RSSSpammer pokes holes in Virginia anti-spam law, gets set free
By Tim Conneally | Published September 12, 2008, 5:30 PM
In a unanimous decision, Virginia's Supreme Court has agreed with arguments made by lawyers of convicted spammer Jeremy Jaynes that Virginia's anti-spam law violates the Constitution's First Amendment free speech protections.
Jaynes was famously sentenced to 9 years in prison in what was believed to be the first case of felony spamming. He was found to have propagated 10 million unsolicited e-mails a day through an AOL server housed in Loudon County, Virginia.
Despite living in North Carolina at the time, Jaynes had to answer to Virginia state law, which had notoriously strict regulations against spamming.
In February, the state's Supreme Court found grounds for reconsidering Jaynes' assertion that Virginia's anti-spam law violated the first amendment, not necessarily reflecting how it affected him, but how it was a generally faulty law.
Indeed, the unanimous decision returned Friday found that the 2003 law does not effectively distinguish standard commercial spam from political or religious spam, and was therefore a prohibition of free speech, and a violation of the first amendment.
Virginia law had originally detailed the act of spamming as sending 10,000 e-mails with altered routing information or headers per day, or 100,000 per month. Spammers could be prosecuted if they made more than $1,000 in revenue or if $50,000 of transactions resulted from the messages.
In 2005, BetaNews guest writer Brian McWilliams argued that Jaynes' sentence did not fit the crime, leaving a reversal likely, and adding that the courts ordered the spammer to make no monetary reparations for his crime. Now that Jaynes will be set free after the high court's decision, he can return to his 5,8000-square-foot, million-dollar Raleigh mansion and spam fortune that was estimated at $24 million -- minus some attorneys' fees.
Virginia could appeal the decision, although experts say that is unlikely due to the poor wording of the legislation, which will need to be revised. AOL could also sue Jaynes, but he is not culpable under the federal CAN-SPAM act, which was enacted after the spamming occurred.
Yes, he should get 9 years in prison for trying to get you to buy his p**** pills.
I'm facepalming over these comments.
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|Once again a major criminal get's to keep all his stolen booty with no recompense to his victims and is set free to live in luxery and keep up his criminal interprize. Oh yes,I forgot, this is just another criminal being patted on the back by our wonderful judicial system to simply walk out hand in hand with another dishonest lawyer while victims go unrecompensed. What a shameful testament for this country.
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|Freedom of speech? Are you kidding me..? :|
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|Jail them all.
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|The mistake can be easily fixable. Someone might kill him. That already happened IIRC.
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|In the old days we didn't need fancy laws to run off tricksters and carpetbaggers. We'd just get a bucket of hot tar, a sack of feathers, and a fence rail. Didn't even need to use 'em. When the slime bag saw us coming they ran out of town and didn't come back.
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|I am glad that the Wise folks in Va decided that citizens have the right, indeed the duty to canvas for votes for the issues they care about, i.e. political speech. We also have the right to distribute religious emails without harassment from the governments and without any one counting them! There were certain groups that were using that 'can-spam' thing to censor any form of speech if the person was not in their political party. That is wrong.
I am very glad the First Amendment wins because it is a win-win for the nation. As for what is called 'junk mail' I get that kind of marketing mail in my US mail and I don't go wild when it happens. It is one of the ways legitimate companies also do business.
The effort should be on preventing phishing and theft, and cybercrime; but unsoliticted emails could be dealt with via filters.
signed gloriapoole, RN and artist, Denver CO 80203
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|Just like the "Do Not Call" lists the politicians of course leave in exceptions for themselves, non-profits, and their religious institutions which end up screwing over everyone.
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|I want a 5,8000-square-foot house. I wonder if that is a 5 foot wide by 8000 foot long or some new numbering system I'm not smart enough to understand yet.
