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Spam Government The Courts News

First Lawsuits Filed under Missouri's No-Spam Law 156

Posted by CowboyNeal from the told-ya-we'd-shoot dept.
darksoulz writes "The St. Louis Business Journal is reporting that Jay Nixon, Missouri's attorney general, has filed the first lawsuits under the new no-spam law against two Florida spammers. The law doesn't totally prohibit spam, it just requires that the subject line be tagged to let consumers know that it is an advertisement. One of the lawsuit recipients even managed to spam an address maintained by the attorney general's office."
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First Lawsuits Filed under Missouri's No-Spam Law More

First Lawsuits Filed under Missouri's No-Spam Law

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  • Struck down by the Appeals Court (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Dancin_Santa ( 265275 ) <DancinSanta@gmail.com> on Friday October 10, 2003 @12:33AM (#7180224) Journal
    Sorry, interstate commerce is not controlled by the states. The law cannot and does not apply to spammers who work out of the jurisdiction of Missouri.
    • This hasn't stopped Jay Nixon [state.mo.us] from suing many out-of-state telemarketers in violation of Missouri's "no-call" list - he's collected more than a million dollars so far [state.mo.us].
      • Exactly. Nixon has been extremely successful collecting from telemarketers. It may not work, but at least it's something. Missouri is doing a lot more about spam than the feds are, that's for certain.

      • Re:Struck down by the Appeals Court (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I would like to see all Spammers eat shit and die, but there is a problem with the Missery law that will most likely get it overturned.

        Telemarketers can tell what state they are calling by the area code. But,in most cases spammers can't tell what state their Spammees are in.

        The only way a spammer can be sure they never send spam to Missery is to never send spam anyplace. The law will be overturned.

        If this law and Asscroft are typical of the legal system in Missery, they are in a world of hurt.
        • I would like to see all Spammers eat shit and die, but there is a problem with the Missery law that will most likely get it overturned.

          To get it overturned, they'll have to fight it in federal court. This will cost spammers money. So even if the law is overturned, the outcome is good.

          BTW, busting on a state is really lame.

        • But,in most cases spammers can't tell what state their Spammees are in.

          That's simply not true. If they don't have a good idea who they are spamming, they shouldn't be spamming them. If they don't know their target, then they should not spam until they have a list of email addresses with locations attached. After all, if they don't know where people live, then chances are, they are committing other crimes, like spamming little Johnny about porn and drugs.

          Not exactly a hard position to defend.
          • I'm sorry, but you are *way* wrong about that. The only way to make that happen is to force people to reveal their physical address in order to have an email address, and that's not only a severe privacy violation from the governmental-action side (and therefore something that the government would be happy to require :-), it's also a severe privacy violation for people who don't want marketers knowing where they sleep, where they get their paper mail, etc.

            Geographically-specific domain names are a separa

            • Not sure what you think is *way* wrong. It sounds like you exactly understood and got it, rather, you just didn't realize.

              You might go back and read what I said and then read what you said and then think for a moment. I'm fairly sure you'll go, "doh!", shortly after.
    • interstate commerce is not controlled by the states

      I'm sure the Missouri highway patrol writes traffic tickets to long-haul truck drivers all the time. That's interstate commerce. Why shouldn't Missouri be able to go after spammers? Remember, they're breaking Missouri state law.

      • Re:Struck down by the Appeals Court (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The states are not permitted to regulate interstate commerce including that which occur within the boundaries of the state. Within the state they are allowed to establish statewide laws, but these laws do not reach outside the boundaries of the state.

        The MO no-call and spam laws violate the Constitution interstate commerce clause by reaching far beyond the boundaries of the state and into other states.

        Also, it is not clear where exactly a recipient could be at the time of spam arrival. If I were a Misso

    • Re:Struck down by the Appeals Court (Score:4, Informative)

      by Courageous ( 228506 ) on Friday October 10, 2003 @12:45AM (#7180290)
      I believe that it's been ruled somewhere that double ended transactions (such as a solicitation, originating in one state, and ending in another) can be said to have occurred in the destination.

