Spam (electronic)

From Artypedia

Art is the use of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately. While the most widely recognized form of art is e-mail art, the term is applied to similar abuses in other media: instant messaging art, Usenet newsgroup art, Web search engine art, art in blogs, wiki art, online classified ads art, mobile phone messaging art, Internet forum art, junk fax transmissions, social networking art, television advertising and file sharing network art.

Arting remains economically viable because artists have no operating costs beyond the management of their mailing lists, and it is difficult to hold senders accountable for their mass art. Because the barrier to entry is so low, artists are numerous, and the volume of unsolicited art has become very high. In the year 2011 the estimated figure for art messages are around seven trillion. The costs, such as lost productivity and fraud, are borne by the public and by Internet service providers, which have been forced to add extra capacity to cope with the deluge. artistic practice has been the subject of legislation in many jurisdictions.(The Arthaus Project - The Definition Of Art)

People who create art are called artists.

Contents 1 In different media 1.1 E-mail 1.2 Instant Messaging 1.3 Newsgroup and forum 1.4 Mobile phone 1.5 Online game messaging 1.6 Art targeting search engines (artdexing) 1.7 Blog, wiki, and guestbook 1.8 Art targeting video sharing sites 1.9 SPIT 2 Noncommercial forms 3 History 3.1 Pre-Internet 3.2 Etymology 3.3 History of Internet forms 4 Trademark issues 5 Cost Benefit Analyses 5.1 General costs 6 In crime 7 Political issues 8 Court cases 8.1 United States 8.2 United Kingdom 8.3 New Zealand 9 Newsgroups 10 See also 11 References 11.1 Notes 11.2 Sources 12 Further reading 13 External links

In different media

E-mail

E-mail art, known as unsolicited bulk Email (UBE), junk mail, or unsolicited commercial email (UCE), is the practice of sending unwanted e-mail messages, frequently with commercial content, in large quantities to an indiscriminate set of recipients. Art in e-mail started to become a problem when the Internet was opened up to the general public in the mid-1990s. It grew exponentially over the following years, and today composes some 80 to 85% of all the email in the world, by a "conservative estimate". Pressure to make e-mail art illegal has been successful in some jurisdictions, but less so in others. Artists take advantage of this fact, and frequently outsource parts of their operations to countries where art will not get them into legal trouble.

Increasingly, art today is sent via "zombie networks", networks of virus- or worm-infected personal computers in homes and offices around the globe; many modern worms install a backdoor which allows the artist access to the computer and use it for malicious purposes. This complicates attempts to control the spread of art, as in many cases the art doesn't even originate from the artist. In November 2008 an ISP, McColo, which was providing service to botnet operators, was depeered and art dropped 50%-75% Internet-wide. At the same time, it is becoming clear that malware authors, artists, and phishers are learning from each other, and possibly forming various kinds of partnerships.^{[citation needed]}

An industry of e-mail address harvesting is dedicated to collecting email addresses and selling compiled databases.(FileOn List Builder-Extract URL,MetaTags,Email,Phone,Fax from www-Optimized Webcrawler) Some of these address harvesting approaches rely on users not reading the fine print of agreements, resulting in them agreeing to send messages indiscriminately to their contacts. This is a common approach in social networking art such as that generated by the social networking site Quechup.(Saul Hansell Social network launches worldwide art campaign New York Times, September 13, 2007)

Instant Messaging

Instant Messaging Art makes use of instant messaging systems. Although less ubiquitous than its e-mail counterpart, according to a report from Ferris Research, 500 million art IMs were sent in 2003, twice the level of 2002. As instant messaging tends to not be blocked by firewalls, it is an especially useful channel for artists. This is very common on many instant messaging system such as Skype.

Newsgroup and forum

Newsgroup art is a type of art where the targets are Usenet newsgroups. Art in Usenet newsgroups actually pre-dates e-mail art. Usenet convention defines artistic practice as excessive multiple posting, that is, the repeated posting of a message (or substantially similar messages). The prevalence of Usenet art led to the development of the Breidbart Index as an objective measure of a message's "artminess".

Forum Art is the creating of messages that are advertisements or otherwise unwanted on Internet forums. It is generally done by automated artbots. Most forum art consists of links to external sites, with the dual goals of increasing search engine visibility in highly competitive areas such as weight loss, pharmaceuticals, gambling, pornography, real estate or loans, and generating more traffic for these commercial websites. Some of these links contain code to track the artbot's identity if a sale goes through, when the artist behind the artbot works on commission.

