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Judge Deems Washington Anti-Spam Law Unconstitutional
ThatGuyAZ writes "A King County (Wash.) Superior Court Judge threw out a lawsuit under the tough Washington Anti-Spam law, calling the law "unduly restrictive and burdensome" in limiting interstate commerce. While the state can appeal this low-level ruling, this is definitely the opening shot in the coming legal battle over state attempts to regulate spam. "
Spam is _NOT_ free speech.
Spam is THEFT.
Free speech says "you may believe and express your opinions, whatever they are."
Free speech does NOT say "You can force people to listen to your expression."
Freedom of expression != right to be heard.
If you walk into your local news office, and say "I want to be on the air, you have to let me because it says free speech in the constitution", you'd be laughed out of the station. If you sued them because they wouldn't let you speak on the air, you'd be laughed out of court.
Fuck, why don't you just pull your head out of your ass before you post garbage like this.
*SHEESH*
Theft is a bad thing, the Spammers Ways Must Stop. Jihad! Know a spammer? Halt them with legal warnings. Cause them economic pain and grief, burn them with the law, ruin them, they must suffer. Close their accounts, ruin their business. Sue them. Take them to court. Never ever purchase any product or service from them. Call the Attorney General's Office on them. Their ways and business must stop. They are simply thieves! They have been stealing from us long enough.
t m
It is about time that legal action is being taken against these people who are continuing to send out spam (unsolicited advertisement e-mail.) It is plain and simple a form of theft when they spam people. Reasons are as follows. I/We pay any where from $10.00 to $30.00 a month for access to the net, then another ~$20.00+ a month for phone service (plus long distance for some, or gods forbid cellular,) and the money invested in our equipment. Not to forget the time it takes to download and sort the spam from the real mail.
This is not like postal junk mail where the mailer pays a fee for each message for delivery. This is not like banner ads on web pages that help pay for content. This not like commercials on TV, radio, or magazines and newspapers that help pay for content. Furthermore the increase of junk e-mail is driving up the costs of using ISPs as they have to upgrade some services to handle the load in stead of upgrading other services that may have been wanted by the customers. I have no problem with advertisements on web pages and other media when they pay for the content I am viewing, much of that content may never be there without it. But when then invade my personal communication methods I get a little angry. I also do not tolerate telephone telemarketers, they are just as bad but at least they will honor do not contact requests.
Again. it is a form of theft. It is theft when the relay via third party systems without their permission or knowledge (trespass and use of another's equipment.) It is theft then the spam in violation of the terms of service of their provider, (violation of a contract.) Spamming is theft of time when we have to download their message and separate it from other real e-mail especially then they use deceptive subjects lines (My time has value to me.) It is theft when they cause services to overload and crash, (denial of services.) It is theft when the network is bogging down and we are trying to get data we paid for (again denial of service.) This causes them to raise their prices, (to recover lost costs.) In effect all Unsolicited Advertisement (Junk) E-Mail is sent POSTAGE DUE.
Internet commerce is NOT Bad; it is in fact generally good. I/we do not oppose people trying to promote ideas, services and products via the Internet, while trying to do something about mass unsolicited e-mail advertisements. I/we are NOT opposed to people trying to make money via the Internet nor it's commercialization in the appropriate contexts. Private e-mail boxes are not those places. Spamming is intolerable because unethical business practices and exploitation of other peoples' private systems and of the Internet it is costing all of us time and money. Spammers give legitimate businesses trying to use the Internet for business a bad name, crashing computer systems everywhere, ruining cyber experiences to new and old user alike while filling out private e-mail boxes with tripe at a cost to us.
http://www.eskimo.com/~delisle/warning.letter.h
(Mr. Bentor)
Once you see it in your inbox, you've already paid for it. You got absolutely no choice at all.
Welcome to Europe. I pay for evey minute I'm connected to the internet. *EVERY MINUTE* No flat fee.
When you send me spam, I've *ALREADY PAID FOR IT* by the time it hits my inbox.
So, in the t-shirt example, the equivalent would be you have to pay a dollar to get the t-shirt, and you can't get any of your mail until you get the shirt.
And you get 20-30 t-shirts a day.
