Why can't we go after the companies who advertise through spam?
It depends. If a spam advertising a site owned by a company in Morroco arrives at my computer in the U.S. via a spam zombie in Hong Kong, who do I go after?
In what court's jurisdiction do I take action? I either have to hire a lawyer in Morroco to pursue the matter for me, or sue in U.S. court and win an empty victory, as the "defendant" will have never showed up and will not change his behavior because the court can't enforce its decision.
If the advertiser, the emailer, and I are all in the U.S., I have to contend with a legal system that must balance control of actions with free speech issues. If neither the advertiser nor the email have forged headers or otherwise obfuscated the email trail, there's not a whole lot a single receiver can do.
There have been a lot of cases of late in which U.S. service providers, such has Microsoft or AOL, have won huge judgements against major spammers. But they've been able to do so by proving that the spammers have caused large expenses for the ISPs. You have to sue, I believe, for a minimum of $50000 US if you are going to sue in Federal court.
I've often wondered that if the receiver email address is of the form "user@student_accounts.ny.k12.ny.us", then could the sender of sexually-explicit emails to those addresses be nailed under some child-endangerment law, as the sender could be reasonably expected to infer that the recipients would be minors.
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TANSTAAFL!!