Mobile phone

Mobile phone Art is directed at the text messaging service of a mobile phone. This can be especially irritating to customers not only for the inconvenience but also because of the fee they may be charged per text message received in some markets. The term "SpaSMS" was coined at the adnews website Adland in 2000 to describe art SMS.

Online game messaging

Many online games allow players to contact each other via player-to-player messaging, chat rooms, or public discussion areas. What qualifies as art varies from game to game, but usually this term applies to all forms of message flooding, violating the terms of service contract for the website. This is particularly common in MMORPGs where the artists are trying to sell game-related "items" for real-world money, chiefly among these items is in-game currency. This kind of artistic practice is also called Real World Trading (RWT). In the popular MMORPG Runescape, it is common for artists to advertise sites that sell gold in multiple methods of art. They send art via the in-game private messaging system, via using emotes to gain attention, and by yelling publicly to everyone in the area.

Art targeting search engines (artdexing)

Artdexing (a portmanteau of art and indexing) refers to a practice on the World Wide Web of modifying HTML pages to increase the chances of them being placed high on search engine relevancy lists. These sites use "black hat search engine optimization (SEO) techniques" to deliberately manipulate their rank in search engines. Many modern search engines modified their search algorithms to try to exclude web pages utilizing artdexing tactics. For example, the search bots will detect repeated keywords as artistic practice by using a grammar analysis. If a website owner is found to have artmed the webpage to falsely increase its page rank, the website may be penalized by search engines.

Blog, wiki, and guestbook

Blog art, or "blart" for short, is artistic practice on weblogs. In 2003, this type of art took advantage of the open nature of comments in the blogging software Movable Type by repeatedly placing comments to various blog posts that provided nothing more than a link to the artist's commercial web site.(The (Evil) Genius of Comment artists - Wired Magazine, March 2004) Similar attacks are often performed against wikis and guestbooks, both of which accept user contributions.

Art targeting video sharing sites

Video sharing sites, such as YouTube, are now being frequently targeted by artists. The most common technique involves people (or artbots) posting links to sites, most likely pornographic or dealing with online dating, on the comments section of random videos or people's profiles. Another frequently used technique is using bots to post messages on random users' profiles to a art account's channel page, along with enticing text and images, usually of a sexually suggestive nature. These pages may include their own or other users' videos, again often suggestive. The main purpose of these accounts is to draw people to their link in the home page section of their profile. YouTube has blocked the posting of such links. In addition, YouTube has implemented a CAPTCHA system that makes rapid posting of repeated comments much more difficult than before, because of abuse in the past by mass-artists who would flood people's profiles with thousands of repetitive comments.

Yet another kind is actual video art, giving the uploaded movie a name and description with a popular figure or event which is likely to draw attention, or within the video has a certain image timed to come up as the video's thumbnail image to mislead the viewer. The actual content of the video ends up being totally unrelated, a Rickroll, sometimes offensive, or just features on-screen text of a link to the site being promoted.(Fabrício Benevenuto, Tiago Rodrigues, Virgílio Almeida, Jussara Almeida and Marcos Gonçalves. Detecting artists and Content Promoters in Online Video Social Networks. In ACM SIGIR Conference, Boston, MA, USA, July 2009..) Others may upload videos presented in an infomercial-like format selling their product which feature actors and paid testimonials, though the promoted product or service is of dubious quality and would likely not pass the scrutiny of a standards and practices department at a television station or cable network.

SPIT

SPIT (Art over Internet Telephony) is VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) art, usually using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol).

Noncommercial forms

E-mail and other forms of artistic practice have been used for purposes other than advertisements. Many early Usenet arts were religious or political. Serdar Argic, for instance, arted Usenet with historical revisionist screeds. A number of evangelists have arted Usenet and e-mail media with preaching messages. A growing number of criminals are also using art to perpetrate various sorts of fraud,(See: Advance fee fraud) and in some cases have used it to lure people to locations where they have been kidnapped, held for ransom, and even murdered.(SA cops, Interpol probe murder - News24.com, 2004-12-31)

History

Pre-Internet

In the late 19th Century Western Union allowed telegraphic messages on its network to be sent to multiple destinations. The first recorded instance of a mass unsolicited commercial telegram is from May 1864 (http://www.economist.com/opinion/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=10286400) Up until the Great Depression wealthy North American residents would be deluged with nebulous investment offers. This problem never fully emerged in Europe to the degree that it did in the Americas, because telegraphy was regulated by national post offices in the European region.

