Virginia Court Overturns Spammer Convictions 433
EvilStein writes "CNN reports that "A judge dismissed a felony spamming conviction that had been called one of the first of its kind, saying he found no "rational basis" for the verdict and wondering if jurors were confused by technical evidence." Legal groundwork being set? Will other convicted spammers now have grounds for an appeal?"
Why, yes Your Honor... (Score:5, Funny)
Confused? (Score:3, Funny)
How much ya wanna bet the judge is subscribing to the spammers' services and is being blackmailed...?
</joke>
Re:Confused? (Score:2)
Nah. He's being bought off with a share of this 150 million dollars which the late General Sanji Abumbo of Nigeria placed in a foreign bank...
Re:Confused? (Score:2)
Let's see. You run the grammar checker in Word. If your writing scores anything above the 3rd grade level, then it is by definition confusing. That means that pretty much all technical information is confusing.
Mr. Newton, Am I to understand that the apple accelerated at a constant rate but had a variable velocity as it fell from the tree? Well, I might just be a country bumkin. But I find your technical jargon confusing and hard to believe. Case dismissed.
Re:Confused? (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, only the case against the woman (DeGroot) was dismissed. Even then, she only had $7,500 in fines according to the article. She didn't even get any jail time from the jury that convicted her. Apparently, she was only a minor player in the operation.
Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:4, Insightful)
The third way to look at this is that Free Speech has won the day. To this way of thinking, another attempt to squash the little guy with a big mouth has failed.
I believe it was Voltaire who said, "I do not agree with what you have to say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it."
Of course he was also known to say, "A witty saying proves nothing."
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:5, Insightful)
Email spamming != Free Speech. Free Speech does not entail the right for you to use my private property to dump your unwanted advertising.
All email spammers should be put to sleep, as should this idiot judge.
My mistake (Score:3, Informative)
I stand by my statement on email spammers, though.
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:2, Interesting)
If you find any piece of junk mail offensive, for example, woodworking catalogs, you can inform your local postmaster to prevent their delivery to your mailbox. What you find offensive is up to you, not anyone else, which is why I used the woodwork
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, I am a lawyer. I'm licensed to practice in Massachusetts. But I'm not your lawyer, we don't have an attorney-client relationship, and this isn't legal advice. For those things, see a lawyer licensed to practice in your jurisdiction who is willing to enter into such a relationship with you.
You not only have the right to refuse any mail, but you have the right to prevent any mail from being sent to you in the first place. The Supreme Court said so.
Note that I said 'strong right,' not 'absolute right.'
The case you're probably thinking of is Rowan v. US Post Office Dept., 397 US 728 (1970). And indeed, the Court did find in Rowan that it didn't violate the junk mailer's first amendment right for the individual recipients to, via the Post Office, prevent further junk mail from specific senders from being sent.
The key is, that it took action by specific recipients against specific senders. This is important, because next we see Bolger v. Young's Drug Products, 463 US 60 (1983), in which the Court upheld the first amendment rights of junk mailers. There, the government had stepped in and banned junk mail on its own initative, because recipients might have been offended. In that case, the Court decided that it was up to the recipients to decide for themselves whether or not they were offended, and that the government could not act to protect people who might be offended since such recipients could easily avoid reading the junk mail and just throw it out. The burden of not reading things and throwing things out was too low to justify government intervention.
So sure -- if you notify a spammer after the fact, or in advance, by some reasonable means, that they should not send further spam to you, then I think that it might very well be sufficient for the government to make sure that they don't. (Though I'm wary of this, since I'd rather err on the side of more speech than less)
But the onus is on you, the individual recipient. If you don't tell people you don't want something, don't fault them for sending it. And just because you don't want something, don't stand in the way of the people who do. (Though I'd have to wonder about who the hell actually wants spam)
I should be able to prevent anyone trying to send me this stuff from connecting to my port 25.
And you can. Turn off your port 25. That'll work.
Otherwise, I suggest telling spammers to not spam you anymore, and to follow up on that with appropriate legal action if they continue.
But force goes too far.
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:4, Informative)
The point is that sending a physical object has a direct economic impact on the sender, and much less so on that of the sendee. They paid for the paper, the printing, and the stamp... And don't be fooled, it cots tons of money to mass mail, even for a non-profit orginazation, which gets a substantial cut on postage. The recipiant has to only look at it, decide wether or not it's worth reading, then shit-can it.
I get tons of junk mail, and I'm annoyed about it, but at least the pattern recognition portion of my brain can almost instantaneously decide that some peice of mail is crap. Aside from a minute of time and desposal (I live in a city, so I can pretty much load the dumpster if need-be), it costs me nothing.
