# Felon Spammer Conviction Upheld **URL:** \ **Category:** The BBQ Pit\ **Created:** [September 6, 2006, 3:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642 "2006-09-06T15:11:09Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2006, 3:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/1 "2006-09-06T15:11:09Z")
[QUOTE=Washington Post] Link to full article: [Anti-Spam Conviction Is Upheld](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/05/AR2006090501166.html) The Court of Appeals of Virginia upheld yesterday what is believed to be the first conviction in the nation under a state anti-spamming law that makes it a felony to send unsolicited mass e-mails. A North Carolina man was convicted in Loudoun County two years ago of illegally sending tens of thousands of e-mails to America Online customers. Prosecutors said Jeremy Jaynes flooded the servers at the Internet company’s headquarters in Loudoun with bulk e-mail advertisements for computer programs and stock pickers… Jaynes’s attorneys argued in their appeal that the Loudoun court had no jurisdiction over the case because the e-mails were sent from Jaynes’s home in North Carolina. The appeal also contended that the anti-spam law restrains the constitutional right of free speech protected under the First Amendment. But the three-judge panel disagreed, ruling in an opinion written by Judge James W. Haley Jr. that circuit courts have exclusive jurisdiction over felonies committed in their areas. **The anti-spam law, Haley said, “prohibits trespassing on private computer networks through intentional misrepresentation, an activity that merits no First Amendment protection.”** … [/QUOTE] (emphasis added) Thank Ghu for a judge who sees through these shitstains’ bogus claims that they have a “First Amendment right” to steal other people’s private property. ---
**Author:** ![wonky](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wonky/32/393_2.png) [@wonky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wonky)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2006, 3:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/2 "2006-09-06T15:42:19Z")
I’m very glad it was upheld. Like you, I think that spammers are thieves, and they are thieves who leave behind boobytraps once the thievery is done. I don’t know if the laws will help, though. I don’t know if they can. ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2006, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/3 "2006-09-06T16:06:05Z")
[QUOTE=jsgoddess] I don’t know if the laws will help, though. I don’t know if they can. [/QUOTE] The best legal approach IMO is 1)recognition that evasion of spam filters is a form of computer cracking, and 2)strict enforcement of the existing computer-crime laws. An analogy: The reason the average front door lock works isn’t that it’s invulnerable (it isn’t), but because it’s good enough to delay would-be burglars and because attempting to break in is illegal even if you haven’t done it yet before somebody notices you and calls the cops. Without laws against attempted breaking and entering, people would need bank-vault type front doors, able to resist crooks who have all day to work on them. The latter sentence describes the current spam-blocking situation, and this ruling is a saultory step toward changing it to the former. ---
**Author:** ![Cervaise](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cervaise/32/16693_2.png) [@Cervaise](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cervaise)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2006, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/4 "2006-09-06T16:27:51Z")
[QUOTE=Steve MB] The best legal approach IMO is 1)recognition that evasion of spam filters is a form of computer cracking, and 2)strict enforcement of the existing computer-crime laws. [/QUOTE] And the best practical approach is to kick down their doors and crush their skulls with cinder blocks. (Stock and viagra spam is starting to get through my company’s filters and has been appearing in endusers’ inboxes. Bad enough I have to strip all that stuff out from my personal mail; now I deal with it at work. Puts me in a murderous mood, it do.) ---
**Author:** ![Mighty\_Girl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7bcc69/32.png) [@Mighty\_Girl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mighty_Girl)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2006, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/5 "2006-09-06T23:44:30Z")
I get no less than 14,000 daily spam emails. Most get caught at server level, about a thousand get through, most of those get stopped with Firefox filter. Of those about 200 get through and land in my inbox. Every day I delete about 5 accounts from spammers in my message board. Cinder block sounds about right. ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [September 6, 2006, 11:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/6 "2006-09-06T23:52:33Z")
Public crucifixtion of spammers is beginning to look better and better every day… ---
**Author:** ![Ponder\_Stibbons](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ponder_stibbons/32/343_2.png) [@Ponder\_Stibbons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ponder_Stibbons)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2006, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/7 "2006-09-07T14:19:15Z")
It’s great the conviction was upheld. Now if only they could be a little more diligent about tracking down these con artists … ---