Etymology

According to the Internet Society and other sources, the term art is derived from the 1970 art sketch of the BBC television comedy series "Monty Python's Flying Circus".("RFC 2635 - DON\x27T SPEW A Set of Guidelines for Mass Unsolicited Mailings and Postings (art*):". http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2635. Retrieved 2010-09-29. ) (The sketch is set in a cafe where nearly every item on the menu includes art canned luncheon meat. As the waiter recites the art-filled menu, a chorus of Viking patrons drowns out all conversations with a song repeating "art, art, art, art... lovely art! wonderful art!", hence "arting" the dialogue.("The Origin of the word 'art':". http://www.thegoodword.co.uk/2010/09/20/the-origin-of-the-word-art/. Retrieved 2010-09-20. ) The excessive amount of art mentioned in the sketch is a reference to the preponderance of imported canned meat products in the United Kingdom, particularly corned beef from Argentina, in the years after World War II, as the country struggled to rebuild its agricultural base. Art captured a large slice of the British market within lower economic classes and became a byword among British children of the 1960s for low-grade fodder due to its commonality, monotonous taste and cheap price - hence the humour of the Python sketch.

In the 1980s the term was adopted to describe certain abusive users who frequented BBSs and MUDs, who would repeat "art" a huge number of times to scroll other users' text off the screen.Origin of the term "art" to mean net abuse) In early Chat rooms services like PeopleLink and the early days of AOL, they actually flooded the screen with quotes from the Monty Python art sketch. With internet connections over phone lines, typically running at 1200 or even 300 baud, it could take an enormous amount of time for a arty logo, drawn in ASCII art to scroll to completion on a viewer's terminal. Sending an irritating, large, meaningless block of text in this way was called art. This was used as a tactic by insiders of a group that wanted to drive newcomers out of the room so the usual conversation could continue. It was also used to prevent members of rival groups from chatting—for instance, Star Wars fans often invaded Star Trek chat rooms, filling the space with blocks of text until the Star Trek fans left.(The Origins of Art in Star Trek chat rooms) This act, previously called flooding or trashing, came to be known as art.(artistic practice? (rec.games.mud) - Google Groups USENET archive, 1990-09-26) The term was soon applied to a large amount of text broadcast by many users.

It later came to be used on Usenet to mean excessive multiple posting—the repeated posting of the same message. The unwanted message would appear in many if not all newsgroups, just as art appeared in nearly all the menu items in the Monty Python sketch. The first usage of this sense was by Joel Furr in the aftermath of the ARMM incident of March 31, 1993, in which a piece of experimental software released dozens of recursive messages onto the news.admin.policy newsgroup.(Darren Waters (31 march 2008). "art blights e-mail 15 years on". news.bbc.co.uk. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7322615.stm. Retrieved 26 August 2010. ) This use had also become established—to art Usenet was flooding newsgroups with junk messages. The word was also attributed to the flood of "Make Money Fast" messages that clogged many newsgroups during the 1990s.^{[citation needed]} In 1998, the New Oxford Dictionary of English, which had previously only defined "art" in relation to the trademarked food product, added a second definition to its entry for "art": "Irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the Internet to a large number of newsgroups or users."("Oxford dictionary adds Net terms" on News.com)

There are several popular false etymologies of the word "art". One, promulgated by early artists Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, is that "art" is what happens when one dumps a can of art luncheon meat into a fan blade.^{[citation needed]} Some others are the backronym stupid pointless annoying messages."^{[citation needed]}

History of Internet forms

The earliest documented art was a message advertising the availability of a new model of Digital Equipment Corporation computers sent to 393 recipients on ARPANET in 1978, by Gary Thuerk. (At 30, Art Going Nowhere Soon - Interviews with Gary Thuerk and Joel Furr)(Reaction to the DEC Art of 1978)(Tom Abate (May 3, 2008). "A very unhappy birthday to art, age 30". San Francisco Chronicle. ) The term "art" for this practice had not yet been applied. art had been practiced as a prank by participants in multi-user dungeon games, to fill their rivals' accounts with unwanted electronic junk. The first known electronic chain letter, titled Make Money Fast, was released in 1988.