      Anyway, jurisdictional disputes are complicated. Your "does not and cannot" assertion is pretty thin.

      C//
      • What?? Isn't every interstate-commerce transaction a "double ended transaction", and clearly covered by federal (rather than state) law?
      • As Courageous [slashdot.org] said, jurisdictional disputes are complicated - reading mailing lists with lawyers on them discussing jurisdiction is rather like reading Slashdotters discussing the correct pronunciation of GNU/Linux (RMS sucks! Does Not! Does Too!).

        But you REALLY want this to be UnConstitutional, because otherwise, you'd be subject to every law in every state that your email goes to, and possibly every state where people can read your web pages or Usenet postings. You'd possibly even be subject to laws i

    • Good point but in my opinion then 'entered' missori when they connected to missori mail servers to deliver the illegal mail. Virtual or not it is a tresspass onto assets in missori. I'm sure this isn't how the law works. Just an optinion.
    • Sorry, interstate commerce is not controlled by the states. The law cannot and does not apply to spammers who work out of the jurisdiction of Missouri.

      I don't think this is true. If you operate in one state and the effect of your operation is in another you exopose yourself to their laws. And yeah, interstate commerce may not be controlled by the states, but the letter of anti-spam laws may not be based on commerce regulation, rather interference with electronic communications.

    • Complete and utter nonsense. The spammers are choosing to do business in the state of Missouri and are therefore bound to Missouri laws. If you don't know what the hell you're talking about then don't open your mouth.

    • What commerce? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by raehl ( 609729 ) *
      Sending fraudulent email is hardly "interstate commerce". The principle you're referring to does things like prevent states from charging tarrifs or preventing goods from travelling through their state from one state to another. It doesn't mean states can't, say, require commercial driver's licenses for truck drivers, or prohibit you from stealing bandwidth.
    • If they're trying to do business with people located in Missouri, and they send commercial transmissions to people located in Missouri, they sure as hell fall under Missouri jurisdiction. Jurisdiction is a non-issue here.
    • Hmm. I think I'll lob explosives into Missouri from Kansas. Surely Missouri will be powerless.

    • A state law can apply to any person or business who conducts business within the state in question. This individual or company is definitely doing business in Missouri by soliciting Missouri citizens via e-mail which puts the spammer under Missouri Jurisdiction. Simply because the Internet was used doesn't remove the business's obligation to ensure that they are adhering to state laws. In this case, it is up to the spammer to know which state the person they are spamming is from and what state and local l

    • Probably not.

      The "commerce clause" says that Congress has the power to "regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes". But that's not an exclusive power. State regulation of commerce can clearly impact interstate commerce. State jurisdiction can thus overlap federal jurisdiction.

      The way this works, after two centuries of dealing with grey areas, is that the states have power to act in an area where the states and the Federal Government share control

    • Just because the feds can regulate interstate commerce as well doesn't mean that the states can't.

      The Floridians are out of the jurisdiction of the Missouri courts, but not because of restrictions on regulation of interstate commerce.
    • Jay Nixon, the Missouri AG, has sued several out of state companies for violating our no-call list. This seems to be a step out the same play book as the No-call list.

      I could say "Its about time", but at least he is doing something about it. I have not been impressed with some of his politicing in the past, but might actully vote for him next time around if is does/can run again.

      He's been our best AG since, dare I say the name around here, Ashcroft.

  • this won't stop much (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jr87 ( 653146 )
    This is only gonna stop the dumb spammers who are easy to trace... soon they are gonna be up to their eyeballs in spammers who are a bit harder to trace.... I think also this could cause the vengefull spammer to start to really hit some of these guys....One more thing how do spammers know what boxes are in Missouri some sort of list? if it is I'm sure the spammers just love it
    • is simply that they'll send more spam to non-US addresses. A year ago, my spam statistics used to indicate ~95% of spam originated from the US, with the remainder from .jp, .kr and .ru.

      Now the spam I get originating from the US is 99.8% of the total.

    • SPAM is designed to sell you a product or service. In order to pay someone, you have to know, atleast approximately, who they are.

      Just follow the money.

      It won't stop out of state spammers, but anyone in Missouri (my home state) would be a damn fool to not follow the law.

