Or at least justice:
BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) – A man who sent 850 million junk e-mails through accounts he opened with stolen identities was sentenced to up to seven years in prison on Thursday.
Atlanta-based Internet service provider Earthlink Inc. said it hoped the sentence and an earlier $16.4 million civil judgment against Howard Carmack will deter other spammers.
It probably won’t — but it will probably deter that one for up to seven years.
(via the Flea)
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They should serve him Spam three meals a day for the next seven years!
I seem to recall a study that said criminals are not deterred by severe punishments, either given to other criminals or legally enacted for their crimes. The main reason is that criminals normally can convince themselves that they are so clever that they won’t get caught. The suggestion was that the only way to deter crime is to make people believe they will be caught. It’s probably hard to convince spammers they will be caught, and the international aspect of the internet makes things more complicated.
It’s certainly just that a spammer got caught, but I think the market needs to make it unprofitable for spammers to do business. Making spam a criminal offense is not likely to be effective in stopping spam, I think, but if there’s no money in it, then it will stop of it’s own accord.
Sure. One spammer out of zillions hardly chills the climate. All it does is deter that one guy from being able to do it for that length of time.
The main difficulty of a criminal approach to spam is, as you suggest, it’s very difficult to catch and successfully prosecute spammers. The market approach has the problem of it being extraordinarily cheap, per message, to send spam, and the return on investment requires only a few suckers to make it worthwhile. Trying to change that equation is going to be very difficult.
Good point. To raise the costs for spammers would probably raise the costs for legitimate users too. Now that I’m thinking in economic terms, I’m trying to use the tragedy of the commons to think about this case. There are two main differences that I can see: first, the internet is not a finite resource like the commons was, and second, there are two classes of users of the internet (abusers and non-abusers), unlike the commons, in which everyone was of roughly equal status. The two differences are linked too: the shared resource can grow at the expense of the non-abusive users.
It seems that at some point, the non-abusive users will balk at the cost of growing the resource any more since the costs will finally outweigh the benefits. Then, the resource will effectively be finite, and it will be overwhelmed with SPAM. The legitimate users will stop using email, and then so will the spammers since they will follow the users to whatever other new technology they adopt.
I can see two ways to continue the story here. One is that the internet dies of lack of interest because everyone’s gone off and found some other better technology. The other is that once the spammers are gone, the legitimate users start to come back, and when the spammers follow them, a boom/bust kind of cycle is formed.
Hmmm, I don’t really think either of those scenarios are likely, but it’s fun to speculate about. Going back to the beginning, I guess the way to make SPAM uneconomical is to charge for individual emails. To allow legitimate use to continue, we could charge on a sliding scale according to the number of emails sent. The more you send, the more you spend. Actually, that’s not very good either, since it would doom any large email lists.
Oh well, it’s certainly a hard problem, and I’m not getting anywhere at the moment, so I’ll stop now.
FWIW, you’re not the first to consider that problem.
One difficulty in “charging for individual emails” is that the technology is not designed for such a thing. There is no centralized Internet authority to act as a gatekeeper and fee collector, and as a transnational system, no government can step in to do it. And God forbid the UN should be the fee-collecting authority …