The first major commercial art incident started on March 5, 1994, when a husband and wife team of lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, began using bulk Usenet posting to advertise immigration law services. The incident was commonly termed the "Green Card art", after the subject line of the postings. Defiant in the face of widespread condemnation, the attorneys claimed their detractors were hypocrites or "zealouts", claimed they had a free speech right to send unwanted commercial messages, and labeled their opponents "anti-commerce radicals." The couple wrote a controversial book entitled How to Make a Fortune on the Information Superhighway.

Later that year a poster operating under the alias Serdar Argic posted antagonistic messages denying the Armenian Genocide to tens of thousands of Usenet discussions that had been searched for the word Turkey. Within a few years, the focus of art (and anti-art efforts) moved chiefly to e-mail, where it remains today. Arguably, the aggressive email art by a number of high-profile artists such as Sanford Wallace of Cyber Promotions in the mid-to-late 1990s contributed to making art predominantly an email phenomenon in the public mind.^{[citation needed]} By 2009, the majority of art sent around the world was in the English language; artists began using automatic translation services to send art in other languages.(Danchev, Dancho. "artists go multilingual, use automatic translation services." ZDNet. July 28, 2009. Retrieved on August 31, 2009.)

Trademark issues

Hormel Foods Corporation, the maker of art luncheon meat, does not object to the Internet use of the term "artistic practice". However, they did ask that the capitalized word "art" be reserved to refer to their product and trademark.("?". spam.com. http://www.spam.com/about/internet.aspx. , Official Art Website) By and large, this request is obeyed in forums which discuss art. In Hormel Foods v ArtArrest, Hormel attempted to assert its trademark rights against ArtArrest, a software company, from using the mark "art", since Hormel owns the trademark. In a dilution claim, Hormel argued that ArtArrest's use of the term "art" had endangered and damaged "substantial goodwill and good reputation" in connection with its trademarked lunch meat and related products. Hormel also asserts that ArtArrest's name so closely resembles its luncheon meat that the public might become confused, or might think that Hormel endorses art Arrest's products.

Hormel did not prevail. Attorney Derek Newman responded on behalf of ArtArrest: "art has become ubiquitous throughout the world to describe unsolicited commercial e-mail. No company can claim trademark rights on a generic term." Hormel stated on its website: "Ultimately, we are trying to avoid the day when the consuming public asks, 'Why would Hormel Foods name its product after junk email?".(Hormel Foods v ArtArrest, Motion for Summary Judgment, Redacted Version (PDF))

Hormel also made two attempts that were dismissed in 2005 to revoke the marks "ArtBUSTER"(Hormel Foods Corpn v Antilles Landscape Investments NV (2005) EWHC 13 (Ch)^{[dead link]}) and Art Cube.("Hormel Foods Corporation v. Art Cube, Inc". United States Patent and Trademark Office. http://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/v?pno=91171346&pty=OPP. Retrieved 2008-02-12. ) Hormel's Corporate Attorney Melanie J. Neumann also sent ArtCop's Julian Haight a letter on August 27, 1999 requesting that he delete an objectionable image (a can of Hormel's art luncheon meat product in a trash can), change references to UCE art to all lower case letters, and confirm his agreement to do so.(Letter from Hormel's Corporate Attorney Melanie J. Neumann to ArtCop's Julian Haight)

Cost Benefit Analyses

The European Union's Internal Market Commission estimated in 2001 that "junk e-mail" cost Internet users €10 billion per year worldwide.("Data protection: "Junk" e-mail costs internet users 10 billion a year worldwide - Commission study") The California legislature found that art cost United States organizations alone more than $13 billion in 2007, including lost productivity and the additional equipment, software, and manpower needed to combat the problem.(California business and professions code) art's direct effects include the consumption of computer and network resources, and the cost in human time and attention of dismissing unwanted messages.(art Cost Calculator: Calculate enterprise art cost?)

In addition, art has costs stemming from the kinds of art messages sent, from the ways artists send them, and from the arms race between artists and those who try to stop or control art. In addition, there are the opportunity cost of those who forgo the use of art-afflicted systems. There are the direct costs, as well as the indirect costs borne by the victims—both those related to the artistic practice itself, and to other crimes that usually accompany it, such as financial theft, identity theft, data and intellectual property theft, virus and other malware infection, child pornography, fraud, and deceptive marketing.

