Class Action Lawsuit Against Spammer 299
sfjoe writes "California-based spammer eTracks is being sued by the law firm, Morrison and Foerster (who have a very cool homepage). M & F's press release says they are "...seeking other relief, including attorneys' fees and statutorily authorized damages of $50 for each email delivered in violation of the law, up to $25,000 per day".
California's anti-spam law has already held up under appeals court scrutiny so this may very well be a major setback to the spam industry."
I think spammers should be forced to pay by donating an organ for each
forged header.
Where's My Money, Mofo? (Score:3, Insightful)
D
Re:A death blow against Free Speech (Score:2, Insightful)
There is a right to free speech. There is not a right to force that speech on others.
Re:what gives? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about because spammers take up network resources and user time without being asked to, without being authorized to, and without yielding benefit? It costs a spammer essentially nothing to send an email that will consume perhaps thousands of dollars in lost bandwidth, CPU cycles, and user effort. The cost is not borne by the instigator, but by the unwilling recipient.
Let's say I decided to drop by your house every day and scrawl an ad (or an offensive message) in chalk on the sidewalk. It's easy enough to erase -- just a little water spilled over it. Is it OK, then? What if I decided to do this every day to every house in your neighborhood? What if I got the chalk by, say, dropping by the local public school and absconding with it?
And I don't know what a good anti-spam law would be, but I wish to death that people would stop acting as if it were a priori impossible to write one without somehow opening up all imaginable governmental ills. Good laws do exist, though it's fashionable on slashdot to pretend they don't. A targetted law helping to assign some economic cost to sending spam would help restore the operation of normal market forces. Not all slopes are slippery.
Re:what gives? (Score:2, Insightful)
They're just trying to make money
Sure, by using up resources that they did not pay for. 1) I pay for internet access so that I can communicate with those I want to 2) resources are being wasted to store and forward the spam emails 3) resources are being wasted to delete the email
It's really not hard to do a lot of stuff. Like protecting yourself against criminals isn't that hard, perhaps we don't need police? Seriously though, it doesn't matter that it is not difficult. It is the sheer volume. I have some email accounts that I use as "fake" email accounts when I think I'll be spammed by the people I'm giving out my email to. One of these accounts gets at least 50 spams a day. Now if I were some poor newbie, tell me how much effort it would take to filter out the one email a day I get that I did intend to receive. If you don't get enough spam to think it is a problem, just change your email address from samsa@@@anitisocial...com to your real address.
Why in the world should it be illegal? Because in California it is.
Re:what gives? (Score:5, Insightful)
I run vectorstar.net, a free hosting service. I would easily wager that greater than 90% of the mail that wriggles through to our users is spam. Thus, 90% of my mail-related disk space and 90% of my mail server processing goes to handling unwanted, unnecessary spam. That's the difference between being able to run a Pentium 100 server or a PIII-1ghz server. Thus, it costs me a LOT of money to deal with spam mail.
The same situation falls true for the majority of businesses. Their mail servers handle far more spam than they do valid email. It leads to serious expenditures on mail server hardware, (in some companies) software, and staff to maintain the servers.
So that's why we hate spam with a passion.
Re:what gives? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, however, I receive about 20 spam a day to that address. I miss messages that I should be receiving. After going two months while travelling without internet access, I returned to discover nothing *but* spam in my inbox -- hotmail had automatically deleted the older messages on the assumption that I would want to keep the newer ones.
Now, my hotmail block-list is full, and I have about another 200 addresses I would like to add to it. I cannot use that account, because it is now fundamentally useless. And spammers don't cost me money?
Spammers cost money everytime they send an ad that a distracted person clicks on, and gets shipped off to a porn site. That red-flags the corporate internet policy manager or whoever, who has to then go TALK to that employee about their going to a porn site. Sure, they just show the spam and say "Oops". It costs both of those people at least half an hour, though, and at $100 an hour, that's an expensive piece of e-mail.
The bandwidth used is not inconsiderable, either, particularly for people who are using dial-up accounts in regions where they pay-by-minute.
Spam is hardly a victimless crime, it's just a stupid one, and it's all opportunity or possible cost, so it's hard to really say "oh, that cost us money". It definitely costs money. It cost me my fucking hotmail account, and discarded my lengthy correspondence with folk hero Donovan, for Chrissakes.
Bah.
l
Re:A death blow against Free Speech (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's see, I have a domain where I pay by the byte (well, megabyte).
In the EU, people pay by the minute for net time.
How is this spam free again?
Go where? (Score:2, Insightful)
The hole in this theory is that most of these people are actually based in the US and spamming because they have squat for money and need to con people to get any. Now, assume they relocate to Mexico they might get away with it for a while, but I wouldn't count on that either. Effectively they'd have to pick up and move themselves to a country without extradition, etc. If they have the wherewithall to do that, most probably wouldn't need to spam.
Re:what gives? (Score:4, Insightful)
There's a subtle difference here, if I remember the bizarre laws in the US concerning the US Postal Service...
When a spammer abuses the network and your email account, he/she/it is NOT paying for the distribution, and is, in a way, "tresspassing" on your "property"...
If I recall correctly (I may not), in some bizarre, technical, legal way, "your" mailbox (the physical one that the USPS delivers to) is ACTUALLY the property of the USPS (not sure how this works exactly, but I THINK this is law so as to put the Big Guns of the Federal Government behind dealing with illegal abuses of the Postal Service, rather than having to rely on individuals to report and accuse abusers). If this is true, then when a junkmailer pays the post office to deliver a bunch of crap to your address, it's only (again, in a technical, legal sort of way) the USPS' resources that are being used, not "yours".
I may be totally off base here - if somebody with a better understanding of USPS-related law is reading this, I'd love a clarification...
At any rate, the summary is that with junkmail, the junkmailer is covering the bulk of the cost to deliver, while with spam, the ISP's and recipients are covering the bulk of the costs. (Looked at another way - you don't pay the USPS to RECEIVE mail, so you're not really losing anything. You DO pay your ISP to recieve E-mail [as part of the cost of the rest of the ISP service] so receiving email does actually cost you something, even if it's a tiny amount.)
Besides, paper is recyclable (though I suppose electrons are, too, come to think of it...)
Re:what gives? (Score:3, Insightful)
billboards, or bus placards, or fancy lighted neon marquees. I can
avert my eyes as I drive by them in my car.
I do have a problem with graffiti. When you sneak up in the night and
spray-paint "Eat at Joe's" on the side of my building, you are using MY
PROPERTY without my permission. And I want to see you tarred, feathered
and drowned in your own paint.
Spam is grafitti. My computer, my disk space, and my bandwidth are
things that I pay for; they are my property. When you use them, without
my permission, to transmit your Nigerian Bank Scams, your porno ads,
your Ponzi schemes, your stock-market pump-and-dumps, and your offshore
casinos, you are spray-painting on my property.
And I want to see you tarred, feathered and drowned in your own flith.