The federal government has prevailed on a grand jury to indict Federal Express for servicing what it should have known were illicit online pharmacy operations. FedEx says it repeatedly asked the government to supply a list of shippers it considered illicit so that it could cut off service, but that the government refused; the Department of Justice contends that circumstantial evidence should have been enough to alert the package shipment company. Writes Mike Masnick at TechDirt: “we don’t want shipping companies to be liable for what’s in packages, because then they have not just the incentive, but the mandate to snoop through all our packages.” Amy Alkon has more on reactions. Earlier, UPS paid the government $40 million to resolve similar allegations, and Google agreed to pay a fine of $500 million for (as we put it at the time) “matching willing buyers with sellers through Canadian pharmacy ads… a forfeiture geared to the revenue the pharmacies (not it) took in from the ads.”
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Unionized UPS paid the demanded tribute of $40 Million. Non-unionized Fed-Ex refused and was indicted.
Let’s see if people can get the message: You will buy from the approved list of donors — er, businesses — or, the shippers won’t deliver. Still, this could prove a boon for USPS’s business, since it is unlikely it will be forced to pay a fine or be prosecuted.
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