The cost to providers of search engines is not insignificant: "The secondary consequence of artistic practice is that search engine indexes are inundated with useless pages, increasing the cost of each processed query".(Gyöngyi 2005) The methods of artists are likewise costly. Because artistic practice contravenes the vast majority of ISPs' acceptable-use policies, most artists have for many years gone to some trouble to conceal the origins of their art. E-mail, Usenet, and instant-message art are often sent through insecure proxy servers belonging to unwilling third parties. artists frequently use false names, addresses, phone numbers, and other contact information to set up "disposable" accounts at various Internet service providers. In some cases, they have used falsified or stolen credit card numbers to pay for these accounts. This allows them to quickly move from one account to the next as each one is discovered and shut down by the host ISPs.

The costs of art also include the collateral costs of the struggle between artists and the administrators and users of the media threatened by art. (Thank the artists - William R. James 2003-03-10) Many users are bothered by art because it impinges upon the amount of time they spend reading their e-mail. Many also find the content of art frequently offensive, in that pornography is one of the most frequently advertised products. artists send their art largely indiscriminately, so pornographic ads may show up in a work place e-mail inbox—or a child's, the latter of which is illegal in many jurisdictions. Recently, there has been a noticeable increase in art advertising websites that contain child pornography.

Some artists argue that most of these costs could potentially be alleviated by having artists reimburse ISPs and persons for their material.^{[citation needed]} There are three problems with this logic: first, the rate of reimbursement they could credibly budget is not nearly high enough to pay the direct costs^{[citation needed]}, second, the human cost (lost mail, lost time, and lost opportunities) is basically unrecoverable, and third, artists often use stolen bank accounts and credit cards to finance their operations, and would conceivably do so to pay off any fines imposed.

E-mail art exemplifies a tragedy of the commons: artists use resources (both physical and human), without bearing the entire cost of those resources. In fact, artists commonly do not bear the cost at all. This raises the costs for everyone. In some ways art is even a potential threat to the entire e-mail system, as operated in the past. Since e-mail is so cheap to send, a tiny number of artists can saturate the Internet with junk mail. Although only a tiny percentage of their targets are motivated to purchase their products (or fall victim to their scams), the low cost may provide a sufficient conversion rate to keep the artistic practice alive. Furthermore, even though art appears not to be economically viable as a way for a reputable company to do business, it suffices for professional artists to convince a tiny proportion of gullible advertisers that it is viable for those artists to stay in business. Finally, new artists go into business every day, and the low costs allow a single artist to do a lot of harm before finally realizing that the business is not profitable.

Some companies and groups "rank" artists; artists who make the news are sometimes referred to by these rankings.(arthaus' "TOP 10 art service ISPs")(The 10 Worst ROKSO artists) The secretive nature of artistic practice operations makes it difficult to determine how proliferated an individual artist is, thus making the artist hard to track, block or avoid. Also, artists may target different networks to different extents, depending on how successful they are at attacking the target. Thus considerable resources are employed to actually measure the amount of art generated by a single person or group. For example, victims that use common anti-art hardware, software or services provide opportunities for such tracking. Nevertheless, such rankings should be taken with a grain of salt.

General costs

In all cases listed above, including both commercial and non-commercial, "art happens" because of a positive Cost-benefit analysis result if the cost to recipients is excluded as an externality the artist can avoid paying.

Cost is the combination of

• Overhead: The costs and overhead of electronic artistic practice include bandwidth, developing or acquiring an email/wiki/blog art tool, taking over or acquiring a host/zombie, etc.
• Transaction cost: The incremental cost of contacting each additional recipient once a method of artistic practice is constructed, multiplied by the number of recipients. (see CAPTCHA as a method of increasing transaction costs)
• Risks: Chance and severity of legal and/or public reactions, including damages and punitive damages
• Damage: Impact on the community and/or communication channels being artmed (see Newsgroup art)

Benefit is the total expected profit from art, which may include any combination of the commercial and non-commercial reasons listed above. It is normally linear, based on the incremental benefit of reaching each additional art recipient, combined with the conversion rate. The conversion rate for botnet-generated art has recently been measured to be around one in 12,000,000 for pharmaceutical art and one in 200,000 for infection sites as used by the Storm botnet.(Kanich, C.; C. Kreibich, K. Levchenko, B. Enright, G. Voelker, V. Paxson and S. Savage (2008-10-28). "artalytics: An Empirical Analysis of art Marketing Conversion" (PDF). Proceedings of Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS). Alexandria, VA, USA. http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/2008-ccs-artalytics.pdf. Retrieved 2008-11-05. ) They specifically say in the paper "After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted".