Then there's the trouble about trying to notify spammers and whatnot... Okay, so you click on the "do not receive further spam" link... Perhaps they're obligated to stop sending mail (or not), but that dosen't stop them from making a buck off of you. That little click gave them a host of valuable information that they can turn around and use directly, or sell. They learned that someone reads mail sent to that address, and by logical deduction, they learned that the person that read it is stupid enough to read (more) spam. They learn what kind of spam people respond to (or at least the ones stupid enough to read it), they learn when they read their mail, etc. I'd guess that an active e-mail address is worth lots and lots more than a dead one, or one that never responds. Perhaps you do tell a spammer not to spam you, but in the course of doing so, you've got more spam from two other spammers. Like that's going to go somewhere.
Furthermore, there's the issue of out-of-country and zombie network e-mails... Exactly how would you propose tracking them down? The best you've got is the person that contracted the spammer--and I'd say this type would be the kind to really go after... Because afterall, spam is done because it's worth money. Kill the money, kill the spam.
If they force you to shut off port 25 they've effectively caused you to do your own denial of service. That's about as good a solution as stopping a cancer by blowing one's head off.
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:3, Interesting)
Then, were it the case that the US postal service forcibly collected postage on mail sent postage due, you would argue there is no legal basis for objection?
I run an ISP. A substantial portion of our money and time goes to maintaining mail servers due to the volume of spam we receive and filter. We have, at times, had our mail servers become com
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:3, Insightful)
The few courts to look at it do seem to have latched onto the idea, but honestly, I've read the cases, and they seem to be weak. I think they're wrongly decided, and that such laws are unconstitutional.
By this argument, a prohibition against applying grafitti to somebody's house is "unconstitutional" (if the recipient doesn't like it, he can just paint over it -- hey,
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:3, Informative)
That is something you DO have to worry about with email these days. Spammers are increasing the likelihood tha the average windos using novice will get infested by some email trojan.
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:3, Informative)
The junk fax cases have already settled this issue -- deliberate (on the sender side) and involuntary (on the recipient side) cost-shifting from sender to recipient makes it theft
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:2)
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:5, Insightful)
Theft of services is not "free speech".
There is no legally significant difference between someone sending you a million emails and someone sending you a million pieces of junk mail.
The difference (the senders of junk snailmail pay for the service they use; the senders of spam impose this cost on their targets) is a matter of common knowledge. This statement can thus only be interperpreted as willful trolling (and will presumably be moderated accordingly).
you can refuse to accept them, or can throw them away unseen, and with virtually no effort on your part
It is also a matter of common knowledge that spammers routinely sabotage attempts to reject their communications. If the law treated the matter rationally (i.e. if it regarded attempted evasion of spam filtering as a form of unauthorized computer access, and applied the established penalties for that crime), the problem could be readily brought under control.
I place spam in the same category as the KKK
Yes -- KKK members are known to engage in vandalism and trespass, and are generally punished when they get caught at it.
If someone out there wants spam
Solicited mailings are, by definition, not spam.
If someone out there wants to send messages to people, then were I to ban their message based on its content or it being widely disseminated
An irrelevant hypothetical, since the issue here is banning a particular method of message delivery, for the same reasons similar meatspace methods (spray painting on the recipient's house, heaving a note wrapped around a brick through the recipient's window, parking a sound truck in the recipient's driveway and firing it up at 3 AM) are prohibited.
Free speech means having to tolerate the existence of speech you don't like.
It does not, however, mean tolerating theft and trespass.
No one is making you listen to it, however.
See above. The law need only treat e-mail filtering as it treats other form of comptuter security, and the problem is solved.
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, but it also isn't inevitable with spam, so what's your point?
The difference (the senders of junk snailmail pay for the service they use; the senders of spam impose this cost on their targets) is a matter of common knowledge.
Firstly, receiving any communication incurs a cost on the recipient: junk mail has to be sorted through and thrown away. Telemarketing calls have to be hung up on. Door to door solicitors involve getting up, opening the door, telling the
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:3, Insightful)
Theft of services is not "free speech".
But it IS, in fact, inevitable with spam. Anyone with the slightest experience dealing with spam knows that. It's theoretically possible for a spammer to operate without stealing services, but it's not as a practical matter. In order to do that they would have to confine themselves to spamming on spam-friendly networks, which would mean spamming almost no one but each other. No spammer has ever bee
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't recall that I said that spammers can order people to have email accounts.
What I'm saying is that where people choose to have email accounts, they implicitly welcome all communication, unless they explicitly provide reasonable notice that they don't want it.
A junk mailer can't send junk mail to a person without a mailing address, and can't force them to have an address. But once you've opted to have one, it's okay for them to send it to you, all else being equal.