So, just for the record:
On the other hand, blocking IP's of gratuitous spammers does work. Boycotts and public pressure work, but it's a clumsy, expensive, and ad-hoc solution. The law is also a clumsy, expensive solution, but the threat of the law is such that the clumsy, expensive parts seldom come into play.
The reason the court threw out the case is because interstate commerce is under federal jurisdiction. We need a federal law against unsolicited mass email, just like we have against unsolicited fax, war dialers, and telemarketing to cellphones.
For Joe Net Surfer, *every* ISP he goes to has clauses in the TOS that say "no spamming or you're cancelled and subject to fines/litigation/etc.". Maybe the rules are different for the bigger customers. What ISPs don't have this clause? Start a list. Other ISPs should refuse to transport the packets from the bad ISP. Eventually spam friendly ISPs will be stangled off from the net and will GET THE MESSAGE. The net is a cooperative anarchy. Use it like USENET uses the USENET DEATH PENALTY.
palmer.robinson@metrokc.gov
You are absolutely right! Spammers are the scum of the earth. The only solution to spam is a legal one, and the only way to get a legal solution is to annoy the bribe-takers in Washington enough that they respond positively. That's why I have been forwarding all my spam to my congressman for the last year. I WANT to annoy him, until he does something about it. (So far, his computer sends me a polite "Thank you" every time . . .) PLEASE join me in this . . . forward all your spam to your congressman! It will take a LOT of spam to be effective, because the spammers are making "campaign contributions" to your congressman while you merely ask him to do what is right.
Spam sucks!
How do junk faxes deal with the state boundary issue? Admittedly area codes would lessen it, but unless area codes never cross state lines then there would be some problems, and even if area codes are set up so that that never happens then special numbers (800 and such) must be a problem. Perhaps we can learn something from what appears to be a sucessful implementation of a similar (albeit smaller) problem.
Who supplies you with these magic hard drives that only cost money when they store information you like? I could use a zillion of these magic free mass storage units for my ISP's mail servers.
It would seem that nearly all telemarketers have lists of cell phone prefixes and make sure *not* to call them, bacause they know calling people paying for "airtime" (charged for making *and* receiving calls), will be pissed that they're paying to hear about great offers from balh blah blah. Is this courtesy by the marketers or required by law? And why should not the same philosophy apply to email spammers?
first post! haha
No, because that would be unsolicited *personal* email. If you found a list of your graduating class and emailed them all "hello", that would be spam.
Spam isn't really about content, it's about repetition. People complain about commercial spam because those who spam for their own economic benefit are the most common. But there has been religious spam, political spam, and other noncommercial senders of unsolicited messages that are just as harmful as any individual commercial spam.
The most significant cost of spam is the cost in time and effort to filter the noise out of their mailbox. Spam apologists say "just hit delete", and sure, it takes only a couple of seconds to delete each one. But if you multiply that by a million recipients, you're talking about thousands of man-hours appropriated piecemeal by a large spam.
Besides that, there's the noise problem. If you only take 2 seconds to delete each spam, what's the chance that you'll delete a real message by mistake? One in a hundred? One in a thousand? A conscientious person would have to take substantially more time than 2 seconds to make sure he isn't tossing out the baby with the bathwater.
The reason spam is such a problem compared to snailmail and telemarketing is that the cost of spam to the sender is trivial compared to its cost to the recipient. The spammer just sets up his spam factory and presses the button.
Postal spam is annoying, but it's kept down by a fixed minimum cost per item. Telephone spam is kept to a barely tolerable level by the legal requirement that an actual person must be on the other end. Before this law was in place, automated dialers playing recorded messages over the phone threatened to make telephone service useless. Sound familiar?
If the DMA doesn't stop pushing for "responsible mainstream spam", they're likely to get backlash in their old-media standbys as well. I would just as soon pass laws that ban telemarketing altogether, and add a postal service option to bar unsolicited snailmail from my USPS box.
The guy who approaches me on the street doesn't force me to open my wallet and pay hard currency for the privilege of hearing him say "Hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?"
If he tries, he's engaging in robbery, and is a criminal.
So the difference is basically that spammers aren't criminals yet, even though they're engaged in robbery.
When 's the next defcon, anyway?
