The Fine Line Between Spam And Doing What The System Allows

from the blurry-borders dept

The MySpace community has had issues with "spam" within the system before. A year ago there was the highly publicized case (where the details were murky for a while) involving a guy who was hired (maybe) by MySpace to write a system for sending messages to everyone, but who then tried to extort the company or he would reveal to the world how to spam everyone in MySpace. That guy is now in jail -- which seems reasonable based on the extortion part. However, what about the spamming part? From what happened in that case, it's pretty clear that it wouldn't be that hard to create a system to spam everyone in MySpace... and that's exactly what a few people have done. However, MySpace is now threatening one with a lawsuit, which is where the story gets somewhat interesting. The guy isn't thrilled that he's being considered a spammer and points out that he isn't hacking anything, but just automating the basic process MySpace allows to let people to contact each other. Of course, a spammer is just doing that too to the regular email system. So, while there's an argument that MySpace should just make their system more secure to block out automated tools like this, it's more difficult to reconcile that with the spammer analogy. Either way, though, it would seem that MySpace shouldn't be going after the guy who wrote this software, but those who use it inappropriately. After all, they're the ones who are causing the real problem.

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