Man quits job, makes living suing e-mail spammers | Hacker News Reader

Man quits job, makes living suing e-mail spammers

finance.yahoo.com

102 pointsiwh26 comments

You have to understand: Spam is about economics. It's not about morals or freedoms or anything else. It's purely about money.

If the amount it costs a spammer to spam is strictly less than his earnings from spam + profit, then he'll continue spamming. Every time Balsam wins a judgment, it goes in the cost column, thereby eating into the spammers' profits. Enough such judgments, and their profits evaporate, prompting a search for a new means of livelihood.

While I may or may not agree with his methods, his actions are taking money out of the pockets of spammers; which, given their model, can only be a good thing.

If more people did what he's doing, we would definitely see much lesser spam.

I completely agree with your sentiment.

The winning quote from this article is: "His courtroom foes contend that Balsam is one of many sole practitioners unfairly exploiting anti-spam sentiments and laws. They accuse him of filing lawsuits against out-of-state companies that would rather pay a small settlement than expend the resources to fight the legal claims."

Finally, a consumer is using the same tactics that big companies with big budgets use to get startups and individuals to give up their claims. This obviously only works because Balsam is a lawyer and doesn't need to pay his legal fees. But, I am happy to see someone fighting back!

If Balsam accepted donations, I'd be sending him $25 right now, hopefully joined by 10 million other people.

It doesn't seem like he needs donations. It sounds like he needs lawyers and paralegals to expand to a proper firm, and it would be self-sustaining.

don't you think that a bunch of donations might be useful for this? call it crowdsourced vc if that makes it easier to understand.

Do not do that, he might retire... 1/2 :-)

Perhaps what is needed is a non-profit devoted to suing spammers. Then we could donate to that organization.

I'm sure this Dan guy works harder at fighting SPAM given his profit incentive.

I would think having a profit incentive means choosing the easy, low-hanging fruit rather than the hard cases that would take a lot of time and reduce the amount of potential profit.

If the companies he is suing genuinely are spamming people they have no prior business relationship with, he is doing a service. But how often do people get truly unsolicited spam from overtly US based companies? All spam I've looked at recently has no connection to a business with any marketing model other than spam - generally sent through an open relay or compromised computer, with links with nameservers and HTTP hosted on a compromised system, and/or in China or a former USSR country. Unless you happen to know a lawyer in one of those countries, it would be difficult and prohibitively expensive to unmask their identities and still make a profit suing them.

I suspect, however, it is not genuinely unsolicited mail that he mainly goes after, but rather, solicited commercial mail which potentially fails to meet the requirements under California law. Suing companies not based in California who someone has initiated a relationship with on a technicality of Californian anti-spam law is, in my opinion, unfair - the companies had no say in the Californian law, and it is simply wrong to try to require every Internet business to comply with the laws of every jurisdiction in the world.

As with any business in the world of capitalism, the spammers are free not to send their email to people in California. The difficulty of this is immaterial, companies have to deal with the uneven landscape of state laws all the time.

I would support a regulatory regime that would require all commercial email to include the provenance of the sender's relationship to the recipient, whether first-party or third, whether the recipient's address is rented, sold, acquired via corporate acquisition, or otherwise. Also, companies would be required to retain records of recipient acquision, such that if a recipient actually did create an account or other kind of direct relationship that the sender should be able to supply proof of the existing relationship. This could be implemented as simply as retaining all outgoing registration emails.

> As with any business in the world of capitalism, the spammers are free not to send their email to people in California. The difficulty of this is immaterial, companies have to deal with the uneven landscape of state laws all the time.

Note that this isn't always true. For instance, credit card companies in the US can ignore usury laws of the state their customers reside in. Rather, the laws of the company's state are applied.

Generalizations always break down easily, but you know what I meant.

While I'm not sure if the spam I recieve is from a US company or not, I suspect some of it is. I regularly recieve unsolicited emails (which make it through my filters) trying to sell me scientific equipment, high purity materials, and other research things. I assume these are from US based companies, but I've never read through them enough to find out.

Two things wrong with this article:

1. By not using the harshest terms possible to denounce spam and the thieves who spam, this article tends to promote spam as something we all "just hate" but have to get along with.

2. This article does not note that the Man who Quit his Job is actually something of a meta-parasite, as he does no economic activity. However, Balsam is a parasite on thieves who themselves produce no economic output, so he is indeed a meta-parasite. It would be worth connecting this with research in artificial life and with research in biology where parasites-of-parasites have evolved.

> This article does not note that the Man who Quit his Job is actually something of a meta-parasite, as he does no economic activity. However, Balsam is a parasite on thieves who themselves produce no economic output, so he is indeed a meta-parasite.

That argument leads police to being meta-parasites as well. However marginal Dan's efforts are, there is value in making negative activities more expensive.

I make no judgments about the moral worth of parasites. After all, RNA parasites may have driven the jump to cellular life.

I just want to see the similarity between Balsam and both natural and artificial life hyperparasites noted and explored.

immune systems.

Difference being that police don't make their livelihood from the people they go after; rather, the people the "parasites" prey on. There are a few exceptions, like seizures from drug dealers to augment taxpayer funding.

It's parasites all the way down.

It's an interesting approach to spam. It's kind of like the way people dealt with the tobacco industry in the 90's (and maybe still now? I haven't kept up) by just suing them for damages, false advertising, misleading stuff, or whatever else.

I think that this is one of those less heard of positives of having a litigious society. Sometimes we can curb nasty behavior by making rules that allow people to sue violators into submission.

IANAL but it sure seems by not fighting these early individual smaller cases the spammers are setting themselves up for a huge class action case in the future by establishing precedence.

Any lawyers here? How do no contest rulings in small claims apply to setting precedence?

It looks like a fair amount of the time he's settling out of court -- I also wonder if any of the companies settling have deep enough pockets to be worth organizing a large class?

IANAL either, but small claims court is a "court of no record" and does not establish precedent.

first i thought, thank god somebody is doing this. but a second later: it´s not clear who the companies are he´s suing. i don´t think he sues the guys behind the big botnets which cause most spam.

so perhaps some startups are sued because for some reason they sent emails to the wrong person.

i´m not sure whether this is good or bad...

Considering he is suing many small companies, who prefer to settle rather than pay for a lawsuit, it's not clear he is doing a net service. A serial litigator has an economy of scale in terms of lawsuits. All but the largest companies can afford to keep lawyers on staff or to hire them regularly.

So as much as I'd like to applaud people who fight spam, I think this guy just found a legal niche to mess with small and legitimate companies. It's like the crippled person going around suing shops for lack of legal amenities (ramps, ramp angles, parking, toilets).

Except instead of suing for a lack of legal amenities, he's suing for spamming. Or, to put it differently, he's not suing them for not doing something they should, he's suing them for doing something they shouldn't.

It's much more like suing mom-and-pop stores for dumping trash in the back alley.

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