CA Appeals Court Upholds Spam Law 339
Joe Wagner writes: "Criminal penalties for spam, yeah baby! It has just been announced that California State's spam law has been ruled constitutional and valid by California Court of Appeal for the First District: '...we hold that section 17538.4 does not violate the dormant Commerce Clause [of the United States Constitution].' The actual ruling is here. Congratulations to Mark Ferguson and his lawyers (1, 2) for fighting it out for the rest of us..."
Whoo hoo! (Score:1, Interesting)
Brilliant, now... (Score:5, Interesting)
Is there actually a "spam lobby" anywhere that could prevent (read give money to) politicans from supporting or passing such bills in other states?
I love this definition of SPAM: (Score:5, Interesting)
Perhaps not plain english, but as close as legalese gets.
YES!!!
Does this apply to junk mail? (Score:2, Interesting)
In A Related Story (Score:2, Interesting)
Here is the story from Yahoo [yahoo.com]
Re:In A Related Story (Score:2, Interesting)
From the site where you can sign up (www.texasnocall.com) :
ARE THERE EXCEPTIONS TO THE RULES FOR TELEMARKETERS?
Yes. Telemarketers may contact customers:
* with whom they have an established business relationship;
* if the customer requests contact;
* to collect a debt;
* on behalf of a non-profit organization or charity, or
* if the telemarketer is a state licensee (for example - insurance or real estate agent, etc.) and:
* the call is not made by an automated device;
* the solicited transaction is not completed without a face-to-face presentation to complete a sales transaction and make payment;
* the consumer has not previously told the licensee that the consumer does not wished to be called.
Oh well. It was a nice thought.
- Dave
Spam prevention for the entire domain! (Score:3, Interesting)
What are the odds of getting someone big to do this, like Hotmail or AOL? Then we'll really see how against spam the big companies are.
I dont know how this would mod, maybe i need help (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyways we're going down to his house in bakersfield next week. Apparently his father has a T1 line going into a csu/dsu into a router on a pretty unsecured network into his house. All windows machines running IIS, can't remember the spam package he's using but here is the dilema I face, maybe my fellow
Up until last year I was a happily working dot com guy. Every company needed sysadmins so for a guy like me that understood tcp/ip networking and o/s installation it was great. Jobs were everywhere. Then I got laid off a week after buying my house. Been surviving, still got the house, but you just don't derive as much pleasure from life living day to day on ramen and cigarettes your bought scraping the change that fell out of people pockets from your couch.
His father wants our help. He know's I can help him convert everything over to BSD, which in itself would secure him a bit, get a firewall in place and a billing system. Currently he is making $2,500 a week net and has customers lined up out the door to use his spamming services.
My moral dilema is, do I help the guy to make a quick buck (which also makes the wife happy) or do I stick to my guns and say spam is wrong?
It's a really hard choice to make when you're faced with the reality of well.. reality. Bills don't pay themselves. I sometimes wonder if the goverment is lying about how bad it really is out here because I got 5 sysadmin friends in the bay area out of work now. 5 sysadmins that I personally know and hang out with. Their job hunts have been the same as mine for the last year, HR ppl just bringing you in for an interview so its "make busy" work.
I dunno, today might just be a weird day, its an odd coincidence that slash would be posting a story on this a week before i'm supposed to go help it.
Re:only a slight improvement (Score:4, Interesting)
Valid return address - allows you to track down someone to be held liable for the spam. This makes complaining to the upstream provider much easier - and while the spammer will probably just hop accounts for the next one, it'll at least be a thorn in their side.
Address removal - This won't really change anything -- they'll remove you from the one-time list they used to generate that particular spam, but add you to 3 other lists that will be sold or used to spam again.
ADV: in subject - This is the one that could change the user experience signifigantly, if mail server admins use it. If spam is required by law to contain ADV: in the subject, than email can be filtered server-side to cull it out. Obviously this requires a little bit of work on the server admin's part - but if done right, this could bring your spamcount to zero (assuming the spammers obey the law)
;P )
Now...most likely the spammers won't obey the law. They'll keep going as they are now, until enough of them get fined/jailed over it - then they'll have to figure a way to get around it. Most likely this will involve large "donations" to various congress members, in return for their vote against making there be any real penalty for violating the law.
So yes - you're right on the one hand that the ammount of spam that comes in may not change - but the few spammers who actually abide by this law will make themselves easy targets for good filters. (and most good filters already cull out ADV: subjects