Washington State Citizens Going After Spammers

An Anonymous Coward writes: "Article in the Spokane Spokesman-Review covers how lawyers and a writer in Washington State are going after spammers since the anti-spam law was declared constitutional in June by the state supreme court." It's a well-researched article -- I hope it spurs more people to file claims against spammers.

Reply To

[AnotherSteve]

If I fake a return address in Washington or Idaho and get spammed, can I get damages?

Which brings up a more serious question: can an ISP sue under this law for damages? It is their bandwidth that is being stolen. So if you site your server farm in the northwest, can you go after spammers?

YES!

[www.sorehands.com]

I believe Earthlink had sued ounder the California anti-spam law. I also recall that AOL sued some spammers.

The problem is that for an individual to sue you have to show damages. An anti-spam law provides a floor for those damages. Otherwise you have to be able to prove that you were harmed by a certain amount of money. Being annoyed is not not easy to reduce to a dollar value. In the case of an ISP, they can show the costs in cleaning up from the spam.

Re:YES!

[rgmoore]

AFAIK, under the Washington state law you don't have to show damages. You only have to show that the mail has a misleading subject line, incorrect return address, or forged path. To quote:

"Don't lie. That's it," said Assistant Attorney General H. Regina Cullen. "People can spam. But they have to be truthful."

It seems like a reasonable standard to me: you can send as much email as you want as long as you don't try to dodge responsibility for it. But, of course, no spammer wants to tell the truth because he's going to get smacked in return by all the people he's pissed off. It has the desirable effect of stopping obnoxious behavior without illegalizing potentially valuable mass emails.

Any chance of making it international?

[Vuarnet]

Since I live in Mexico, I'm pretty sure I don't really need all those emails about "clearing up my debts" or "how to lose 20 pounds in two weeks". "Herbal Viagra" indeed! (luckily I don't need _that_ either)

I'm pretty tired of receiving between 10 to 15 daily spam emails, and that's not counting the filters I'm using in Hotmail which send ALL email coming from excite.com and msn.com directly to the trashcan.

Heck, I'm really amazed the pr0n spam has actually decreased these past few months (maybe they heard I was receiving the herbal Viagra ads and therefore wasn't a prospective customer).

So if you guys can send a russian programmer to jail, can't you just trade him for a hundred spammers or so? (Put them all in the same cell, too, while you're at it). The rest of the world will really thank you!

A Step Forward

[Cratylus]

The nice thing about these SPAM laws is the fact that they don't necessarily make SPAM illegal, they just force the sender to be accountable.

Let's keep up the crusade until we see an end to forged headers and subjects like "Re: our last conversation".