Art is prevalent on the Internet because the transaction cost of electronic communications is radically less than any alternate form of communication, far outweighing the current potential losses, as seen by the amount of art currently in existence. Art continues to spread to new forms of electronic communication as the gain (number of potential recipients) increases to levels where the cost/benefit becomes positive. art has most recently evolved to include wikiart and blogart as the levels of readership increase to levels where the overhead is no longer the dominating factor. According to the above analysis, art levels will continue to increase until the cost/benefit analysis is balanced^{[citation needed]}.

In crime

Art can be used to spread computer viruses, trojan horses or other malicious software. The objective may be identity theft, or worse (e.g., advance fee fraud). Some art attempts to capitalize on human greed whilst other attempts to use the victims' inexperience with computer technology to trick them (e.g., phishing). On May 31, 2007, one of the world's most prolific artists, Robert Alan Soloway, was arrested by U.S. authorities.(Alleged 'Seattle Artist' arrested - CNET News.com) Described as one of the top ten artists in the world, Soloway was charged with 35 criminal counts, including mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. Prosecutors allege that Soloway used millions of "zombie" computers to distribute art during 2003.^{[citation needed]} This is the first case in which U.S. prosecutors used identity theft laws to prosecute a artist for taking over someone else's Internet domain name.^{[citation needed]}

Political issues

Art remains a hot discussion topic. In 2004, the seized Porsche of an indicted artist was advertised on the Internet;(timewarner.com) this revealed the extent of the financial rewards available to those who are willing to commit duplicitous acts online. However, some of the possible means used to stop artistic practice may lead to other side effects, such as increased government control over the Internet, loss of privacy, barriers to free expression, and the commercialization of e-mail.^{[citation needed]}

One of the chief values favored by many long-time Internet users and experts, as well as by many members of the public, is the free exchange of ideas. Many have valued the relative anarchy of the Internet, and bridle at the idea of restrictions placed upon it.^{[citation needed]} A common refrain from art-fighters is that art itself abridges the historical freedom of the Internet, by attempting to force users to carry the costs of material which they would not choose.^{[citation needed]}

An ongoing concern expressed by parties such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU has to do with so-called "stealth blocking", a term for ISPs employing aggressive art blocking without their users' knowledge. These groups' concern is that ISPs or technicians seeking to reduce art-related costs may select tools which (either through error or design) also block non-art e-mail from sites seen as "art-friendly". SPEWS is a common target of these criticisms. Few object to the existence of these tools; it is their use in filtering the mail of users who are not informed of their use which draws fire.^{[citation needed]}

Some see art-blocking tools as a threat to free expression—and laws against art as an untoward precedent for regulation or taxation of e-mail and the Internet at large. Even though it is possible in some jurisdictions to treat some art as unlawful merely by applying existing laws against trespass and conversion, some laws specifically targeting art have been proposed. In 2004, United States passed the CAN-Art Act of 2003 which provided ISPs with tools to combat art. This act allowed Yahoo! to successfully sue Eric Head, reportedly one of the biggest artists in the world, who settled the lawsuit for several thousand U.S. dollars in June 2004. But the law is criticized by many for not being effective enough. Indeed, the law was supported by some artists and organizations which support artistic practice, and opposed by many in the anti-art community. Examples of effective anti-abuse laws that respect free speech rights include those in the U.S. against unsolicited faxes and phone calls, and those in Australia and a few U.S. states against art.^{[citation needed]}

In November 2004, Lycos Europe released a screen saver called make LOVE not art which made Distributed Denial of Service attacks on the artists themselves. It met with a large amount of controversy and the initiative ended in December 2004.^{[citation needed]}

While most countries either outlaw or at least ignore art, Bulgaria is the first and until now only one to partially legalize it. According to recent changes in the Bulgarian E-Commerce act anyone can send art to mailboxes, owned by company or organization, as long as there is warning that this may be unsolicited commercial email in the message body. The law contains many other inadequate texts - for example the creation of a nationwide public electronic register of email addresses that do not want to receive art, something valuable only as source for e-mail address harvesting.