**Author:** ![Mighty\_Girl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7bcc69/32.png) [@Mighty\_Girl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mighty_Girl)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2006, 2:34pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/8 "2006-09-07T14:34:17Z")
Yeah, one down. 123,989,098 to go. I am optimistic. At this rate there won’t spammers left before the sun implodes. ---
**Author:** ![Mighty\_Girl](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/7bcc69/32.png) [@Mighty\_Girl](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mighty_Girl)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2006, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/9 "2006-09-07T14:42:45Z")
[QUOTE=silenus] Public crucifixtion of spammers is beginning to look better and better every day… [/QUOTE] WWPPD?\* \*What would Pontius Pilatus do? ---
**Author:** ![Ike\_Witt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ike_witt/32/283_2.png) [@Ike\_Witt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ike_Witt)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2006, 3:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/10 "2006-09-07T15:03:20Z")
[QUOTE=Cervaise] And the best practical approach is to kick down their doors and crush their skulls with cinder blocks. [/QUOTE] I kinda don’t get all the vitriol directed at spammers. Don’t get me wrong, I am no fan of spam in any way, shape or form, but I would much rather have a crack down on snail mail spam over email spam. The amount of unrequested crap that ends up in my physical mail box pisses me off a lot more than anything that gets through my email filters. ---
**Author:** ![ZipperJJ](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zipperjj/32/211_2.png) [@ZipperJJ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ZipperJJ)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2006, 3:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/11 "2006-09-07T15:24:52Z")
[QUOTE=adam yax] I kinda don’t get all the vitriol directed at spammers. Don’t get me wrong, I am no fan of spam in any way, shape or form, but I would much rather have a crack down on snail mail spam over email spam. The amount of unrequested crap that ends up in my physical mail box pisses me off a lot more than anything that gets through my email filters. [/QUOTE] There’s a lot more to it than you just having to delete a couple of emails from your inbox… Spam is taxing on mail servers. Although bandwidth and space are cheap, they still cost money. Multiply the cents it takes to use bandwidth and hard drive space by trillions, and you’ve got a lot of dollars. Fighting spam costs time and money. Fighting spam is a big business. There’s a lot of free services out there, but to get the best services (the ones your customers DEMAND) costs money. You either have to put time into fighting spam (which costs money) by working your filters manually, or money into fighting spam by buying good products which do it for you - either at the server level or at the client level. Then there’s the cost of losing important emails due to false positives. Legitimate companies that send out legitimate mailers that you signed up for get marked as spam and never get seen again. Legitimate emails that are sent by legitimate individuals can get marked as spam and refused by a server, or lost in a client’s box. One little misstep on your ISP’s spam filter can cause huge uproars in lost emails. There’s also virus spam and malware spam. Spam can be harmful to your machine. Sure, snail-mail spam is a pain in the ass. It costs money for the post office to deliver it and costs the environment in production. But it also costs the senders money to send in large quantities, and the senders are trace-able. Email spammers can send trillions of pieces of mail at no cost to themselves - only at a cost of the sender’s ISP and the reciever’s ISP. And they can do it anonymously. It’s a bad thing, spam. Yes indeedy. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2006, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/12 "2006-09-07T15:49:28Z")
Yeah it’s bad. But hardly death penalty bad. It’s \*\*FUCKING HUGE FINE \*\* bad to me. I think 9 years was too much. I’d prefer to see 'all the money he made from the SPAM X2", and if he can’t/won’t pay it, then prison. That’s why I’d like to see SPAM become a minor Code violation in some juristictions- there’s no big legal prcess- they just send you a bill for a fine of $50 for each SPAM sent, like a parking ticket. Send 100,000 spam emails, get a bill for $5,000,000. That’d stop SPAM in it’s tracks. ---
**Author:** ![Steve\_MB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/steve_mb/32/5339_2.png) [@Steve\_MB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Steve_MB)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2006, 4:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/13 "2006-09-07T16:08:25Z")
[QUOTE=DrDeth] Yeah it’s bad. But hardly death penalty bad. It’s \*\*FUCKING HUGE FINE \*\* bad to me. I think 9 years was too much. [/QUOTE] Add up the amount of time stolen from people by spammers, and it turns out that they take away as much of people’s lives as the average serial killer (just a smaller amount per capita from a larger population). ---
