Prolific Spammer's Conviction Upheld

(AP) -- A divided Virginia Supreme Court affirmed the nation's first felony conviction for illegal spamming on Friday, ruling that Virginia's anti-spamming law does not violate free-speech rights.

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4.6/5 after 19 votes

• superhuman - Feb 29, 2008
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  Great! I hate spam as it wastes my time everyday and time is the most precious of all the things that we have.
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• fleem - Mar 01, 2008
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  Since obviously multiple states were involved, I hope the prosecution picked the state with the greatest punishment. Also, it seems the false source email addresses that appear in a spam is certainly mail fraud across state boundaries, so I'm surprised this wasn't a federal case.
  
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• VideograhyLab - Mar 02, 2008
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  It's just the beginning. The US Supreme Court will have to weigh in ??????????
  
  Than offshore spammers will have to be addressed.
  We foresee a long litigation ahead.
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• novakyu - Mar 02, 2008
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  Unfortunately, this is a Pyrrhic victory. In the long term, this will not stop spams in our mailbox (spammers will just move their operation to whichever state/country has laxest laws; solution to spam must be anything but legal---perhaps technological, or perhaps procedural, but not legal), and we just saw our free speech rights erode right in front of our eyes.
  
  There's the concept of "canary in a coal mine". This is one more group that cannot exercise their free speech rights---and who says that the next cannot be the political minority, or, for example, those who say things that, in the opinion of the popular mob, the children shouldn't hear?
  
  I hate to agree (as I don't like spam as much as anybody) with the dissenting judges and the defense lawyer, but I do. This is a great blow to the American civil rights.
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• JDB - Mar 03, 2008
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  I disagree. E-mail uses the computer memory (private resources) of the receiver, not the sender! It would be as if someone came into your home, printed out an advertisment or political/religious pamphlet from your printer on your paper with your ink (all of which [computer memory, paper, ink]) are YOUR resources! People are free to promote their own personal agendas under the First Amendment, but they should not be allowed to commandeer another person's resources to do so, that is theft!
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• billstewart - Mar 03, 2008
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  As far as I can tell from the press reports, the majority of the judges were wrong - this spam is clearly interstate commerce, and therefore not subject to Virginia state jurisdiction any more than postal junk mail advertising similarly bogus products. The spammer may not have argued his case well, and Virginia law has some bad precedents (because other people have spammed AOL users in the past), and his arguments on free speech and vagueness were bogus enough that his lawyer should have known better than to try them - but the jurisdictional issues were solid. If the prosecution could show that the spammer was using cracked computers located in Virginia to send some of the spam to other locations in Virginia (i.e. AOL's servers), that would be a different case, but it appears that he sent the spam directly from North Carolina.
  
  AOL could still use the Federal "CAN SPAM" law to stop him - it's weak, and easy for spammers to work around, but it doesn't look like this spammer bothered to comply with it, since it was easier to just try to not get caught (loser.)
  
  Spam is annoying, and it does cost money if you're an email service provider, but the real cost to the recipients isn't the near-zero cost of having some of the ones and zeros in their computers represent junk mail - it's the wasted time of the recipients and the interference with real email.
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