As a Washington State resident, I am dismayed to see our beloved anti-spam law ruled unconstitutional. I was really looking forward to suing spammers. However, I believe that the judge is correct in this case. Washington's law goes beyond Washington's power- one state has no jurisdiction over the residents of any other state, even if they do happen to send spam to a resident of the former. Unfortunately, it seems that an individual state can do almost nothing to stop spam, and that legislation at the federal level is necessary. It would be interesting to see if a new protocol for email could be devised that would be inherently resistant to spam...
Your right to speak does not entitle you to be a public nuisance. Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. Freedom of the press does not entitle you to use my press.
Besides that, I would rather not see the government get the power to enforce tracability on the net. They want it too badly already, to track down those nasty hackers, copyright violators, reverse engineers, and other terrorists. Full tracability would be a much worse threat to civil liberties than antispam laws.
From the site of Carney Badley Smith & Spellman, PS:
Palmer Robinson Appointed Judge
January 2000
Carney attorney Palmer Robinson was appointed by Governor Gary Locke to serve as a judge in the King County Superior Court. The Governor described Palmer as "a private attorney specializing in complex civil cases, including product and liquor liability, insurance and employment law." Palmer joined Carney in 1982. She attended Hastings School of Law in California and served as the first female president of the Washington Defense Trial Lawyers. According to Governor Locke, Palmer brings a vast well of civil litigation "knowledge" to the bench. She is universally respected by the trial bar and will be a superb judge.
palmer.robinson@metrokc.gov
If so, this is a clear indication that your web-browser has certain insecure options enabled that allow the sites that you visit to grab your email address or to determine more about you than you probably want them to know.
Conversely, if you dis-able insecure web-browser options that allow web sites to capture compromising information about your identity, then you won't receive any spam.
In this respect, spam is your first line of defense in protecting your online privacy. If you regularly receive spam, then it's because your system is probably being run with a default configuration that enables insecure browser options.
In this respect, the solution to spam is not screaming at the courts. The solution is to have enough of a clue so that you know how your web-browser works so that you know when to enable/dis-able certain options as required.
You are a true hero! (no, that's not sarcasm)
Are there any federal laws concerning spam?
Receiving spam is not an indication that your web-browser has certain insecure options. Granted it is possible for a misconfigured browser to provide a spammer with your email address, this is not where most spammers get their lists from.
My browser does not have any insecure options enabled. There is also no personal data of any kind stored in my browser. I also connect to the internet through an anonymizing proxy and everything is filtered through junkbuster. And I still recieve spam. Why? Spammers get their lists from the web, from usenet, and from web boards like slashdot. It is very easy to set up a spider to collect large lists of email addresses from the web and usenet.
Do you have a website with your email address listed there? then you are at risk. Do you have a Slashdot account with your real email address listed? Then you are at risk. Have you ever used your email address to subscribe to anything online, including websites like slashdot, or products or services? Then you are at risk. You may have noticed several Slashdot users with email addresses like: joeuser@N-O-SPAM.isp.com . This is done so that their email addresses are not collected by any spiders. The spiders are not smart enough to tell that the real email address is joeuser@isp.com .
You do not want your email address to wind up in the hands of a spammer. Spammers also sell lists to each other. You do not need to have a misconfigured browser to recieve spam, all you need is your email address posted anywhere on the web or usenet. Also signing up for "Free porn in your email!" is not a very smart thing to do, unless you are conducting research on the effects of spam on the human mind.
Even if you take precautions, there is still a chance that your email address will wind up in the hands of a spammer. E.g. is not easy to use webmaster@SPAMMERS-MUST-DIE.asset.com as your email address on the company website. I personaly think that the solution to spam is a fully loaded M1 Carbine and a few good men (The court system is too slow for me). Knowing how your web-browser works is very little help.
It's like I always say: Judges should not have the power to nullify a law for any reason. If the law is unconstitutional it should be repealed through the legislative process. The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly, as Abraham Lincoln said.
Puh-lease. Legislatures pass laws knowing that they're unconstitutional. It will stay on the books until somebody complains about it.
Take Mandatory Minimum Sentences, for example. They took sentencing away from the judges and put thousands of non-violent drug offenders in prison for 15 years a pop.
Meanwhile, the murderers and rapists get out in 5 years. Congress ain't gonna repeal that for fear of being "soft on crime".
You will have an address like "username@isp.com.CA.US" where the CA stands for California, the state that I chose randomly for this example. The state where you are billed will be properly represented.