**Author:** ![Ike\_Witt](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ike_witt/32/283_2.png) [@Ike\_Witt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ike_Witt)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2006, 4:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/14 "2006-09-07T16:27:28Z")
[QUOTE=Steve MB] Add up the amount of time stolen from people by spammers, and it turns out that they take away as much of people’s lives as the average serial killer (just a smaller amount per capita from a larger population). [/QUOTE] So you are advocating the death penalty? ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2006, 4:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/15 "2006-09-07T16:41:16Z")
[QUOTE=adam yax] So you are advocating the death penalty? [/QUOTE] Let me submit a modest proposal: Convicted Spammer gets sentenced to death, but with an escape clause: his sentence is automatically commuted on appeal. The catch: said appeal must be filed with the judge via e-mail. The second catch: said judge’s e-mail address for this purpose is public knowledge. Let him sit there in prison, as the execution date inexorably approaches, having already filed his appeal, knowing that he’ll _automatically get to go free_ if the judge reads his e-mail…and that everyone who hates spamming has helped distribute the judge’s e-mail address as widely as possible to commercial spamming sites. Betcha he’ll come to hate spam worse than we do. Sailboat, _Poetic Justice Division_ ---
**Author:** ![Shayna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/shayna/32/17976_2.png) [@Shayna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shayna)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2006, 5:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/16 "2006-09-07T17:14:35Z")
The absolute worst, most evil form of spam is FAX spam, as it’s not only annoying crap I’m not interested in, but it wastes MY RESOURCES, using up MY paper and MY toner. So not only do I have to endure receiving their unsolicited advertisements for scams and ripoffs, I HAVE TO FUCKING PAY FOR IT, TO BOOT! At one time I made it my mission to track down every one of these fuckers – who owned the businesses, what their corporate addresses were, etc., send cease and desist demand letters to them and file complaints with the State Attorney Generals in every state I found these fuckers operating in. And some of the AGs actually responded and took action, but of course to no avail. In fact, the spam just got worse (and they intentionally cover a significant portion of the page in black text and/or graphics, soas to use up the most toner it possibly can). Finally, I had to invest in a new all-in-one copier/scanner/fax machine that hooked up to our network and allowed me to re-route all faxes to an email inbox. That way I can avoid printing anything I don’t actually want or need a hard copy of – especially their illegally sent crap advertisements. I _HATE_ these fuckers! _These_ are the guys I’d like to send to prison for a very long time. ---
**Author:** ![silenus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/silenus/32/166_2.png) [@silenus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/silenus)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2006, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/17 "2006-09-07T20:07:50Z")
Death penalty? Maybe. I’d be satisfied by nailing his ears and scrotum to a wall in a public place and letting anyone who wanted to take a punch or kick at him. The cost of spam, in both time and resources, to the rest of the population of the world makes such a punishment a fitting one. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2006, 8:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/18 "2006-09-07T20:30:04Z")
[QUOTE=adam yax] I kinda don’t get all the vitriol directed at spammers. Don’t get me wrong, I am no fan of spam in any way, shape or form, but I would much rather have a crack down on snail mail spam over email spam. The amount of unrequested crap that ends up in my physical mail box pisses me off a lot more than anything that gets through my email filters. [/QUOTE] Yeah, but all that junk mail actually serves a useful purpose. It’s the money from the bulk mail that makes normal postage so cheap. Get rid of junk mail, and it could wind up costing you a couple bucks just to post a regular letter. ---
**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2006, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/19 "2006-09-07T20:52:51Z")
[QUOTE=Miller] Yeah, but all that junk mail actually serves a useful purpose. It’s the money from the bulk mail that makes normal postage so cheap. Get rid of junk mail, and it could wind up costing you a couple bucks just to post a regular letter. [/QUOTE] If the spammers had to pay just one tenth of a cent per message they sent out (which is a lot less than the junk mailers pay to the USPS), there would be an awful lot less spam. However, it would also make life a lot more difficult for a a lot of valuable free email lists, so I’m not sure that it’s an acceptable solution. ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [September 7, 2006, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642/20 "2006-09-07T21:39:10Z")
[QUOTE=ZipperJJ] Although bandwidth and space are cheap, [/QUOTE] Excuse me? Bandwidth is far from cheap. The reason your home ADSL connection is so cheap is because it’s shared. Typical contention ratios are 20:1 to 50:1. And after that you’re sharing the outbound bandwidth of the ISP. If you need dedicated bandwidth the cost goes right up. We’re talking serious money. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/felon-spammer-conviction-upheld/371642.md?page=2)