Spammer Demands And Receives Access To Accuser's Hard Drive
from the bad-news dept
There's a fascinating, if somewhat confusingly titled, post on Slashdot discussing a lawsuit in Washington state against a spammer. Washington State, of course, put in place one of the earliest anti-spammer laws, allowing individuals to sue spammers for $500/spam if they can track down the spammer. A few people have done nicely forcing local spammers to pay up. In one such case, however, the spammer countered by getting a computer "expert" to demand from the judge that the spammer get an image copy of the accuser's hard drive to look at the "evidence." Even under normal conditions this would be ridiculous -- but it was even more ridiculous here because the spam messages in question were sent to webmail accounts at Hotmail and Yahoo Mail, meaning that they never directly touched the recipient's hard drive. It was clearly a tactic designed to frustrate the guy suing the spammer -- and, unfortunately, it worked. The judge agreed with the "expert" that the hard drive image should be turned over to the spammer. The Slashdot article is confusing, because that's the story it gives, but the title says that the person doesn't have to hand over the hard drive. The explanation appears to be that the guy in question has "settled" the case with the spammer before he needed to hand over his hard drive, though terms of the deal aren't clear at all. Either way, this is a bad decision and will encourage other similar tactics when spammers are brought to court in the future. Hopefully, other judges will recognize that this serves no good purpose other than intimidation and won't allow it.
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Will this apply fairly to everyone?
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Tech advisors for judges
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He who is his own lawyer...
Pretty typical, and predictable, defense lawyer move.
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Yeah I'm an old geezer at 36, you wet behind the ears little pipsqueak, and I used WP and Lotus back in the 1980's!
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agree
What happens when you can sue anyone just because you say they spammed you. LOL No evidence required, just the fact you said they did it.
Fact is if you use email for anything other than a ha ha from time to time your stupid. To easy for anything to happen with email. It's dated. Thing of the past. Email is for people who think of it as something new still. Say someone who used WP and Lotus back in the 80s!
who still uses email anyway?
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Re: agree
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agree too
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???
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Hahaha
Stuart
http://www.earnersblog.com
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Re: Hahaha
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violence
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Simple Solution
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People in Charge just don't understand
I think History is not going to look back kindly on the 'turn of the century' - when it comes to socio-eonomic and technological issues are concerned.
I'll probably be apologizing to my children for all a long time for all the stuff my generation screwed up.
"The technology was soo new, we just didn't understand what we were doing."
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Fear and intimidation IS the law
How can you assert this with a straight face?
The entire American system of law is based on one concept, intimidation.
Anyway, lawyers and politicians should keep their noses out of technology which is beyond their minds.
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