At 10:50 PM -0800 3/17/03, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
On Monday, March 17, 2003, at 08:12 PM, John Rumpelein wrote:
I live in Washington State, where we have already passed the legislation you
propose. I can tell you, unfortunately, that I don't receive any less spam
than you do. We can theoretically pursue lawsuits against spammers in small
claims court to the tune of $500 per offense, but I have not heard of one
single spammer (not one) who has actually been forced to pay under this law.
it's a problem of jurisdiction. Washington is simply too small.
Actually one of the speakers at the MIT Spam Conference described
someone who actually did take half a dozen spammers to court on the
basis of one of the state laws (either Washington's or one like it).
The results sounded pretty similar to the big suits. If you could
get them to court, you could find them guilty. If you found them
guilty, they might have the money to pay. And when you were done you
found that the return on your time was not worth the effort.
The problem with spamming is not that there is no legal recourse.
There is. The courts have held that spamming is equivalent to
trespassing--it's an unauthorized use of your equipment. (Can anyone
site a case in which the spammer won?) The legal problem is that the
penalties are not great enough to make suits worthwhile.
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/ Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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