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Papa John's faces $250 million spam lawsuit
- woodchuck64 14y agoHe's going to have no choice but to pass that cost on to his customers.
- beedogs 14y agoHe could just blame the President again and cut his abused staff's hours some more.
- saraid216 14y agoYou got the order backwards. It's cut the hours then blame someone else.
- hristov 14y agoRiight, and the consumers will keep paying that cost because there is are no other pizza restaurants in America. If only some other company could crack the pizza technology...
- lostlogin 14y agoWish the pizza places near me would crack it. They are either terrible, or 2 hours wages for a nice one.
- richforrester 14y agoBetween $500 and $1500 per sms? Where's the justice in that?
- JulianMorrison 14y agoIt pays for the ones that got away.
- ww520 14y ago$500 is the statue limit per incident of violation and $1500 is the punitive triple damage.
- tlrobinson 14y agoThat's nothing compared to the $150,000 or whatever per song downloaded the RIAA was going for.
- tedunangst 14y agoHas anyone ever been asked to pay money for downloading a song (apart from the obvious, when buying it from a store)?
- jlgreco 14y agoTraditionally they send people scare-letters ("pre-litigation letters")^ offering a settlement for downloading. If people decided to fight it, they usually get brought to court for downloading and "making available" (distinct from uploading). "Making available" has generally been thrown out, as the ill-defined crap that it is. ""The court agrees with the great weight of authority that section 106(3) is not violated unless the defendant has actually distributed an unauthorized copy of the work to a member of the public," wrote the judge in his order. "Merely making an unauthorized copy of a copyrighted work available to the public does not violate a copyright holder's exclusive right of distribution."" http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9932004-7.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9932004-7.html So basically they sue/sued people for downloading as well as some crap they made up. Regardless, senseless pedantry. Here is a 'fixed' statement if you are terribly bothered: "That's nothing compared to the $150,000 or whatever per song downloaded and/or 'made available' the RIAA was going for." ^ http://www-tech.mit.edu/V127/N24/riaa/letter.pdf http://www-tech.mit.edu/V127/N24/riaa/letter.pdf This example pre-litigation letter uses the phrasing: "distributed (i.e., by uploading) and/or reproduced (i.e., by downloading)"
- tzs 14y agoIn both cases where people ended up facing such large fines, the RIAA repeatedly offered to settle for much much much smaller amounts, typically around $2-4 per song that the person was sharing. The defendants decided to reject these offers, even though the MINIMUM POSSIBLE fine if they lost in court would be much larger than the RIAA was asking for. Typical numbers would look something like this. The person shared a couple thousand songs, and the RIAA asked for maybe $5k. When the person refused, the RIAA would sue over around 20 of the songs, and the RIAA would have an airtight case. The best case realistic outcome for the defendant would be for the jury to award the minimum possible damages: $750/song, so the defendant would end up owing about $15k, which is about 3 times what they could have settled for. That was their best case outcome. In reality, the jury would generally opt for something between the minimum and maximum, and so they got the big fines. Then they would appeal. Incredibly, the RIAA would then offer again to settle for a few thousand (total--not per song). And the defendant would refuse, get another trial, and get a jury that opted for even higher up on the damage scale. Oops. Basically, these defendants were either idiots, or they were taken advantage of by attorneys of questionable ethical judgement who put their desire to argue novel dubious copyright theories in court over the interests of their client.
- wilfra 14y agoI don't know but I'd be willing to settle with Round Table Pizza and AT&T Wireless for $100 per text and a promise that they will stop SMS spamming me.
- arbuge 14y agoI believe email spam is $16,000 per email now...
- lostlogin 14y agoWish that went to me. Inbox overflowing.
- ww520 14y agoSMS spam is worse than email spam since lots of people pay for each message received.
- bonchibuji 14y agoIncoming messages are still charged?
- joejohnson 14y agoIf they get fined $250 million, how are they going to be able to pay for their employees health insurance?
- GuiA 14y agoThe price of every pizza will increase by $10.
- antsam 14y agoI'm waiting to see how they can blame this on employee health insurance.
- citricsquid 14y agoSpeaking of Pizza spam, Domino's in the UK do some sleezy things with their ordering. After entering your order information and proceeding to the delivery page you're asked to input your email, name and phone number (so they can contact you if the driver can't find your address). The form has 2 check boxes, before May 2012 this stated "Tick the boxes below if you want to receive marketing material via SMS and Email" however sometime around May 2012 they changed this to state "Tick the boxes if you do not want to receive marketing material via SMS and Email". Any customer that has previously used Domino's pizza (probably most people that order?) has gotten so used to their form that they don't think to re-read every input. I got caught out by it and it's really really lame that they did that. Not only are they going against the conventions we all expect (tick to include, not tick to exclude) they switched it to trick customers! I wonder if they're breaking similar laws.
- philip1209 14y agoI understand the immorality, but is there a basis for illegality? If I wanted to cause trouble, I would randomize the appearance of the "do not" and maybe even the syntax.
- DanBC 14y agoYou can't go too far or the information commissioner will want a word. Obviously that's hypothetical - the ICO is too busy to go after anyone implementing your idea.
- jQueryIsAwesome 14y agoIt reminds me of one time when one local phone company decided to subscribe everyone to a new automatic answer service and everyone received a letter that if they don't wanted this new (paid) service they had to call the phone company. They lost the lawsuits.
- circa 14y agoBetter ingredients, better spam, Papa Johns!
- __david__ 14y agoI don't understand how franchises work. If there were a couple franchises that were responsible for sending the texts, why is the main Papa John's company getting sued, and not the responsible franchises? Especially after the main company seemingly told all the franchises to knock it off when they noticed...
- lotu 14y agoThe little franchises that actually did this don't have millions of dollars which limit the maximum payout of the lawsuit.
- namank 14y agoI think it takes the same skill to discover cases with potential for class action suits as it does to discover and flesh out great ideas. Think I should start networking with these kind of lawyers and use their skill to develop my ideas.
- webfuel 14y agoI wonder if some of those 500,000 messages were relationship or transactional in nature since the FCC does not ban those [1] 1. http://www.fcc.gov/guides/spam-unwanted-text-messages-and-email http://www.fcc.gov/guides/spam-unwanted-text-messages-and-em...