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:3, Insightful)
The moment a spammer uses any filter-evasion technique, no matter how trivial, he confesses to already being on notice to that effect and refusing to obey it. QED.
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:3, Insightful)
Nonsense. If any of these statements were true, he would either not use filter-evasion techniques at all, or would not be able to create a filter-evasion technique capable of being recognized as such (e.g. if spammers didn't know anything about Bayesian filtering, they would never have gotten the idea of appending blocks of gibberish text
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:3, Interesting)
I said that I think that the first amendment offers protection to spammers. I didn't say I wanted spam. I get enough already, and I don't like it. Indeed, I probably hate ads -- all ads -- more than most people here (I filte
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:3, Insightful)
No, that depends on precisely what's going on. But since you seem to allow for mail that doesn't try to get around filters but nevertheless does, it doesn't seem to be a significant issue right now.
Paper junk mail sent in a manner analogous to filter-evading spam (i.e. Joe Blow knows that a large number or recipients have instructed the post office to not deliver his mailings, so he changes his name to avoid the bloc
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:5, Informative)
Free Speech laws are intended to protect a person's right to think and speak without fear of government oppression. There are also laws to protect a person's right to privacy and personal possession. It is MY e-mail account. I pay for it. If I give someone my e-mail address, that, and ONLY that gives that person permission to send me e-mail. If I revoke that permission, that person should no longer be able to send me e-mail. Just because my mail account is open to anyone doesn't mean I have to tolerate unsolicited marketing.
Spam isn't an act of Free Speech. It is an act of marketing or solicitation. There are plenty of laws that restrict the "rights" of marketers and solicitors. Spam should be no different.
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:3, Insightful)
Abusing free speech is nothing new, and is not legal. The classical example is shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater. Trumpeting "Free Speech" in support of spamming is a lame argument. Speech, particularly advertising, is regulated in many ways. For example, televised alcohol ads are banned, companies doing telem
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe the air in your car tires should be up for grabs. I'll come and fill my air tank from your tires, because hey--someone might actually not mind me doing so, and preventing me from getting that air interferes with my freedom of action!
Let's look at this again:
"There is no legally significant difference between someone sending you a million emails and someone sending you a million pieces of junk mail."
Yes there is. Bulk junk mail is paid for by the sender. Bulk email is paid for by me.
"In both cases, you can refuse to accept them, or can throw them away unseen, and with virtually no effort on your part."
Try being a professional mail admin at a large company, and then come back and tell me that. In addition to the tens of thousands of dollars we spend on servers, software, and maintenance costs to stop spam, we probably put 10-20 man-hours per week into the problem.
Spam is theft, NOT free speech. Period.
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:3, Insightful)
They have no right to do anything with my time or property that I do not specifically grant them. Note that I do not care what the law says about this: fuck the law when it does not understand that my right to spend my time and resources any way that I choose -- and I choose not to spend it filtering spam -- automatically trumps the right of the spammer to make money by abusing me.
I do know how crucia
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:3, Insightful)
That's not quite how it works; rather the general rule is that you implicitly grant them permission. You need to affirmatively retract it to get to the point you want to be at.
Note that I do not care what the law says about this: fuck the law
Heh. And yet, were it not for people vigorously defending free speech, you might have gotten in trouble for saying 'fuck.' (See the Cohen v. California case, commonly
Spam is NOT protected free speech!!!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
SPAM IS NOT FREE SPEECH.
WEBSITES ARE FREE SPEECH AND MASS MAILINGS THROUGH USPS ARE FREE SPEECH.
SPAM IS NOT FREE SPEECH AND NEITHER IS TELEMARKETING!
The difference is based upon the level of invasion towards the listener that the speaker is inflicting when contacting the listener. The difference is also upon who's paying for the medium, and where the destination is.
For instance, consider websites, t
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:3, Insightful)
So you're saying that I cannot call you on your landline because you own your telephone? Or that I cannot write you a letter because you own the mail slot in your door? Don't be silly.
Being able to receive communications is implicit permission for people to send them to you. If you have an email account, it begs for email to be sent. Hell, you're listing it right along with your post!
You can -- to some degree -
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:3, Informative)
Are you stupid, a spammer or a sockpuppet???
Where does in the first amendment is it said "the right of people to force other to read what they say and by having them pay for me transmitting it shall be protected"???
Spam is not FREA SPEACH. Spam is THEFT. Theft of computer ressources, theft of bandwidth, theft of storage, THEFT OF PEOPLE'S TIME.
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:4, Informative)
So is slashdot. No matter...
