Facebook wins faceoff with Montreal spammer, article.
"Last Friday, a California court ordered Adam Guerbuez and his company Atlantis Blue Capital to pay the popular social networking site $873 million dollars in damages for spamming registered users on the site."
$873 million??! Either that's a misprint, or the world is even more insane that I realized.
Wonko sez:
Spam is a curious thing, but it must benefit someone otherwise it would have died out years ago...
I'm very anti spam, and here's why. If one hundred people a day rang your doorbell trying to sell you stuff - be legitimate or shall we say rather more shady in nature - you'd be pretty fed up, pretty soon. And don't forget that sometimes that person trying to sell you stuff was just acting as a distraction while another person either sneaked into your home and trashed the place, or stole your credit cards and ID and used them to buy things in your name. Just because it's 'on-line' and you have a delete button it doesn't make it any less wrong, or annoying.
Spam uses up a tremendous amount of time and resources globally. Just imagine what we could have achieved if all that energy had been put to a beneficial use.
Spam can be annoying, but penalizing it is a dangerous threat to free speech. I mean, there is a "delete" button, right?
ReplyDeleteWhy should facebook be awarded money for having its users spammed? Sounds to me like the users, if anyone, should be getting that cash...
ReplyDeleteOooh, imagine if we could get a cent for every piece of spam ever received!
ReplyDeleteKent, I don't know... cumulatively, spam is wasting *fantastic* amounts of time and energy, not to mention that filters trying to stop it are problems in themselves.
ReplyDeleteI guess it has never bothered me that much. Plus, with the "War or Terror" causing "intelligence" agencies to sift through all our emails, spam gives them a lot more junk to eat up their time. That is one waste of time that helps us all.
ReplyDeleteSpam is a curious thing, but it must benefit someone otherwise it would have died out years ago...
ReplyDeleteI'm very anti spam, and here's why. If one hundred people a day rang your doorbell trying to sell you stuff - be legitimate or shall we say rather more shady in nature - you'd be pretty fed up, pretty soon. And don't forget that sometimes that person trying to sell you stuff was just acting as a distraction while another person either sneaked into your home and trashed the place, or stole your credit cards and ID and used them to buy things in your name. Just because it's 'on-line' and you have a delete button it doesn't make it any less wrong, or annoying.
Eolake's right, spam uses up a tremendous amount of time and resources globally. Just imagine what we could have achieved if all that energy had been put to a beneficial use.
It is up to you to enforce your property rights against those door-to-door hucksters, not up to "the authorities" to round them all up, and certainly not to punish the rest of us in order to stop them.
ReplyDeleteOn the contrary, if those "hucksters" were a social problem, or engaged in criminal activity I'd say that's precisely what we have "authorities" for. It shouldn't be down to individuals to deal with such a problem. And I don't understand how taking such action could be construed as punishing the law abiding majority. In what way are they being punished? By not being bothered one hundred times a day by someone trying to sell them something they probably don't want?
ReplyDeleteFreedom's a great thing - and the Internet is probably about as free as you'll get - but it has to be tempered with responsibility for oneself, one's actions and the effect they have on others.
Experience has shown that any "law" passed to deal with a real "problem" quickly gets used against innocent people. It is just the nature of legal systems.
ReplyDeleteCertainly there is always a risk of unintended consequences for legislation. That is why (at least in the UK, I can't speak for other countries) we have the system of checks and balances, legal processes, etc, to challenge poor law making. However I think it's rather stretching the point to contend - taking the argument to its logical conclusion - that every Law is so abused. Even if you accept that argument, it doesn't necessarily negate the validity of the Law in the first place. It does demonstrate the frailties and shortcomings of humans, but that's a different issue.
ReplyDeleteTo return to the nub of the issue here; is spam a good or a bad thing? I really struggle to see how my inbox being among millions of randomly generated addresses, and then being offered dubious medication, sexual gratification or equally dubious stock information is free speech. Scams, dodgy advertising and people trying to make a dishonest buck is not free speech. It is annoying. It is taking up vast amounts of time, energy and resources that could be put to some useful end. Some estimate that as much as 90% of all e-mail is spam. Even if you accept that as a 200% wild overestimate that's still around 2 billion spam messages *every day*. The European Union estimated in 2001 that "junk e-mail" cost Internet users €10 billion per year worldwide (http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=IP/01/154&format=HTML&aged=0&language=EN&guiLanguage=en). More recently I've seen an estimate that spam cost US organisations more than $13 billion in 2007, including lost productivity and the additional equipment, software, and manpower needed to combat the problem. Ultimately those costs get passed on to you and me and everyone else. That's not free speech, that's an industry.