I'm ambivalent about spam laws. On the one hand it's nice to see something happen to discourage spamming, one could see a system where time served by a spammer is equivalent to time wasted by spam. Take the spammer in the article. He got 100,000 complaints about spam, so if you assume that only one out of ten spammers complain and on average each person spammed has ten of their minutes wasted on average, then the spammer should spend 10,000,000 minutes (19 years) in jail. One could also argue that if accrued minutes go up a factor of ten or so, you may as well just execute the spammer rather than put them in jail for a thousand years.
On the other hand, spam really doesn't really hurt anybody compared to say, what the folx that ran Enron did (and what George Bush did ten years earlier on a smaller scale). Surely a solution can be found that doesn't involve the US justice system. For example, if statistics were kept on internet packets destined for port 25 on all the machines on the internet were kept and used to determine each ISP's line charges, I'm sure that ISPs would go after spammers with a vengance. This system can be maintained without involving end users (and without filling Bill Gates pockets to boot)
Bah humbug
On the other hand, spam really doesn't really hurt anybody compared to say, what the folx that ran Enron did (and what George Bush did ten years earlier on a smaller scale). Surely a solution can be found that doesn't involve the US justice system. For example, if statistics were kept on internet packets destined for port 25 on all the machines on the internet were kept and used to determine each ISP's line charges, I'm sure that ISPs would go after spammers with a vengance. This system can be maintained without involving end users (and without filling Bill Gates pockets to boot)