA or SF). Would this mean that the same bombing outside the context of war would be OK??? The nuking was borderline in the context of war. Outside of that context it is clearly unacceptable.
Try talking to a soldier who was directly involved in house to house fighting during wartime... We might be able to accept the actions from our safe, sanitized homes, but some of them are still haunted by what they did and saw.
On the other hand, I know one person who was a Navy seal. One member of his group actually enjoyed the violence and killing. Some time after the war, he was arrested. He had walked up to a random house, rang the door, and when a woman answered, he raped her.
Some people do the horrifying because they feel they must. Others do it for self satisfaction, and simply look for excuses that can make their actions acceptable and/or bearable in the eyes of their community. In the grey space of good/evil the latter are among the most evil in my eyes.
If you have multiple lines, the fun thing to do is to call up on one line, let the message finish, get to the part where you get to record a message and then call them up again on a second line and conference the two together.
I just crank up the sound on my headphones and place them next to the mouthpiece onf the phone, then play something like a Noam Chompsky MP3.
As the volume of spam goes down (because spammers are dropping out of the business), the false replies will get more concentrated on the remaining spammers... making it even less worthwhile for them to do the spamming. The fewer spammers out there, the fewer counter-spammers it'll take to drown them out.
As the number of spammers out there climbs again, the number of pissed off counter spammers will rise as well... something of an ecological system.
Unfortunately, I guess my article was a bit vague... I meant going to the spamvertized web site and giving them bad data there. I almost never trust the reply address for spam, unless it's a Nigerian spammer (who obviously expects me to email him back). Those email address now get handed to the mortage spammers.
For 1000 leads with 20 'good' calls in them, you'd be better off just cold-calling. At that point the list is worth zero. If the list is worth zero, spamming is no longer worthwhile.
Plus, the real person they call will likely bitch them out (because it is a cold call). Hey, they might even be on the Do Not Call list.
I wonder if it's illegal to collect names and phone numbers from the DNC list? Even if it's not, I think that that's getting into the range of being evil.
No it's not. A simple phone call will do the trick. Now if the credit card winds up being stolen the FBI will most likely be able to find the culprit.
My friend charges $3.75/month for a simple site. He makes most of his money off of volume. I doubt that he could afford the time to call each and every prospective customer (possibly multiple times) to get verbal verification.
We've gotta take the George W. Bush approach to the war on spam. We will make no distinction between the spammers that send the spam and the ISPs that harbor them.
I do hope you're joking.
That's also the Osama Bin Ladin approach.
The biggest difference is that Bush thinks he's working on the side of good and light, while Osama thinks that , uhm, he's on the side of light and good.
I use it on the command line, but if you want to turn it into a CGI script, feel free. I've modularized the process enought that it should be almost trivial.
As far as I can see, it would be legal for the intended purpose, but it's plausable that some scammer could find an illegal use for it.
If someone hands me an 800 number, I just call them up and waste their time. Lots of people did that in the early days of spamming. That's why you almost never see 800 numbers nowadays.
While $20 shared hosting accounts are available without sufficient proof of ID and a mechanism for ensuring you pay a hell of a lot more than $20 if you abuse the TOS and spam, then spamming will continue to be a commercially viable proposition.
A friend of mine (see my sig) runs one of those cheap hosting sites. His TOS is written with terms like that (I know -- I helped write it). The intent is to discourage spammers, but that doesn't necessarily meen that he'll never get one (or that, when he does, he'll be able to collect his $5/email administrative fee).
I'm sorry to those who have a business model which requires you to sell hosting for $20 and not confirm who you're selling to. Hang on a second, no I'm not.
While you're at it, why not shut down all the SMTP servers on the net, too.... That would stop spam real good.:-{
The vast, vast, vast majority of people who use these cheap sites are people who have something to say and want to get it out there. Just like with email, spammers come in trying to look for all the world like a 'normal' user. Sometimes they'll do things like pay with scammed (but apparently valid) Credit card data. It's really hard to stop that without shutting down the other 99.9% of legitimate users.
Besides, spammers are used to their sites being shut down shortly after they start a run I'm sure they're prepared for that. DOSing their site is going to do more damage to collateral victims than to the spammers themselves.
The intent of attacks like what I'm suggesting is a more surgical strike... It attacks the spammers themselves and the economics of spamming.while (hopefully) leaving most others relatively intact.
I found a perl script that generates the checksum for a credit card number.. I used that to write a very short program to
generate plausible credit card numbers -- enough to force the spammmers to verify the card (and piss off MC/VISA).
Given that there's no expectation of the card actually passing verification (and it's going to a random address), I doubt that it's against any law (if they try to sue me over it, I'll be happy to drag them thru the mud).