But here's my conundrum. I'd like every spammer to die a slow painful death. But, at the end of the day, I get mail like "Hi, I'm a clueless fuckwit and I'm on one of your mailing lists (or read your webpage, whatever) and I'd like you to spend an hour helping me". I can just delete it. I can say "no" or I can choose to help them (rolls eyes, oh boy, again)
If I get a piece of spam I delete it.
Now what's the difference? Both are unsolicited. Both use my computing resources, both cost me per-byte bandwidth charges.
The only difference as I see it is we all agree (hopefully) spam is "bad" and helping people is good, but that doesn't mesh well with the law.
Ban, say, commercial unsolicted speech and then some guy who might say "Hey, I saw you're looking for a racaltitrant pleby on your webpage, I have an old one in my garage, I don't use it and you can have it for the price of postage, cheers" might fave the same penalty as your average c|@lis haflwit spammer.
What we want is a "email that pisses me off is bad" law and that's a real slippery slope.
I'm not sure the law is going to be any use here at all. Some people like/use spam. Bah.
Now, if there was some way I could say "if you want to send me unsolicited commercial email about killifish or pre-1940's Lemania chronographs that's ok. The rest of you can die" I'd have a good case, I think, for going after the penis pill hawkers, and I'd get what *I want*. Whois seems a likely place to put this.
(I'm serious about the killifish and watch parts btw, I need 4 Lemania 15TL [vrx.net] column wheels and SJO "Loe" [killi.net])
Look at me! I RTFA! (Score:5, Insightful)
Ruling Tuesday, Judge Thomas D. Horne also said jurors may have gotten "lost" when navigating Virginia's new anti-spam law in the case of Jessica DeGroot. But Horne upheld the conviction of her brother, Jeremy Jaynes, who prosecutors said led the operation from his Raleigh, North Carolina, area home.
Seems to me we are not given enough information in this article to assess what the issue was in the specific conviction that was overturned. And I'm personally not familiar with the case. Does anyone know what the situation with the sister was? Did she merely live in the same house as a spammer?
Based on the article, she could have merely been in charge of canceling his magazine subscriptions. The article just indicates that the judge claimed the jury was confused in her case.
And I found an error in the story submission too:
Virginia Court Overturns Spammer Conviction s - Why is this last word plural?
Even the story submitters don't RTFA!
The linked story indicates no more than one overturned conviction, that of the sister. A third guy seems to have been involved but there is no mention of his being convicted, hence no overturned conviction.
Of course I read the article (Score:3, Funny)
I'm just drunk as hell, proving my point that even alcoholics can get stuff submitted to Slashdot.
Only the minor conviction got overturned. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Two ways to look at this ruling (Score:2)
So there are still only "two ways to look at this ruling," at least by your stated reckoning.
Birsmirching the memory of Voltaire is inexcusable.
Re:The "car" example (Score:2, Interesting)
If someone aggressively aged your car in the way spammers aggr
let em click (Score:3, Funny)
Commentary on trial at www.spamconference.org (Score:5, Informative)
aspects of this case available at
www.spamconference.org [spamconference.org]
You've Got Jail. Some First Hand Observations from the Jeremy Jaynes Spam Trial
Jon Praed, Founding Partner, Internet Law Group
In a nutshell, they convicted Jaynes' accomplice
based on the money trail and it wasn't all that
convincing. The evidence ruled inadmissable was
convincing, but not the evidence used to convict.
RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
The person whose conviction was overturned was the 'accomplice', Jessica DeGroot. The judge upheld the conviction of her brother, Jeremy Jaynes, who is said to have led the operation. He will indeed be remaining a guest of the state for the next few years.
Re:RTFA (Score:2)
Yeah, the article text was stupidly alarmist. But, I guess we shouldn't expect any better of Slashdot, though I'd sure like to.
Re:RTFA (Score:2)
Great news indeed (Score:3, Funny)
Why can judges... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why can judges... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why can judges... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why can judges... (Score:3, Informative)
An appellate judge has lots of options. They can look at the evidence themselves and decide that a guilty verdict was unfair (as in this case,) or they can look at the evidence and decide that the lower court failed to take it all into account and demand the case be retried. They can also look at the procedures as we
Re:Why can judges... (Score:3, Interesting)
>of "not guilty". That's the "double indemnity clause".
Err, you mean "double jeapordy." "Double indemnity" refers to double payment on some insurance policies for violent death . .
>l say that every time I've been in a courtroom
>the judges have been universally, absolutely
>professional. I have never failed to be impressed
>by a judge's common sense approach.
I've seen them cross the professionalism line--but with one exception, it was in
Re:Why can judges... (Score:3, Informative)
According to a friend of mine who was studying law, judges can indeed overrule a "not guilty" ruling -- it would be part of the same trial, not an additional trial and hence not additional jeopardy.