      • Re:Follow the money (Score:2, Interesting)

        by EddWo ( 180780 )
        Not always. Sometimes it is just a way of creating lists of valid email addresses that they can sell on to other spammers.
        I expect a lot of these penis enlargement things do not even exist. It is just used to check which mails bounce and which are actually read. Using an embeded image with a special URL.
        They can make more money selling your email address to someone else than they can from selling you a product or service.
    • We're already up to our eyeballs in spammers that are hard to trace. ISTM the solution is to sue and/or prosecute companies that use spam as their primary means of advertising, AND *don't* adhere to reasonable rules of business conduct.

      Using a hijacked or spoofed IP to send advertising, using forged or deceptive headers, etc, are not within said "reasonable rules".

  • Jay Nixon, Missouri's attorney general, has filed the first lawsuits under the new no-spam law against two Florida spammers.
    Woodward and Bernstein?
    • Woodward and Bernstein?

      From the article:
      The first suit was filed against Phillip Nixon of Palm Beach, Fla.

      Nixon sues Nixon?

      One of them has got to be a crook!

      And only one of them will be able to go to China.

      (1337 script-kiddies who are victims of America's "educational" system: you download an explanation of these allusions from KaZaa)
    • Thank god it's not Hugh Jass

  • It's about time... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ScooterBill ( 599835 ) * on Friday October 10, 2003 @12:48AM (#7180301)
    The spam trade is possible because of one thing:

    Sending millions of emails is extremely inexpensive and like the old adage "ask a million girls for a date and no matter how ugly you are, you'll probably get a few takers"

    If it becomes expensive to spam, then the spam will stop and email advertising will become what it's good for, telling potential customers about products that they ARE interested in.

    I can't wait for the California law to take effect. It's way more restrictive. I pity the spammers.

    M

    • like the old adage "ask a million girls for a date and no matter how ugly you are, you'll probably get a few takers"

      This is an old adage? Where have I been all this time???? Not busy enough, I'd guess!

      Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to design a highly-parallizable distributed date-asking beowulf cluster algorithm to statistically guarantee me the bottom feeders I would otherwise have missed!

    • the old adage "ask a million girls for a date and no matter how ugly you are, you'll probably get a few takers"

      Wasn't that adage disproved by Slashdotters?

      Not even 1 girl in a million likes the smell of three-week old Dorito dusk on a man whose idea of a hot date is IM'ing each other over his home-built LAN in his mom's basement.

      And Mr. Darwin days, "That's good!"
    • I pity the spammers.

      I don't.
    • I often think that if for each mail someone sends they have to perform a computationally expensive computation to "digitally sign" the message in a way specific to the recipient's address, then it will no longer be economical for spammers to send mail because if it takes them 100 milliseconds per spam sent, 10 million e-mails takes more than 240 hours.

      After all, we all sign our messages when we write a letter, so why not insist the same for e-mails?

      Alternately, if each SMTP server admininstrator agreed to
      • There are a lot of variations floating around on the signing theme, including some fairly decent ones that don't use idiot concepts such as internet postage or complete lack of privacy (maybe a checksumming mechanism involving an automated verification of the sending server, whatever. At least that would let you track open relays a bit better).

        However, the 'delay' idea won't work--consider any large legitimate mailng ilst.
      • CPU cycles keep getting cheaper. I wouldn't bet on a solution like that helping for very long if at all.
  • One of the lawsuit recipients even managed to spam an address maintained by the attorney general's office.

    Maybe they should charge them with stupidity while they're at it.

  • Weak legislation (Score:2, Insightful)

    by lewko ( 195646 )
    One of the main arguments against spam is that unlike 'conventional' paper-based junk-mail, the cost of spam is borne by the recipient, not the sender. This consists of the time taken to process the mail (be that reading and/or deleting it) as well as the cost in data transfer to download it.