At the same time, all servers will have to conform to this same naming structure, but with the state being the physical location where the server is hosted.
Now, the gubment can regulate e-mail, spam, porn, gambling, piracy and all other sorts of fun stuff.
Here's a cluestick. Beat yourself.
On the other hand, my ISP is a unix shell provider. I don't download anything other than the text being displayed. All mail is stored on the server side, even when I save it to my home directory (also on the server side).
Yes, and if they do they should be punished for their theft of bandwidth just like anyone else.
You know, I actually bought that argument until I heard you put it just like that. It's not illegal for somebody to send junkmail to your house or your company, to drop it through a mail slot and to make you sort through it. They don't have to compensate you for your time. You do lose money, albeit not much.
Making spam illegal is standing on a slipperly slope. If you make spam illegal, what gets censored next? Maybe threatening emails, or emails with other specific subjects? Censor anything else you find offensive? Besides, it would be nearly impossible to craft anti-spam legislation that wouldn't make some perfectly legitimate email illegal as well.
Making spam illegal is not the solution. The solution is to give those being spammed more rights. Give me back the right to my identity. I control which corporate entities "know" about me and what they "know". Imagine a requirement that when a company gets your name from you or another source that they are required to send you notification and a check one of the following list:
- you can send me more information
- you can provide my identity to other companies - by not completing and returning this form, you will be removed from our lists
That's the kind of right we need. No laws even, just the right to our identities.
Of course, the judge is wrong. Forging email headers is fraud and there is plenty of precedent to support this.
You have no idea. Please read some of the anti-spam sites. One email address subscription can be copied a million times.
I like Porn as long as I didn't find out about it by Spam.
I'm OK, Your OK, unless you spam me and then you must die a slow painfull death.
Disclaimer: This post is meant to be funny, please don't have me arrested or anything.
no no no, I think he's quite right. Let's allow EVERYONE who uses the net to distribute whatever views they see fit by bulk email, including commercial spam.
That way, several million companies can send several million emails, every day. This will make everyone on the internet a lot happier, because their email boxes will overflow every day, and they'll feel, like, SO loved.
In addition, we can let everyone from the NRA to the IRA and the KKK to flood everyone's email boxes (including children's) with messages encouraging them to guy guns, kill women and children, and reintroduce slavery for everyone with a tan above "light".
I think that's an almost Utopian view of the world (as far as freedom of speech is concerned), and I can't wait to get my next message telling me that if I fly over the Atlantic I can pick up really good deals at "Mario's Honest Motors". I really hope that everyone who wants to will be allowed to send misleading, untraceable spam, and that as a result all the ISPs grind to a halt as their servers stop coping.
Spammers should be applauded for forcing the net to upgrade to much higher spec machines, while decreasing the performance overall. Wooo.
I don't understand the guys who like spam. I consider it intolerable. You see, I live in Israel. That's right. No overnight shipment (usually no shipment at all). No access to fancy-shmancy US-style diet offers (when I wanna get thin, I eat less). BTW, I'm 15 years of age, so I neither do I enjoy adult p0rn sites. I end up with a lot of TOTALLY unnecessary mail in my inbox, and no apprehensible outcome. My mail adresses are for PERSONAL purposes. However I'm afraid that the only way to get me out of some lists now is to launch an EMP near their server.
SPAM is the greatest evil of the Internet. It needs to be stopped at all costs. These losers need to spend serious hard time in prison.
moderate this up!!!!
You could just post his e-mail address to Slashdot.
the moron who moderated this up didn't follow the link or wants us to visit a so called trench coat mafia page. humor at best, waste of time at worst. its not what moderation should be.
One salesman whinged at me. "Do you have a home phone number that's not a cell phone?" My answer: "Yes, but this number is more convenient, so that's the one I'd like to use!".
I don't know if it's industry custom, state law, or federal law, but it works pretty damn good. I can't even remember if I've gotten a single telemarketing call on this phone.