It's just that judges rarely (if ever) actually overrule a not guilty verdict.
Re:Why can judges... (Score:2)
Except for a single biased/stupid person has the ability to single-handedly prevent someone from being found guilty. True, the judge will declare a hung jury and the prosecution can retry the the entire trial but there is a lot of power in each jury member's hands.
For minor crimes, the prosecution may ev
Re:Why can judges... (Score:3, Informative)
Appellate judges normally only rule on errors of law made by the lower courts. For example, if the trial judge totally botch
Just wait (Score:2, Funny)
Jaynes' conviction upheld; wife's overturned (Score:2, Redundant)
overturned.
Jaynes, the perpetrator, had his appeal denied.
He's the major actor, and the only one that was
sentence to hard time in the first place.
Jurors didn't get it? (Score:2, Informative)
Let me help our future Leesburg juror's with an analogy of my own: spammers are the equivalent to military electronic warfare jammers. They try to stop our productivity with enmasse information directly beamed into our communications infrastructure.
Forgive me fellow slashdotters but in former soviet russia the russian military had a rule that any attack against its communications infrastruc
Perhaps (Score:3, Funny)
Oh Gawd (Score:5, Informative)
TFA is not detailed enough (Score:3, Informative)
If you RTFA (yeah right), you know that the main spammer, Jeremy Jaynes, remains convicted.
It is his sister, Jessica DeGroot, who had her conviction overturned. Unfortunately, TFA is rather short on details.
Here is a better article: http://www.leesburg2day.com/current.cfm?catid=19&It goes on explain why DeGroot's conviction was overturned. The only piece of evidence that the prosecutor presented against her is a credit card statement showing purchases of those domain names used by the spammers. However her lawyers contend that it doesn't prove that she actually made the purchases; her brother or someone else could've used her card to purchase those domain names.
How can you prove a negative? (Score:2)
What kind of evidence would you like, Mr. Attorney? Would you like to look through my Sent box to see if you see any requests for C!al!s or V!4gr4? What, you don't see any, but that doesn't prove anything, for I could have deleted the evidence?
I also happen to be not walking down the street soliciting strangers to punch me in the face. So if someo
Re:How can you prove a negative? (Score:3, Insightful)
but 9 years for spamming is a bit rough(and frigging expensive on the system). who would you like to spend more time in jail.. the guy who blackmailed money from you(or busted your kneecaps and took some dough for future protection) or the guy who sent you some mail you didn't ask for(electronically too, so you didn't carry it from the mailbox).
if it was just a year or two would make the same effect.. what matters in cutting the spam is not the amou
Nothing new here (Score:3, Funny)
The average judge, while more intelligent, enjoys setting precedents.
Put the two together and you've got the 9th circuit out in California
(Yes I just received my jury summons... I don't think I'll make it tho...)
Burden of proof... (Score:2)
So in order to get a conviction, the prosecutors have to prove that the recipients of the emails DIDN'T do something? (Because they're looking for evidence they were unsolicited, and not for evidence that they weren't, so the spammer doesn't have to produce crap)
I think the law needs to be reworded. The only way a conviction will ever stand up if this this is the case is if someone has a verifiable record of attempts to get the emails to stop. And even then it might be hard to prove t
ahh Virginia... (Score:3, Interesting)
Where drunk driving nets you a slap on the wrist (7 day license suspension, misdemeanor -- Virginia Driver's Manual [state.va.us] [pg. 30]) and spamming sends you to jail.
I'm glad to see we have our priorities straight, and the dangerous people are being kept away from the rest of us.
Re:ahh Virginia... (Score:2)
Quick question (Score:3, Funny)
If you ask me, our personal privacy initiatives are more than a bit skewed, and with the estimated 600 man hours it takes a victim of identity theft to recover from said crime, someone needs to be held accountable. Then again, if our privacy laws made sense it'd be illegal to sell a citizen's personal information without their consent. The beneficial side-effect would be the removal of everyone's email addresses from the hands of spammers. After all, where do you think they get their information from? That's right, data warehouses (just like ChoicePoint).
What kind of grounds is that? (Score:3, Insightful)
In case it isn't obvious, I would be disqualified from any such jury. Heck, I'd be booted for trying to bribe the *OTHER* candidates to disqualify themselves so that I could get in.
By the way, laws are *NOT* going to solve the problem of spam. It's an economic problem, and it requires an economic solution. As soon as the spammers are forced to pay the actual costs, then the spam will be gone. Can't be done within the pseudo-economic non-model of SMTP, where they pretend email is free and the spammers respond by dividing by zero.
The judge better not buy this (Score:2)
It's trivial to prove the mail solicited, show the confirmations.
You have to talk to everyone that received the mail (or at least a representative sample) to show that they're not unsolicited.