    Legislation mandating (as is the case here) that senders preface spam by adding "ADV: in the first four characters in the subject line or ADV: ADLT if it contains adult material" miss the point. The user has already pa
    • Obviously the next step would be to delete the messages on the server (can be done by the client using IMAP), and then again the next step would be to make email-servers stop receiving messages with the forementioned subject feature to receivers who have enabled the feature.
      Recognizing spam at low cost is the first step.
      • You (or someone) have already paid to download it. Blocking something at your firewall or mail server is convenient however doesn't avoid you actually paying download charges.
        • The mail server can stop receiving the message at the point it sees the subject of the message. More likely you are portscanned worth a few such spam-send-attempts a day. Noise really.
          • It can, but the send may be retried several times. Plus the sender might send a few kilobytes of data before it gets the RST or FIN packet(s). The only way to stop it is to wait, or return a 5xx error code - and if you close the connection early, the 5xx might be ignored.

      • Re:Weak legislation (Score:3, Informative)

        by Phroggy ( 441 ) *
        g IMAP), and then again the next step would be to make email-servers stop receiving messages with the forementioned subject feature to receivers who have enabled the feature.

        The SMTP protocol does not allow this; once a mail server has agreed to accept a message, it MUST accept the ENTIRE message. The Subject header, like all other headers, is part of the same block of text as the message body. The receiving server can only reject the connection based on 1) the sender's IP address, 2) the HELO string, 3
        • SMTP has the ability to generate an error after the receipt of the data.

          Just throw a "resource unavailable". After all, the nospam policy makes the resource unavailable.
        • The SMTP protocol does not allow this; once a mail server has agreed to accept a message, it MUST accept the ENTIRE message.

          In that case, how can an SMTP server refuse large attachments like many of them do?
          • Either the ESMTP SIZE extension, which rejects either at the sender (maximum size is reported), or after the MAIL FROM: SIZE=nnn, or after the message is received (discard it, send a 5xx after the '.')
    • The bandwidth cost is negligible. The real cost is time and effort wasted wading through spam trying to find your real mail. I know, I can see you're from Australia, and you guys pay through the arsehole for bandwidth, but here in the rest of the world, we just don't want our time wasted - that's the real cost burden being placed on the recipient.

      Every scheme I've seen to make the sending process "cost" something seems to correspondingly decrease the usefulness and convenience of email (though I do like

      • Re:Weak legislation (Score:2, Interesting)

        by lewko ( 195646 )
        The bandwidth cost is negligible

        For one or two emails, yes. Your answer is only referring to your personal experience with spam as a single email user. Now look at the bigger picture. You have never run an ISP though have you? Multipy the 'negligble cost' by tens of thousands of emails and it certainly DOES add up, no matter HOW little you are paying for bandwidth.

        Consider that spammers may send your domain even millions of random emails e.g. aaa@yourdomain, aab@yourdomain etc. just to see which ones ge

        • But the point still stands: on an aggregate basis, the bandwidth costs are still a heck of a lot smaller than the human capital costs, they are just incurred at a different point. The ISP doesn't see the thousands of users and the thousands of hours of wasted time directly, they just see thousands of megs of wasted bandwidth. So sure, to an ISP owner, it looks like the major cost is wasted bandwidth (and as you point out, in some cases it's the ISPs upstream bandwidth they have to pass along to their cust
          • Yeah because obviously ISPs don't spend any time or money setting up filters and blocks and reporting tools and information pages for the customers and reports to execs etc etc. Go ask AOL or Verizon or SBC or Adelphia or USWest etc etc how mnay thousands of hours they have spend to combat spam.
        • The bandwidth is still negligible in the aggregate, compared to web surfing. I've used more of my ISP's bandwidth today reading Slashdot than getting spam, including the spam that came into their servers and was trashed by SpamAssassin or procmail. (That doesn't include the spam that didn't make it into their servers because of blacklisting - that probably would have been bigger than my web surfing most days.) I get maybe 200-300 spams a day, most of them under 10KB each and many under 2KB each.

          The ba

      • The bandwidth cost is negligible. The real cost is time and effort wasted wading through spam trying to find your real mail.

        Wrong. The real cost to the user is having messages bounced from your primary e-mail/webmail account because your mailbox is filled spam, including the various 140KB worms.

