MrGaribaldi
Posts: 2,488 +1
Originally posted by StormBringer
I would like you all to stop for a minute and think about all the spam you get, and how many of those have made you buy a product.
I seem to recall from a documentary on spam that it's less than one for every 10 000 spam that actually reads it, and somewhere in the vincinity of 1 in a 1 000 that buys something (the numbers might be a bit off, but it's very seldom anyone buys anything from spam)...
And because of this, spammers are spamming several millions... Thus congesting the internet and being a general nuisance to most of us...
So only a small fraction of us are interested in what the spammers sell...
Originally posted by BrownPaper
the article did not say he was going to get 20 years in prison; that was just the maximum sentence. with a lesser sentence and a decent lawyer, he'd probably get a year in prison if he was convicted.
Yes, I realized that, but still... Having 20 years as a maximum punishment for sending spam is just crazy...
See my prev post for why I think that...
MoRulez> Yes I do see some similarities, but I would argue that it's not the same problem...
Spamming is something that only a few people do, which annoys most net users, and cost many companies a lot of money.
Downloading mp3's is something that is quite common and costs the record industry a lot of money.
And both of it's against the law.
But let's look a bit more closely at the motives here...
Spammers send out spam to make money... It's not like a hobby, or something they do with their friends...
People download mp3's because it's an easy way to get the music they want... They don't have to go to a store and buy an entire cd because they like one or two songs on that cd. And downloading doens't cost much, as there are no middle men nor a greedy record company pushing the prices up... And it's very very convienient...
But if there was a legal alternative with the same "qualities", I think most, if not all, would use that...
Why, because they're tired of spending way too much money on a product that isn't up to par...
Why should you have to buy a full cd when you only want one song? And why should you have to go to a store to get it, when you can allmost anything else on the net? And why are the online services selling the music at such a low quality with so many restrictions?
So I'd say that even if there are similarities between spamming and mp3 downloading, those are only superficial, as the latter is the consumers rebelling at an industry which has lost track with "the real world"...
Sorry for going so OT, but.....