So, why not prove it's solicted by showing the confirmation? Oh yeah, it really wasn't solicited was it, Rule #1.
the whole spam thing (Score:2, Interesting)
this has gotten *way* out of control. a lot of us are the same people who rail on the courts and police for locking up nonviolent drug offenders so that there will be room for the fuckers who really need to be in jail (baby rapers, murderers, kidnappers, the very at-large terrorist element).
so why, oh why, are you upset that someone is NOT going to jail for commiting an utterly nonviolent offense? because you get some penis enlargement and get rich quick email? christ, us
Re:the whole spam thing (Score:4, Insightful)
Ah yes, the old "she must have asked for it because she wore sexy clothes"-type argument. That's really getting tired.
I have my e-mail address in order to be reachable by the public and I have had the same one since July 1996. I refuse to change it or hide it because doing so would make me unreachable by the people I want to be reachable for. If I do that, I might as well give up on e-mail entirely.
Remember? There was a time when e-mail was used to communicate with the world, not just with intimate friends and family. It was exciting, fun. Spammers have killed that for the most part, and turned the Internet from an open community into a hostile spam sewer.
Non-violent, you say? Not all violence is physical.
Maybe you would see it if you'd get a thousand a day like I do. (Yes, I use a good filter, dozens still get through.) Or if you'd be an ISP and have to deal with your mailservers dying under the load of millions of spams a day and having to shell out money to buy dedicated servers to deal with the crap (like my ISP), impacting all their tens of thousands of customers. Still think that's as "non-violent" as using some drugs?
How about all the viruses spammers keep spreading so they have zombie networks to sell to bounce spam off of? This is where most spam comes from nowadays. How is this not the most criminal form of cracking, tresspass and theft of service?
Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail. If they signed up for it, it's not spam, by definition.
So which is it? Did they sign up for it, or are you spamming? Of course, since you're trying to confuse the issue by conflating free speech with cramming "speech" down people's throats while making them and others pay for the privilege of being the crammee, my guess is the latter.
So because it happens "all the time" (?), that makes it right, doesn't it? Some ISP's also keep signing up those hardcore spammers and exempting them from their AUPs with pink contracts. This is a huge part of the problem.
Spoken like a true spammer.
They had the dirt on Jessica (Score:4, Informative)
The judge didn't simply disagree. (Score:5, Informative)
I believe this judge was merely speculating why the jury reached the wrong verdict. I dont think there actually needs to be any finding of a specific 'cause' for the juries incorrect verdict. The statement to "confusion" is merely obiter. The court likely concluded the jury was not doing its job, which is to be FAIR and UNBIASED in its deliberation.
(as usual the media completely fails to report enough information to make sense out of what actually took place in the courtroom.)
This usually means that was no evidence before the court capable of supporting the juries conclusion, and therefore the jury either misunderstood or was using external evidence to reach its verdict, or was being vindictive and punishing the accused merely because of the victims suffering, or its outrage at the crime, rather than the evidence of guilt.
If you were tried with murder, and the murder victim was clearly still alive (and especially if the prosecutor admits the victim is alive, and the defense called the victim to the stand to attest to that), then the jury *must* acquit. The evidence can not possibly support a finding of guilt. Even if the accused was covered in the "victims" blood, and the "murder weapon" was found, and motive and opportunity was proved. If the victim is alive, then clearly no murder could possibly have been commited (unless they conclude that someone ELSE was murdered). In this case the jury must have misunderstood the evidence. That is kind of a crazy example, but it is a situation where an appeals court would reverse the jury's verdict.
Put basically... mere disagreements do not overturn decisions. More is required.
you always have grounds for an appeal if (Score:4, Informative)
Anyone who is convicted on the basis of evidence which can not possibly cause a reasonable and unbiased person to reach a guilty verdict has always had a grounds for an appeal. This is nothing new. Nor is it restricted to accused spammers.
The jury has a responsibility, not only the accused, but also to the 'people' to be fair and unbiased in its findings.
Among other things, this means its findings must be objectively plausible. The jury may not create fictions out of whole cloth.
If the prosecution (as the CNN article seems to imply) could not find a single person to come forward and claim they received unsolicited email, and if the accused testified and claimed they never sent unsolicited email, then the jury could not arbitrarily decide to conclude the opposite of the only evidence before the court.
If that was a necessary element of the offence, then guilt can not be proved.
If they said 'guilty' then either they made a mistake or they were not being fair and unbiased.
Gotta love equity of justice in the US (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not standing up for the spammers here, but FFS, why does someone who sends nuisance email get more time than the drunk driver who last year killed one of my best friends from High School? (30m + 5y probation after plea bargaining down to an assault charge.. bullshit)...
