Thursday, April 14, 2005

Nine Years!??!?!

by kid mercury -- today's your lucky day. get your free lottery ticket.

That's right folks. Spammer Jeremy Jaynes, allegedly the eighth ranked spammer in the world, has been convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison.

There are a few things that are really disturbing about that statement:

1) Spamhaus, an organization that clearly has way too much free time on its hands, has somehow created a ranking system to determine who are the most prolific spammers. I couldn't find a breakdown as to how their calculations were determined. I guess their afraid of spam rank optimization (SRO)?

2) I agree that spam is a bad thing. But isn't it often it's own punishment? If your company gets caught using blatant spam tactics, doesn't that do enough damage to your credibility/brand as to be a sufficient punishment? I mean, nine years is a really long time, especially when we think of sentencing for some other crimes:

Man commits rape and burglary -- gets six years total
Woman steals $250,000 -- gets two years
The maximum sentence for voluntary manslaughter in Kansas, USA is 100 months -- less than 8 1/2 years

So apparently spam is worse than rape, theft, and killing someone.

Hope this doesn't set a legal precedent for search engine spam.....

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