        The real cost is also the fact that CyberSitter blocks access to your entire mailbox, just because it contains the word "<censored>". (Why wouldn't it? It's from the same company that blocks random sites s

    • Legislation mandating (as is the case here) that senders preface spam by adding "ADV: in the first four characters in the subject line or ADV: ADLT if it contains adult material" miss the point.

      This is a START. And it's a good start. They have limited resources. It's a good way to make it EASY for the state to prosecute violators. If ALL spam contained ADV: in the subject line, the situation would be better than it is now, even if there was twice as much of it. Once that's taken care of, THEN we can
    • Time is a lot more valuable than bandwidth.

      If a spam wastes a minute of someone's time and that person considers their time to be worth $20/hour (less than many I'm guessing,) then it's about 30c of time. An email would cost nowhere near that much in bandwidth, and SpamAssassin could bump the score on these emails +10 straight away, removing most of the cost.
  • Along the same lines I read where a Kansas City man used Kansas's couple year old spam law (SB 467) in court and won. I've been meaning to contact the gentlemen and seek his advice. I want to do the same thing myself soon.
  • "..One of the lawsuit recipients even managed to spam an address maintained by the attorney general's office."

    Nothing like telling the farmer you are gonna sleep with his daughter.
  • I worked with MO State Rep. Carl Bearden quite a bit to get the original legislation in place which was shot down until they came up with the current revision.

    I'm really glad to see that the AGO is attempting to shut them down. This is a HUGE success! I was very worried that they wouldn't have the enforcement power to even attempt to put a stop to this.

  • It's too bad California is being so specific. (Score:5, Informative)

    by caferace ( 442 ) on Friday October 10, 2003 @01:34AM (#7180498) Homepage
    The volume of spam I get is somewhere in the neighborhood of 200+ a day. Granted, it's (nearly) all properly sorted and filtered with a combo of SA and Moz' filters. But... In order to report it to the Calif. AG, it has to adhere to the following guidelines:

    "1. You are the recipient of the spam and you are a resident of California.

    2. The spam was delivered via servers located in California (sender's, recipient's or intermediary server will suffice).

    3. There is some indication that the spammer is operating in California, such as a California telephone number or address for orders. If you can identify the spammer and have information from other sources showing that the spammer is in California, that will also work.

    4. The spam fails to comply with the statutory restrictions. To comply, the unsolicited advertising emails' subject line must begin with "ADV:", the first text in the message must offer a toll-free number or functioning email address for removal of the recipient from further unsolicited emails, and that statement must be in a type size as large as most of the other text.

    1,2 and 4 are pretty easy. Proving 3 can be a real PITA, and means if I really want to work this hard I have to do a lot of legwork. Granted, the end result may be worth it, but...

    ref: http://caag.state.ca.us/spam/index.htm [state.ca.us]

    • 3. There is some indication that the spammer is operating in California, such as a California telephone number or address for orders. If you can identify the spammer and have information from other sources showing that the spammer is in California, that will also work.
      --SNIP--
      1,2 and 4 are pretty easy. Proving 3 can be a real PITA, and means if I really want to work this hard I have to do a lot of legwork. Granted, the end result may be worth it, but...

      3 can be obtained by a simple whois. Reverse track th
      • 3 can be obtained by a simple whois. Reverse track the relay servers, the website, do a whois on domain names of sending servers and you have this condition met.

        Ah, do I hear the wheels of progress already working on the next Mozilla extension [texturizer.net]? Imagine gleefully watching the California ones carefully plucked out of your Junk folder, optionally with PDF files of the necessary court papers ready to print and file.

  • that you don't advocate and support laws just as vile and misshappen as the DMCA.

    They could come back to zap you.

    A bad law is still bad law, even if it at some time accomplishes something you desire.

    Let's be careful and try to get it right.

    KFG
    • Amen.

      In the overzealous quest to get even with those spammers who, it would seem, dissed their collective mother, the slashdot crowd is demanding that a very dangerous precident be set.

      There's really no difference between this law and one that prevents a class of people from accessing any publicly accessable webpage.
    • "Right", in my view, would be "you can send any mail you want, so long as it's not fraudulent". Where fraudulent includes forged headers (but not stuff like anonymous remailers).