Well, in the short run, loan referrals are STILL worth $50, so spamming a spammer who is doing that will result in an insane windfall for said spammer.
I'm guessing that these spammers have some sort of guarantee of quality and/or a equivalent to a click-thru rate.... One batch of 99% garbage, and they'll get paid Nothing, then dropped for a (more effective) cold-calling campaign.. In either case, they'll soon get dropped, and the spamming will stop.
The only way this would work, (and it probably woulnd't unless everyone id it), is for the responses to be as real as possible, from real email addresses.
For the most part, reply addresses are bogus. They usually expect you to visit a web site. It's only 419 spammers (and the like) who usually give (and read) legitimate reply addresses. I'll often use those as my 'response' address.
Sorry, I don't think it will work. 90% of my spams are either gibberish or are otherwise not selling anything.
This might be the result of blocking remote images in email, to avoid spam filters, some spammers now have an email consisting of little more than a pointer to an image on their (zombie?) servers. The image has all of the text in it.
If you have images blocked, try reading the source and see if that's the case.
Now what about sending them bogus email addresses and phony information? That would send them on a wild goose chase.
Yep. That's what I generally do... I usually 'harvest' the Email addresses of Nigerian spammers, and use those as my 'reply' email address. (Perhaps I can get them talking to each other!:-o ).
If a spam site I visit gives me a non-800 phone number, I'll often put that in my files, as well.
The best kind of spam to response is the one offering to refinance your mortage/credit/whatever. The buyers of the database will pay up to 50 dollars per "lead".
Exactly! Would you pay $50.00 for information that was 99% likely to be bogus???? You'd be better off cold-calling The more false responses we give them, the more likely they are to stop.
If there are 10,000 people or more sending them bogus responses, how the hell are they going to tell the difference? By the time they finish responging to everybody, they'll be run ragged.
This is precisely my idea in trying to get people to
start responding to spams. If we had just a couple thousand people doing scams like this, I think that the nigerian scammers would just give up their jobs.
Even if you do the simplest of counter-scam responses, you make spammers' lives that much harder.
If anything, this story is a shining example of our U.S. Justice System constraining the DMCA to what it was intended for.
It, unfortunately, is lamented that it needs to be held up as a shining example of the DMCA being constrained. See, for example the other news story today of fatwallet.com censoring prices on their site because of a DMCA notice sent after FatWallet's lawyers had gone home on Friday night.
All too often a small company will back off in the face of such a demand letter rather than pay the $30K+ it would take to fight it in court.
Slashdot Mirror
(change in emphasis mine). This means that you would still be liable for up to $30,000, but in that case you might be able to talk the judge down to the $750 minimum. If you were to pay the 'actual' damages into court, the RIAA might be hard pressed to just accept that and walk away themselves.
If you broaden this to include any sort of anonymizer, including the 'Net, then I'd say that anonymous remailers would also classify as prior art. anonymizing proxies might also classify.. As would Microsoft's Passport wallets.
Either this thing doesn't apply to 3rd party internet purchases, or I'd say that there's a boatload of prior art.
This idea may be INCREDIBLY productive... There aren't millions of spammers... Current intelligence indicates only a hundred or so. Pulling their credit card rights would make internet business almost impossible for them, and it would only take a dozen or so chargebacks to get their credit card rights pulled (if some of the stories I've heard are accurate).
I'm guessing that most of their victims are simply to embarrassed to admit to the credit card companies that they think their dick is so small that they bought those silly pills. --- or worse yet, that their dick is still too small.
If I, a civilian, set off a bomb and kill 200 random adult civilians, am I evil? A lot of people would probably say yes.
Almost everything occurs in context.... For example, killing in self defence is not considered as evil as killing in 'cold blood'. If you want to OK things outside of context, then I'd have to guess that you'd classify 9/11 as not evil.
Some people consider the bombing of Hiroshima to be not evil -- or, at the worst, a necessary evil. If japan had had the bomb to use in reply, theiy might have nuked New York (or more likely LA or SF). Would this mean that the same bombing outside the context of war would be OK??? The nuking was borderline in the context of war. Outside of that context it is clearly unacceptable.
Try talking to a soldier who was directly involved in house to house fighting during wartime... We might be able to accept the actions from our safe, sanitized homes, but some of them are still haunted by what they did and saw.
On the other hand, I know one person who was a Navy seal. One member of his group actually enjoyed the violence and killing. Some time after the war, he was arrested. He had walked up to a random house, rang the door, and when a woman answered, he raped her.
Some people do the horrifying because they feel they must. Others do it for self satisfaction, and simply look for excuses that can make their actions acceptable and/or bearable in the eyes of their community. In the grey space of good/evil the latter are among the most evil in my eyes.