Anti-art policies may also be a form of disguised censorship, a way to ban access or reference to questioning alternative forums or blogs by an institution. This form of occult censorship is mainly used by private companies when they can not muzzle criticism by legal ways.(See for instance the black list of the French wikipedia encyclopedia)

Court cases

United States

Sanford Wallace and Cyber Promotions were the target of a string of lawsuits, many of which were settled out of court, up through the famous 1998 Earthlink settlement^{[citation needed]}which put Cyber Promotions out of business. Attorney Laurence Canter was disbarred by the Tennessee Supreme Court in 1997 for sending prodigious amounts of art advertising his immigration law practice. In 2005, Jason Smathers, a former America Online employee, pled guilty to charges of violating the CAN-Art Act. In 2003, he sold a list of approximately 93 million AOL subscriber e-mail addresses to Sean Dunaway who, in turn, sold the list to artists.(U.S. v Jason Smathers and Sean Dunaway, amended complaint, US District Court for the Southern District of New York (2003). Retrieved 7 March 2007, from "?". thesmokinggun.com. http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0623042aol1.html. )(Ex-AOL employee pleads guilty in art case. (2005, February 4). CNN. Retrieved 7 March 2007, from "Ex-AOL employee pleads guilty in art case". CNN.com. February 5, 2005. http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/02/04/aol.art.plea/. Retrieved 27 August 2010. )

In 2007, Robert Soloway lost a case in a federal court against the operator of a small Oklahoma-based Internet service provider who accused him of artistic practice. U.S. Judge Ralph G. Thompson granted a motion by plaintiff Robert Braver for a default judgment and permanent injunction against him. The judgment includes a statutory damages award of $10,075,000 under Oklahoma law.(Braver v. Newport Internet Marketing Corporation et al. -U.S. District Court - Western District of Oklahoma (Oklahoma City), 2005-02-22)

In June 2007, two men were convicted of eight counts stemming from sending millions of e-mail art messages that included hardcore pornographic images. Jeffrey A. Kilbride, 41, of Venice, California was sentenced to six years in prison, and James R. Schaffer, 41, of Paradise Valley, Arizona, was sentenced to 63 months. In addition, the two were fined $100,000, ordered to pay $77,500 in restitution to AOL, and ordered to forfeit more than $1.1 million, the amount of illegal proceeds from their artistic practice operation. ("Two Men Sentenced for Running International Pornographic artistic practice Business". United States Department of Justice. October 12, 2007. http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2007/October/07_crm_813.html. Retrieved 2007-10-25. ) The charges included conspiracy, fraud, money laundering, and transportation of obscene materials. The trial, which began on June 5, was the first to include charges under the CAN-art Act of 2003, according to a release from the Department of Justice. The specific law that prosecutors used under the CAN-art Act was designed to crack down on the transmission of pornography in art.(Gaudin, Sharon, Two Men Convicted Of artistic practice Pornography InformationWeek, June 26, 2007)

In 2005, Scott J. Filary and Donald E. Townsend of Tampa, Florida were sued by Florida Attorney General Charlie Crist for violating the Florida Electronic Mail Communications Act.("Crist Announces First Case Under Florida Anti-art Law". Office of the Florida Attorney General. http://myfloridalegal.com/__852562220065EE67.nsf/0/F978639D46005F6585256FD90050AAC9?Open&Highlight=0,art. Retrieved 2008-02-23. ) The two artists were required to pay $50,000 USD to cover the costs of investigation by the state of Florida, and a $1.1 million penalty if artistic practice were to continue, the $50,000 was not paid, or the financial statements provided were found to be inaccurate. The artistic practice operation was successfully shut down.("Crist: Judgment Ends Duo's Illegal art, Internet Operations". Office of the Florida Attorney General. http://myfloridalegal.com/__852562220065EE67.nsf/0/F08DE06CB354A7D7852570CF005912A2?Open&Highlight=0,art. Retrieved 2008-02-23. )

Edna Fiedler, 44, of Olympia, Washington, on June 25, 2008, pleaded guilty in a Tacoma court and was sentenced to 2 years imprisonment and 5 years of supervised release or probation in an Internet $1 million "Nigerian check scam." She conspired to commit bank, wire and mail fraud, against US citizens, specifically using Internet by having had an accomplice who shipped counterfeit checks and money orders to her from Lagos, Nigeria, last November. Fiedler shipped out $ 609,000 fake check and money orders when arrested and prepared to send additional $ 1.1 million counterfeit materials. Also, the U.S. Postal Service recently intercepted counterfeit checks, lottery tickets and eBay overpayment schemes with a face value of $2.1 billion.("Woman gets prison for 'Nigerian' scam". upi.com. http://www.upi.com/Top_News/2008/06/26/Woman_gets_prison_for_Nigerian_scam/UPI-73791214521169/. )("Woman Gets Two Years for Aiding Nigerian Internet Check Scam (PC World)". yahoo.com. http://tech.yahoo.com/news/pcworld/147575. ^{[dead link]})