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|Betanews discourages proofreading. Apparently it's a site policy ... :P
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|This is a ridiculous decision. Spam wastes time and costs money. The time it takes to delete spam is time that could be used more productively and enchance efficiency. Figure out time wasted deleting, for argument sake, 50 spam emails per day times 7 days, then times 30 days, then times 365 days, etc., etc. Additional costs are in anti spam software that has to be purchased, etc. Anyone who doesn't understand how important it is to have severe penalties to discourage spammers is not in touch with reality.
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|Marvin- "It was not this way 40 years ago..." I could go on for pages about false advertising from the inception of advertising...but I'll just mention the old "Cigarettes are good for you" advertising from 40 years ago to dispel your yearning for the good ol' days. People haven't changed, just the methods they use to take advantage of other people.
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|I think the law should be made simple. Abolish ALL advertisement anywhere (including this web site), or at least allow me to block them completely! I detest every single one of them because most of them are lies. It was not this way 40 years ago, but now if I ever receive one addressed to me I refuse to buy products from that brand.
marvin
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|Yeah, I can see why email spam was not that way 40 years ago. :)
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|I seriously do not understand the uproar over SPAM. Who gives a rats a$$? Do you know that there are children in this country who are living in cars and not eating properly and not receiving an education? And you freaks are worried about unsolicited email? Why doesn't the gov't get their panties in a twist over all the unsolicited mail in my mailbox? Oh, because the gov't makes MONEY from SPAM snail mail, that's why.
You see my email above? I use that when I know I'll receive SPAM by giving it out. I ignore everything in the inbox and just use it for registering stuff. Wow, how difficult was that? I have another one that I give out to personal friends and I literally get no SPAM in that one.
What does that tell you? It tells me that SPAM is the fault of the receiver, not the sender. Be discreet with your information and money-grubbing spammers can't get in touch with you.
The only people who have a legitimate complaint about SPAM are the companies who own the servers that are being used. AND most (like 98%) of people complaining about SPAM have no idea what that even means. They see an opportunity to complain about something, so they jump on it.
Going to PRISON for sending freakin' email? Give me a break!
This country is doomed.
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|Sending emails for fake goods/money laundering is illegal and rightly so.
Sending it multiple times is/should be harassment.
You can't just ditch one problem and focus solely on another. It would end in anarchy.
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|You might be the biggest moron in internet history.
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|What about internetworld7 Sven123456789?
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|Great ... does anybody know where I can download a script and get started?
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|Sure! Just post your email address here and we'll send it to you
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|Religious, commercial, political or whatever, if unsolicited is SPAM.
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|And the United States Judicial system is not broken...
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|not, it's beyond that...
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|It'll be an irony if he spams his attorneys and/or the Virginia Supreme Court.
Crime DOES pay.
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|what a stupidity...
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|No I believe the term you're looking for is "gross miscarriage of justice".
I'm all for free speech, but it has its limits (I don't mean on what you can say, I mean by violating other people's rights not to be annoyed by the amount of messages. Send me ONE spam e-mail so I can delete it and move on, and don't send another ever since if I wasn't interested then, I won't be interested now.)
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|I wanted to add that at times I have had more than 980 emails in the inbox at one time. and it does take time to delete them. What is easiest to accomplish is for a service like Yahoo or Gmail that allows you to tick one box at the top and delete the whole page. There are some emails that require you to look at each one if you want to delete it and that is bad for their business because customers [like me] get provoked quickly with that plan. But email if not sent by the hundreds of thousands or not offering illegal or immoral products is not harmful, any more than receiving grocery ads in the US mail is. It is the emails that have malicious intent to steal your identity, or your bank info, or your email or domain, or your business that are the bad kind of emails. Those should be prosecuted when they are caught, and citizens should help the feds catch them by reporting those type activities or evidence of, to the feds cybercrime and the local PD cybercrime. signed gloria poole, RN of Denver CO 80203
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|What is easiest is not to use webmail in the first place. You can delete multiple e-mails in most programs by clicking the first one, holding s*** and selecting the bottom one to select all. Or hold control (ctrl) and selecting specific ones.
The only e-mail program I can imagine where you can't do that would be a text based one like MUTT. Other than that I don't think I've run into a graphical program where I couldn't do that.
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