      That alone would get rid of 90% of the spam I see.

      What ticks me off isn't spam per se, but when I get 50 copies a day of the SAME 50k-HTML-bloated spam. If they'd just send one or two a month, that would be a lot more reasonable!!

      Whereas I don't mind the ones that only come once in a while, are plaintext, from a real server, and
  • So.. The State Attorney (Nixon), is sueing this guy in Florida also named Nixon. Should I be confused now? Is this for real? What are the chances if it is? :P

  • Spammers are liable for $5000 per email, so thats going to cost them...
    [pinky to lips] one meeeelllion dollarrs.
    for my hotmail inbox this morning. Now all we need is a means to actually track spammers....

  • At least *one* part of the job is easy. (Score:3, Funny)

    by dbc ( 135354 ) on Friday October 10, 2003 @02:44AM (#7180751)
    One of the lawsuit recipients even managed to spam an address maintained by the attorney general's office.

    This is surprising, why, exactly? Like spammers think: "Oh, this address is a government office, better delete it from my list."

    The AG has gotta love this... J. Random Prosecutor thinks: "Now, let's see, so many spammers, which ones should I prioritize most highly for investigation today? Just let me make a quick check of my in box....."
  • I had a conversation today about legislative requirements to mark spam as an advertisement. Invariably the subject arose concerning utilization of compromised computers making enforcement of any anti-spam law rather difficult.

    I have a thought about that... We are permitted to own vehicles which participate on various public transportation infrastructure facilities such as state roads, the interstate system, etc. We are required to ensure the road-worthiness of the vehicle we own. We are required (more or l
    • Oh, I think people should be held responsible for stuff that their computers do even if they are up to date on all patches.

      A computer can only do what its operator tells it to do. If a bad man on the internet takes control and uses it for a bad purpose, it's only because the operator has told it to allow him control.

      What, you fear you have lousy software that will get you in trouble? You better start demanding a guarantee that the software won't hand control over to strangers.

      And once companies are havin
    • Don't overlook the reason we must keep our cars up to date - safety. An unsafe car can kill. You honestly can't say the same thing about a personal computer.
      • An unsafe car can kill. You honestly can't say the same thing about a personal computer.

        Maybe not directly, and maybe not about a system hijacked soley for spam. But we saw numerous instances of the latest worms causing enough network congestion to cause problems at some power plants and railroads.

  • While I am not a lawyer, this strikes me as an attempt by Missouri to regulate interstate commerce. This was one of the few things that the federal government was initially designed to do. [wikipedia.org] Missouri is not supposed to regulate commerce between residents of Missouri and residents of Florida.

    I could live with this law being struck down only to see it replaced with a similar federal law. Spam is a global problem that deserves a global, not local, solution; for now, the best we can get is a national solution

  • HERE [j-walk.com] is something to make us all tremble for the future!
  • I hear a lot in here about people afraid that anti-spam laws will go overboard.

    How about laws that protect anti-spam activities? Laws to protect places like spamcop and spamhaus from lawsuit threats? Eliminate those bogus threats to sue for infringing on a spammers free speech.

    A person should have the right not to receive e-mails. A site operator should have the right to block spam and protect their systems or to netblock out whoever they choose (if customers don't like it, they can go to an ISP that do

  • I see so much drivel about SPAM that it is ridiculous. If anyone ever studied the U.S. Constitution they would know that the ONLY right to privacy guaranteed is from GOVERNMENTAL intrusion into private lives. Our founders, albeit out of personal interest, set up many guidelines to prevent government from interfering with commerce (one of the primary reasons for the American Revolution). Entrepreneurs will always use the most cost effective means to market, and that means introducing their product or serv
  • The approach most anti-spam laws take is that you receive spam you don't want, you contact the spammer saying you don't want it anymore, the spammer sends it again and you can sue. Given all the spam people get, that places a big burden on individuals in terms of time/money (money for legal costs) since a spammer may or may not comply and you have to keep track of who is complying and who isn't which would take a lot of your time.

    The Missouri law has an interesting twist. They force spammers to label the

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