Supreme Court Lets Virginia Anti-Spam Law Die 77
SpuriousLogic sends in a CNN report that begins "The Supreme Court has passed up a chance to examine how far states can go to restrict unsolicited e-mails in efforts to block spammers from bombarding computer users. The high court without comment Monday rejected Virginia's appeal to keep its Computer Crimes Act in place. It was one of the toughest laws of its kind in the nation, the only one to ban noncommercial — as well as commercial — spam e-mail to consumers in that state. The justices' refusal to intervene also means the conviction of prolific commercial spammer Jeremy Jaynes will not be reinstated." Jaynes remains behind bars because of a federal securities fraud conviction unrelated to the matter of spamming.
Re:Supreme Court doesn't rule on everything (Score:3, Insightful)
Sounds like you're nitpicking. They made a mistake - we all do that sometimes. Just inform the caller of the mistake and be done with it, without making it into a big issue. (i.e. Stop making a mountain out of a molehill.)
Re:I believe in Freedom from SPAM (Score:3, Insightful)
Fox News?
Re:e-mail is just too cheap to send (Score:4, Insightful)
Go look up http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt [craphound.com]. Fill it in for yourself, please, with particular attention to the existence of botnets (which steal email services from zombied machines worldwide), non-profit spam (which will get away with it free as they do under the CAN-SPAM act), and the difficulties of micropayments (handling many thousands of small transactions is extremely expensive when you start handling real money).
In other words, it will hurt legitimate email far, far, far more than spam, which will simply steal the service from others. Or do you somehow think that you personally will magically profit from this one?
Re:e-mail is just too cheap to send (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't tell... are you joking or not?
What about people on mailing lists? Is your Slashdot account set to e-mail you when someone replies to a comment you made? How many Slashdotters are there? 1.5 million now or something? You expect them to dish out like $15,000 (if everyone had it enabled), and that's only per-reply, per-comment... would end up being in the hundreds of thousands a day...
But I suppose now you'd want to create a registry or something, white and blacklists, that's ok, I'm sure all these service providers would just love to do that for every damn company, organization and website, around the world, they live for that shit.
Who gets to decide who's on which list? Obviously, this needs federal regulation now, now this costs them money, that's ok... they can just raise the cost... lets say 10 cents, that seems fair... but wait, they still want more money, but they can't raise the initial price... I know, they could add an e-mail tax onto internet accounts... ...
Re:Supreme Court doesn't rule on everything (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Supreme Court doesn't rule on everything (Score:4, Insightful)
Sensible.
That puts me in mind of the fact that even though Israel is the darling of so-called "conservatives" in the US, it is also every bit as "socialist" as any country in Western or Central Europe. You never hear the same kind of scorn and derision that you hear leveled against countries like Sweden, Denmark or (gasp) France.
It's a shame that hubris prevents the US from trying to learn from any other nation in the world.
Re:Just out of curiosity... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's exactly why the politicians don't take it seriously - the average Joe doesn't realize how vast (and expensive) a problem it is.
For awhile, my tiny little home server, only used by me and a few friends and family members, with just one domain name, was rejecting approximately one spam attempt every 45 seconds, on average. I don't know what the recent numbers are - after the McColo shutdown, there was a huge drop, and I haven't bothered to figure out the statistics recently.
But that's once every 45 seconds, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. On a tiny little home server. Now imagine how much money it costs Google to deal with spam on GMail....