Canadian Spammer Fined Over $1 Billion 379
innocent_white_lamb writes "A man has been fined ONE BEELYUN DOLLARS (yes, really) for sending 4,366,386 spam messages that were posted on Facebook. He was fined $100 for each message, and including punitive damages he now owes $1,068,928,721.46. A ruling by a US District Court judge in San Jose, California has now been upheld by the Quebec Superior Court (the defendant lives in Montreal)."
If He Files Bankruptcy ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Where's my money? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:That's too much (Score:3, Interesting)
Nobody expects him to pay. Even a fine of 1 million dollars (1/1000 of the amount) would be essentially impossible to pay - that's many people's lifetime earnings before expenses.
This is clearly a no-more-fucking-around sort of fine. Whatever they fined him at, he wouldn't be paying it, so might as well use the actual amount to send a message.
I've always favoured fair spam sentencing (Score:5, Interesting)
I will agree with spammers that an individual spam is not a major imposition. However, it does cost people something. E-mail isn't free, you have to maintain bandwidth to receive it (a double digit percentage of our university's usage is e-mail in various forms) and it does take time for people to delete it. Not a lot, but some. So, let's be fair, we'll say a 0.1 cent fine and 0.1 second of jail or probation time for each message. Oh what's that? You sent 1 trillion spam messages? Sorry, guess you are fucked then. Should have considered the scale of your operation.
I like it because it would really hammer home that the problem with spam is the scale, and that punishments would scale with that. So suppose you spam your company's mailing list a few times and rather than ask you to knock it off, your boss presses charges. Ok well you sent 10 messages to 1,000 people so 10,000 messages. You are on the hook for $10 in fines and about 16 minutes of probation. A mild slap on the wrist, basically, unlikely they'd even prosecute. However you are a major pharmaceutical spammer that has sent out 3 billion messages? That'll be $3 million please and we'll see you in about 9 and a half years.
I realize that the way the laws are structured now such a thing couldn't actually happen, I just like the idea. An individual unwanted e-mail message is not a big deal, that is true, it is the scale and thus the scale should determine the punishment.
Corruption (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:That's too much (Score:3, Interesting)
To be honest I don't really care whether they can pay or not if the damages are proportional to the harm caused. Even if you're dead broke you can cause great grief to other people, same with people that serve a dozen consecutive life sentences. It's worth making the point even if there's nothing to be gained from it. But though I find spammers to be the scum of the earth, I got to admit there are worse people. It doesn't help taking the damage figures in US courts seriously either, it's like taken out of an Austin Powers movie...
Re:I don't feel sorry, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't cut this guy any breaks (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I don't feel sorry, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually to make matters more confusing, he is a Quebecker, they have different civil laws than the rest of Canada... however the Quebec civil courts upheld the US ruling.
The spammers's stupidest argument (Score:4, Interesting)
Quote the spammer, “If there’s anything that does hit my e-mail box that I didn’t ask to receive, I’ll simply press the delete button."
Any spammer which uses this line of argument should be locked in a prison cell with a 1200 baud terminal logged in to an email account. He only gets fed if he responds to the "Your food is ready" email within 15 minutes.
The email address he is given for this purpose is posted on every spammer list on Earth.