Re:Gotta love equity of justice in the US (Score:3, Insightful)
He got convicted for 20 years in jail for putting false and misleading information on a credit card application. Essentially he ruined his life over a simple prank.
At the s
Re:Slashdot: News for Lawyers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Like it or not, what is happening in the courts affects the technology world more and more all the time. I think that it's important to have the broader picture.
Re:Slashdot: News for Lawyers. (Score:3, Interesting)
What's next? Articles about surviving the post-dollar crash depression? "Cob/Mud bu
Re:Slashdot: News for Lawyers. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Slashdot: News for Lawyers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps it's a sign of the times. Maybe it's not that slashdot has moved from tech into law, but that law has moved increasingly into tech, something I think the majority of /. users would prefer were not the case.
Re:Slashdot: News for Lawyers. (Score:3, Informative)
Linux: Debian to be Marketed to Japan and China Linux (nerd)
Star Wars Sith Trailer and the O.C. Star Wars (nerd)
IT: Virginia Court Overturns Spammer Convictions Law regarding spam? important to IT workers. (vaguely nerd)
Google Calendar Coming Soon? Google (nerd)
IT: New Vulnerabilities Discovered in Firefox 1.0 Security + Firefox = (definately nerd)
Sony Ericsson Announces First Walkman Phone Tech goodies (nerd)
Science: Double-Slit Experiment in Time, Not Space P
Re:300 + spam per day (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:300 + spam per day (Score:2)
Personally, I have always thought the 9 years was far too stiff. There are wife beaters, rapists, thugs and murderers that get far lighter sentences, and who deserve far more. Spammers have the ability to make millions of people a tiny bit miserable with their crime. Rapists have the ability to totally destroy a handful of people with their crime. Which is worse? Which is more needful of punishment? In these days
Re:300 + spam per day (Score:5, Insightful)
Nope -- spammers have the ability to completely destroy e-mail as a usable medium of communication with their crime if not deterred. Nine years is, if anything, too lenient.
Re:300 + spam per day (Score:2)
You are suggesting that one person bear the responsability and pay the price for the possible future actions of tens of thousands of others, which is a form of "justice" that is quite counter to American ideals and principles, in my opinion.
wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
No, not one spammer causes the problem, but noone proposed to stop at one. We'll punish as many of them as we can catch. One by one.
Sure, the first one won't make that much of a difference. Probably not the second one either. But by the time we got the top 100 of them, we've already solved 90% of th
Re:300 + spam per day (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:300 + spam per day (Score:2)
Maybe so. The point of a penalty is that it have a deterrent effect. I think that would be a big deterrent. If the penalty for stealing $1 was only $2, then many people would take the risk of getting caught. The lower the chance of getting caught, the larger the penalty needs to be. Think of it as sort of a lottery, in reverse.
The way I look at this is that the person sending the Spam knows the penalty if caught. They dec
Re:No, no new appeals (Score:5, Informative)
But it DOES matter to the rest of us. (Those who care about anti-spam laws everywhere)
It's called "case law". One judge somewhere makes a ruling and all judges following will treat the ruling as an appendage to the law in question. Judges, in this fashion, do write law!
It doesn't even need to be in the same state to be sited as case law. If it is a case from a different state, they will often take differences into account between the laws. I have heard rumors that laws are sometimes affected internationally by presidents set in other countries.
It may relate to a specific case, but it matters to every such case after. Especially when a new, untried type of law goes to court for the first few times (such as anti-spam).
Re:No, no new appeals (Score:2, Interesting)
for instance, in Canada we can use our own case law, and that of the UK as equal. US case law can also be use up here.. but not as a precedent..
at least this is what I got from my law course in high school..
Re:No, no new appeals (Score:3, Informative)
However, the legal doctrine of stare decisis--"let the ruling stand"--doesn't apply in such cases. Stare decisis is the idea that prescedents from higher court
Re:No, no new appeals (Score:3, Informative)
Yes, courts can take cases in other countries into account, and sometimes do. Usually, from what I understand, in cases where there are no local precedents, and only as advisories. They're not bound by them, of course, but can base their rulings on them if appropriate.
Re:No, no new appeals (Score:2, Informative)
I'm sorry if you know more than I do, but the article (which I did read) wasn't that specific. It just said that one of the two convictions were overturned. It sounds like the judge thought he knew the "technical evidence" better than the jurors.
And it IS a precedent setting case. It is unlikely that any big precedents were set, just tiny ones. I couldn't tell you which ones unless I actually had some better information on the case (things like: which technical information is/isn't permissible in this t
Re:No, no new appeals (Score:3, Funny)
Re:No, no new appeals (Score:3, Insightful)
The fact that a guy got 7 years for sending 10,000 emails seems a bit absurd to me. Especially when (according to his lawyer) there wasn't a showing they were even unsolicited. Then of course there are jurisdictional issues...
