Winds of Change.NET: Lawyers We Like... Suing the Spammers

March 12, 2004

Lawyers We Like... Suing the Spammers

by Joe Katzman at March 12, 2004 8:39 AM

Four of the largest email providers, Microsoft, America Online, EarthLink and Yahoo, have announced they are suing some of the biggest spammers under the United States' new (JK: and deeply flawed) Can Spam Act.

Since a small group of spammers are responsible for a large percentage of the spam you get, this could be encouraging. Let's see the follow-through... and let's also see whether the same companies mentioned above continue to stall more meaningful anti-spam legislation.

Printer-friendly Version

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.windsofchange.net/windsopcentre-cms/trackback.cgi/2462

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference
"Lawyers We Like... Suing the Spammers"

Comments

#1 from Engineer-Poet at 1:45 pm on Mar 12, 2004

The downside: this may be the death of the small ISP.

One of the problems of the CAN-SPAM act is that it removed all right of individual action against spammers; if the ISP does not have the resources to sue the spammers which are overwhelming its users, there is no other remedy. The solution (if you want to call it that) is for users to move to AOL, Earthlink, or one of the other major networks. The small ISPs, however well-run compared to the faceless majors, will be left to bleed their users as they suffocate under spam.

I'm sure that the big ISPs had this in mind when they were lobbying for the bill, but I'm a cynic.

#2 from Lee at 11:57 pm on Mar 12, 2004

The lawsuits don't include entities like Robert Allen or teamvisionbuilder.com (a HerbalLife front). So, we are probably stuck with "legitimate e-mail marketers" i.e. spammers, for a long while.

Post a comment

Here are some quick tips for adding simple Textile formatting to your comments, though you can also use proper HTML tags:

*This* puts text in bold.

_This_ puts text in italics.

bq. This "bq." at the beginning of a paragraph, flush with the left hand side and with a space after it, is the code to indent one paragraph of text as a block quote.

To add a live URL, "Text to display":http://windsofchange.net/ (no spaces between) will show up as Text to display. Always use this for links - otherwise you will screw up the columns on our main blog page.

Finally, note that a constant onslaught of Trackback spams from auto-generated blogspot blogs has forced Winds to ban the blogspot.com domain from use in comments or trackbacks. If you host on blogspot, consider moving; otherwise, the complaints need to be directed at Google not us.