Spam passes the costs of advertising onto the receivers (user & ISP), much like junk faxes, which are already banned. Especially in places like Europe - you're paying by the minute while you wait for your spam to download. Other people pay based on how much bandwidth they use, and most people have limits on mail storage. Spam can be seen as a denial of service attack if it fills up your mailbox and causes real mail to bounce. And thousands of spams can bring down a server like the Slashdot effect. At least with paper mail, advertisers have to pay for the paper and delivery. Usually there's no way to get off of spam lists either. The reply-to addresses are faked, or used as an indicator that your account is active (i.e. a remove request can actually add you to more lists).
*Thwaps the moderator who marked this up* Click through the link next time!
As for Mr. Anon Coward, don't you have anything better to do? And your site's not funny, either.
I'm just a poor starving law student (in Washington state) so take these observations with a grain of salt...
By relying on the Commerce Clause to dismiss the lawsuit, the judge undermined the state's right to do anything in the consumer-protection arena. I guess all you have to do is to move outside the state of Wash. to do all sorts of nasty things, and Wash. residents can't touch ya. Yeah right, like that's going to work on appeal.
Moveover, legislation banning certain forms of unsolicited adversiting,faxes, akin to the Wash. statue in question has been upheld. For example, a federal appeals court in Destination Ventures v. FCC, 46 F.3d 54 (9th Cir. 1995), upheld the Federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, 47 U.S.C. 227. prohibiting the transmission of "junk faxes" on the basis that it demostrated a "reasonable fit" between the asserted interest, here, cost-reduction and consumer protection (sound similar?)and the legislation in question.
Likewise, state legislation to this effect has also been upheld. In Minnesota v. Universial Credit Card, Inc., 491 N.W.2d 882 (Minn. 1992) the Minnesota Supreme Court upheld a state-statue prohibiting certain forms of telemarketing using automated devices. There, the court found that to strike down the law would "depriv[e listeners] of the ability to select the expression to which he or she will expose herself or himself."
Maybe it's just me, but I don't see the difference between faxes, telemarketing and spam where the sender exercises some form of control over who they send the "message" to and the reciever has the burden of dealing with it. Nor do I see how imposing a constraint on the state of Washington's ability to protect it's citizens from these effects is anymore "unduly restrictive and burdensome" than what exists and constitutionally permissible at present....
The thing is, the guy on the street doesn't walk up to you, pretend to be a long lost friend, and then try to sell you the watch. In contrast, a lot of spammers do attempt to do this, and it is really obnoxious.
/dev/null
Much as I dislike junk mail of any kind, I can accept spam as long as it identifies it as such (eg: with ADV at the beginning of the title). That way I can filter the crap out of my main box, and either read it at my leasure or send it to
It is exactly a judge's job to figure out, for each case, which laws apply and how to apply them. Sometimes - and this is inevitable with any complex system, legal or otherwise - some of the rules will conflict. In some of these cases, a law is completely incompatible with another law. In other cases, it's just in odd circumstances where one law will conflict with another law.
It is precisely the judge's job in cases like that to decide how to apply the conflicting laws. Usually, one will win over the other. In the U.S., the Constitution always wins.
What do you suggest as an alternative? That the judge simultaneously apply both, inconsistent, laws? I'd be interested in your description of how that would happen.
I hope he loses a fortune trying to defend himself and loses his house, car, wife, and children. We don't need morons like him urinating in our gene pool. Keep those wheels of justice turning. Good riddance!
Even if Mother Teresa's ghost sent out the messages, it would be spam. Your argument is totally flawed.
To regulate the Internet effectively, especially the non-commercial aspects, would need a world government, or a complex multi-lateral treaty and an international enforcement agency. The former seems unlikely in the near future; the latter would be too slow to set up and too slow to change. Perhaps if the Internet stabilises.
Some regulation is possible in the commercial level. The UK, for instance, could legislate to require UK credit card companies to extract "no spam" contracts from the merchants they deal with, making it hard for spammers to collect money for whatever they're trying to sell. On the other hand, if you make it too expensive to be a UK crredit card company, offshore operations would just set up and take their business.
>...throwing notes wrapped around bricks through your windows, etc).
Maby that whould work on the judge?!)
FRA: STFU GTFO
I propose vigilante justice. If someone spams, give the bastard an old-fashioned kneecapping. If they persist, shoot'em. There's no justice like mob justice.
s> Why people would think of a law prohibiting spam is really beyond me. I s> get junk mail at home that I can ignore and I have a little button on my s> heyboard that corresponds to a function known as a "delete message" s> function that really works wonders.