Re:No, no new appeals (Score:2, Funny)
Yeah, that's only six hours per spam.
Re:No, no new appeals (Score:4, Informative)
Perhaps because it isn't true.
1) The "10,000" is just part of the definition of spamming in this law -- 10,000 per day. Accordng to the prosecutor, Jaynes was rated the eighth spammer in the world. For example, he sent spam to 80 million AOL.com addreses, repeatedly
2)It was 9, not 7 years
Neither the submitter, editor, and hardly any of the commenters seem to have actually RTFA...
Re:No, no new appeals (Score:3, Informative)
IIRC, precedent can only be used as a basis for defense if a defendant's legal team can convince the judge that the precedent applies, although the judge can use precedent to justify a ruling if s/he so chooses without the input of the lawyers.
Re:In Defense of Spam (Score:5, Insightful)
Should I be allowed to stand on the street corner and hand out copies of Common Sense that I bought?
Absolutely. No question about it.
However, if you stole the paper that your pamphlet is printed on, you may still have a first amendment right to your message, but you're delivering it with stolen property. The problem with spammers is not that they have a message, and not that they're beating you over the head with it. The problem is that they are using your money to give it.
You can be forgiven for not realizing this, because in an effort to keep you as a customer, your ISP is eating the costs of each spam they receive instead of passing it on to you. However, each spam they carry is costing them a lot of money in the form of bandwidth, legal costs (spammers often sue ISPs for the exact reasons you cite), hardware upgrades, and charges to subscribe to filtering services, if they choose to do so. You don't see the grand total, but you are paying your share of those bills.
Re:In Defense of Spam (Score:4, Insightful)
I am a firm believe that we should fix systems that are broken rather than trying to apply round-about patches.
Agreed. That's why I think the suggestion of another poster (that spamming be covered by existing computer crime laws) is sheer genious. IMHO, that's exactly what spamming is - theft of service - and it should be treated as such.
That said, the spammers are not stealing any bandwidth, they are using what they're ISP's allow them.
While some (maybe even most) spammers are sanctioned by their ISPs, many are not. Also, many spammers are now relaying their messages through hijacked computers whose owners are unaware of, let alone approving, that use of their computer.
They are also taking up a negligable amount of my bandwidth,
That's true for you and me. However, what about the people on dialup who are forced to download 300 spam messages with embedded JPEGs to get to the one e-mail from family they're waiting for?
A real solution would involve blocking the spam as early as possible (my ISP could reject it based on some magic header strings)
Your ISP is still downloading the message (and using the bandwidth) to read the magic header string. We've also already established that spam-friendly ISPs aren't going to cooperate on their end.
drastically reducing the bandwidth
Interesting. How? Compression? How do you intend to get the spammers and their ISP henchmen to cooperate?
coming up with email standards (there are many proposals, i just can't find a link right now) and denying any email from a non-standards-compliant ISP
No one is denying that a technical solution is great; however, many people believe the existing proposals are inadequate for one reason or other. There's even a "joke" template floating around that can be applied to most every solution proposed for spam thus far.
These industry-centric solutions can practically eliminate spam, and are far superior to government involvement.
Industry solutions work best when all parties are in agreement. Spamming, by definition, will never reach that consensus because you won't get the cooperation of the people you need most - the spammers.
I have to pay a trash fee. Shouldn't I be able to fine companies that send out junk mail?
I don't understand your reasoning, but under the assumption you should, how do you plan to do so without the government's help?
What we need is industry solutions with government-backed teeth. Working on the premise that spamming is equivilent to fax spamming - theft of resources - I think government involvment at some level is justified. I do see your point about keeping the government out of it - they do meddle in quite a bit as it is - but I think if we're careful, they could be useful to solve the spamming epidemic.
If you have a technical or industrial solution nobody's thought of, by all means, spread the word. You'll be my hero. Seriously.
The basic idea here is this. (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes. Definitely.
However you should not be allowed to stand in my living room and hand out copies of Common Sense that you bought.
Yes, it is very much true that if I don't want the copies of Common Sense I am free to ignore you. But I still don't really want you standing in my living room.
Re:The basic idea here is this. (Score:3, Insightful)
No it isn't. My television is hooked up to receive nothing but static.
I can do that if I want. If I don't want to watch what the TV stations broadcast-- and I don't-- I don't have to. I can simply play my Gamecube in peace.
However if I don't want to deal with what spammers broadcast-- well, I kind of can't do that. The only way for me to avoid spam is to refrain from reading my email, either par