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Do The Anti-Spam Laws And Anti-Telemarketer Laws Really Protect Consumers, Or Are They Political Tax GrabsDo The Anti-Spam Laws And Anti-Telemarketer Laws Really Protect Consumers, Or Are They Political Tax Grabs
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By Garnet
Subjects > World > Countries?Create > United States
Subjects > Internet > Email > Spam Email
My response to the story Billion Dollar Spam Award In December 2004 ...
Whether these suits violate freedom of speech is a debatable issue. The related sidebar for this article has a link "State Spam Law Ruled Unconstitutional", where an anti-spam law in Maryland was ruled unconstitutional because it seeks to regulate commerce outside the state's borders. On appeal, those laws may be upheld. Bob used to say that commercial speech is not protected in America with the same "Free speech" protections that one normally thinks of when they think of free speech. Political speech and paradoies, however, are the most protected forms of free speech.
But the main point to get from all this is that just being sued over something like this can be really costly to deal with. Since the attorneys for the other side didn't show up in court, this guy got a default judgement. Now he can run around and try to find the alleged spammers bank accounts, or other assets, and try to get the sheriff of the local county to help him seize any assets that he can find. If he could find the spammers office, he could show up there and have it padlocked and he'd get to keep everything in the office (or probably more precisely, everything in the office would be inventoried by the court and auctioned, and he'd get the money.) To a bank, or whatever other entity, these judgments will look plenty real, it won't matter that they were default judgments. I don't know if the defendants might get an opportunity to stay the judgments and go into the court and argue things like "we weren't served properly", "we weren't properly notified of the court case schedule", or any other myriad of technical issues. But the bottom line is that to do any of those other things will be expensive. Even if the defendants didn't actually do anything wrong.
The interesting thing is that 300 different spammers were sued, and judgments were only entered against 3 of them. I'd like to know more about why the other 297 didn't have judgments entered against them. Unfortunately there is no link in this article to actual court documents.
So the conclusion to draw from this is that being involved with spam in any way is a bad thing. Some people make it their life's ambition to make problems for anyone involved in spam, no matter how distant.
Probably the only ones who benefit from the anti-spam laws are lawyers, in which case you could make lots of money pursuing various angles of these cases: Trying to get them ruled unconsitutional, defending them on appeal, finding a plaintiff so you can try to use the laws against defendants, etc.
When you notice that laws like the federal anti-spam law do not allow individuals to sue spammers, you can see that the politicians are mostly trying to look good while grabbing more dollars for the government and their lawyer friends. You can be damaged by being flooded with spam, but the government gets to go and sue and keep the damages money for damages that you suffered. Only a politician could think that this is fair. This is the kind of deal that looks good for everyone other than the consumer. The anti-telemarketing law, the "Telemarketing Sales Rule" and the National Do Not Call registry work in the same way, making it impossible for end consumers who actually receive the harrassing calls to try and sue the telemarketers unless the consumer can prove a minimum of $50,000 in damages. Older laws, such as the Telephone Consumer Protection Act actually give consumers the right to sue telemarketers for $500 per unwanted phone call after they've given notice the telemarketers. Newer laws, where the government is the only entity given a right of recovery, are the ones that get all the fanfare.
Check out [Facts About Trees]
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