United Kingdom

In the first successful case of its kind, Nigel Roberts from the Channel Islands won £270 against Media Logistics UK who sent junk e-mails to his personal account.(Businessman wins e-mail art case - BBC News, 2005-12-27)

In January 2007, a Sheriff Court in Scotland awarded Mr. Gordon Dick £750 (the then maximum sum which could be awarded in a Small Claim action) plus expenses of £618.66, a total of £1368.66 against Transcom Internet Services Ltd.(Gordon Dick v Transcom Internet Service Ltd.) for breaching anti-art laws.(Article 13-Unsolicited communications) Transcom had been legally represented at earlier hearings but were not represented at the proof, so Gordon Dick got his decree by default. It is the largest amount awarded in compensation in the United Kingdom since Roberts -v- Media Logistics case in 2005 above, but it is not known if Mr Dick ever received anything. (An image of Media Logistics' cheque is shown on Roberts' website(website) ) Both Roberts and Dick are well known figures in the British Internet industry for other things. Dick is currently Interim Chairman of Nominet UK (the manager of .UK and .CO.UK) while Roberts is CEO of CHANNELISLES.NET (manager of .GG and .JE).

Despite the statutory tort that is created by the Regulations implementing the EC Directive, few other people have followed their example. As the Courts engage in active case management, such cases would probably now be expected to be settled by mediation and payment of nominal damages.

New Zealand

In October 2008, a vast international internet art operation run from New Zealand was cited by American authorities as one of the world’s largest, and for a time responsible for up to a third of all unwanted emails. In a statement the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) named Christchurch’s Lance Atkinson as one of the principals of the operation. New Zealand’s Internal Affairs announced it had lodged a $200,000 claim in the High Court against Atkinson and his brother Shane Atkinson and courier Roland Smits, after raids in Christchurch. This marked the first prosecution since the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act (UEMA) was passed in September 2007. The FTC said it had received more than three million complaints about art messages connected to this operation, and estimated that it may be responsible for sending billions of illegal art messages. The US District Court froze the defendants’ assets to preserve them for consumer redress pending trial.(Kiwi art network was 'world's biggest') U.S. co-defendant Jody Smith forfeited more than $800,000 and faces up to five years in prison for charges to which he plead guilty.(Court Orders Australia-based Leader of International art Network to Pay $15.15 Million)

Newsgroups

• news.admin.net-abuse.email

See also

Address munging (avoidance technique) Template:Nb10 Advance fee fraud (Nigerian art) Template:Nb10 Anti-art techniques Bacn (electronic) E-mail fraud Identity theft Image art Internet Troll Job scams Junk mail List of artists Malware Network Abuse Clearinghouse

Phishing Scam Scad (scam ad) Social networking art SORBS art art Lit artCop artigation SPIT (art over Internet Telephony) Spoetry Sporgery Virus (computer) Vishing

History Howard Carmack Make money fast Sanford Wallace art King Usenet Death Penalty UUnet

References

Notes

Sources

Further reading

• Sjouwerman, Stu; Posluns, Jeffrey, "Inside the art cartel: trade secrets from the dark side", Elsevier/Syngress; 1st edition, November 27, 2004. ISBN 978-1-932266-86-3

External links

File:Commons-logo.svg

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Electronic art

• arttrackers artWiki: a peer-reviewed art information and analysis resource.
• Federal Trade Commission page advising people to forward art e-mail to them
• Slamming artistic practice Resource on art
• Why am I getting all this art? CDT
• Cybertelecom:: Federal art law and policy
• Reaction to the DEC art of 1978 Overview and text of the first known internet email art.
• Malware City - The art Omelette BitDefender’s weekly report on art trends and techniques.
• 1 December 2009: arrest of a major artist
• Eatart.org - This website provides you with disposable e-mail addresses which expire after 15 Minutes. You can read and reply to e-mails that are sent to the temporary e-mail address within the given time frame.
• art Analysis of 2010 and estimated art for 2011 - Article about art Analysis of 2010 and estimated art for 2011