I just crank up the sound on my headphones and place them next to the mouthpiece onf the phone, then play something like a Noam Chompsky MP3.
As the number of spammers out there climbs again, the number of pissed off counter spammers will rise as well... something of an ecological system.
Unfortunately, I guess my article was a bit vague... I meant going to the spamvertized web site and giving them bad data there. I almost never trust the reply address for spam, unless it's a Nigerian spammer (who obviously expects me to email him back). Those email address now get handed to the mortage spammers.
For 1000 leads with 20 'good' calls in them, you'd be better off just cold-calling. At that point the list is worth zero. If the list is worth zero, spamming is no longer worthwhile.
I wonder if it's illegal to collect names and phone numbers from the DNC list? Even if it's not, I think that that's getting into the range of being evil.
My friend charges $3.75/month for a simple site. He makes most of his money off of volume. I doubt that he could afford the time to call each and every prospective customer (possibly multiple times) to get verbal verification.
We've gotta take the George W. Bush approach to the war on spam. We will make no distinction between the spammers that send the spam and the ISPs that harbor them.
I do hope you're joking. That's also the Osama Bin Ladin approach. The biggest difference is that Bush thinks he's working on the side of good and light, while Osama thinks that , uhm, he's on the side of light and good.
I use it on the command line, but if you want to turn it into a CGI script, feel free. I've modularized the process enought that it should be almost trivial.
As far as I can see, it would be legal for the intended purpose, but it's plausable that some scammer could find an illegal use for it.
I don't think that there are many people out there who would pay out a $1000 deposit for a $5/month personal website.
If someone hands me an 800 number, I just call them up and waste their time. Lots of people did that in the early days of spamming. That's why you almost never see 800 numbers nowadays.
They've pissed off everybody else, why not piss off their (minority) investors, too?
A friend of mine (see my sig) runs one of those cheap hosting sites. His TOS is written with terms like that (I know -- I helped write it). The intent is to discourage spammers, but that doesn't necessarily meen that he'll never get one (or that, when he does, he'll be able to collect his $5/email administrative fee).
While you're at it, why not shut down all the SMTP servers on the net, too.... That would stop spam real good. :-{
The vast, vast, vast majority of people who use these cheap sites are people who have something to say and want to get it out there. Just like with email, spammers come in trying to look for all the world like a 'normal' user. Sometimes they'll do things like pay with scammed (but apparently valid) Credit card data. It's really hard to stop that without shutting down the other 99.9% of legitimate users.
Besides, spammers are used to their sites being shut down shortly after they start a run I'm sure they're prepared for that. DOSing their site is going to do more damage to collateral victims than to the spammers themselves.
The intent of attacks like what I'm suggesting is a more surgical strike... It attacks the spammers themselves and the economics of spamming.while (hopefully) leaving most others relatively intact.
Given that there's no expectation of the card actually passing verification (and it's going to a random address), I doubt that it's against any law (if they try to sue me over it, I'll be happy to drag them thru the mud).
I'm guessing that these spammers have some sort of guarantee of quality and/or a equivalent to a click-thru rate. ... One batch of 99% garbage, and they'll get paid Nothing, then dropped for a (more effective) cold-calling campaign.. In either case, they'll soon get dropped, and the spamming will stop.
For the most part, reply addresses are bogus. They usually expect you to visit a web site. It's only 419 spammers (and the like) who usually give (and read) legitimate reply addresses. I'll often use those as my 'response' address.
This might be the result of blocking remote images in email, to avoid spam filters, some spammers now have an email consisting of little more than a pointer to an image on their (zombie?) servers. The image has all of the text in it.
If you have images blocked, try reading the source and see if that's the case.
Yep. That's what I generally do... I usually 'harvest' the Email addresses of Nigerian spammers, and use those as my 'reply' email address. (Perhaps I can get them talking to each other! :-o ).
If a spam site I visit gives me a non-800 phone number, I'll often put that in my files, as well.
Exactly! Would you pay $50.00 for information that was 99% likely to be bogus???? You'd be better off cold-calling The more false responses we give them, the more likely they are to stop.
ADOPT A SPAMMER TODAY!!!
Even if you do the simplest of counter-scam responses, you make spammers' lives that much harder.
It, unfortunately, is lamented that it needs to be held up as a shining example of the DMCA being constrained. See, for example the other news story today of fatwallet.com censoring prices on their site because of a DMCA notice sent after FatWallet's lawyers had gone home on Friday night.
All too often a small company will back off in the face of such a demand letter rather than pay the $30K+ it would take to fight it in court.