I don't have kids (yet), but in the future, kids will start to read e-mail at the age of five or earlier (I only had newspapers and comics back then, sniff). I don't want their mailboxes to be flooded with porn spam mails. On the other hand, this problem is much worse with the web, so.. :(
--
# Ed -- amo, ergo sum
# amo, ergo sum
Sure, the college does. Many do. The one I attend does and thwaps students who abuse it. That college is also privately owned. However, most (if not all) of the times the Napster issue has been brought up here, it has been related to a public school. In that case, the bandwidth belongs to those attending the school (and the rest of the community), and it is up to public policy to decide what is and what is not abuse. Another take on it is that students pay decently to attend college (if the students don't pay themselves, Uncle Sam does). In all but a very few cases, the attending students provide the money for the bandwidth that they consume. Let's continue the analogy. I personally do not care if my customers consume my bandwidth. That's what they pay my company for, and that's what they get. However, when people are consuming the bandwidth to annoy my customers, there's a very plain difference. Depending on how you define the "ownership" of an arbitrarty college's bandwidth, the issue can swing either way. What might be a more pertinent question (with regards to Napster) is whether or not the bandwidth is being consumed for illegal activity.
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
The difference, you see, is that if someone browses to a porn site, that person, most-likely, wants to see porn. Spam is the unauthorized use of an email address (and, by association, an ISP's disc space and bandwidth) for commercial gain at absolutely no commercial risk (IE: they're not going to reimburse anyone, so there's no advertising cost). Free speech is good. Coming into my house and screaming my ear isn't. Freedom of the press is good. Stealing my paper and posting flyers with it isn't. The difference lies in whose resources are committed to whose gain. Or, as Pokey the Penguin would say: "I do not fund your numbskullery!".
Pining for the days when The Glorious MEEPT!!! graced SlapDash with his wisdom.
For me, at least, spam is not near as big a problem as are circulars - at least in the realm of how many I receive per day.
Well, in the country I come from (Germany) it costs me almost no effort to get no circulars at all. A simple sticker on the mailbox stating "No Ads" is sufficient. Is there no such thing in the US?
Pity it isn't that easy to get rid of spam once and for all...
Argathin
This sounds very similar to a lot of the comments made about state sales tax on the internet. You're right - it's impractical to make people on the net worry about every possible destination of their mail or web page. Perhaps it makes more sense to make it illegal to send spam from Washington. That will be more enforceable and more reasonable - this way you are only regulating your own state, and only people in your state are subject to your laws. That's the way it should be.
I'm gleefully dreaming of winning a lottery and using the proceedings to setup a good Anti-UCE shop and tossing every weapon available at making some marketeers regret ever having even though of using email as a promotional medium!
Send money, guns and lawyers.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Uh-oh, I'm about to get slashdotted...
--Tom Geller, suespammers.org czar
Tom Geller
That's right, Palmer Robinson's position is up for election in 2000. How many readers actually are in Washington? I'm sure we will be able to vote his sorry butt out of pubic office for good, since he has no place being there. Hope everyone from Washington (in King County, hehe) will make it to the polls!
EMYL,
Your T-shirt argument is making less and less sense.
I don't pay a dime for the email i recieve. One flat fee gets me all the email and surfing i want. And sorting through spam amounts to the same inconvience as sorting through real mail for letters and bills and then throwing away what i don't want. I don't mind that... My time's valuable, but spam is a necessary evil, i'd say. Laws could and should be enforced to kick off the trully fraudulent offers, but "legitatmate" spam should be allowed to exist.
More like irony...
"I can't wear this shirt because it has DeCSSsource code written on it, and that's a violation of my right to free speech, but I don't like what this person's sending me so let's make a law that make's them stop... Better yet, let's devise a way to block them from accessing our internet!"
It's just that there are some bad apples out there. Independants.
Look at the direct marketing industry as an example that spammers should follow. Or really, they should join the DMA and act like real businesses, rather than the fly-by-night operations that currently exist.
Yes, there's some bad seeds in direct mail, too. There's bad seeds everywhere. Websites that exist only to steal credit card numbers. Hackers or crackers sitting around their dens with nothing better to do than probe my home machine day in and day out. Etc.
But if spammers just followed a few precendents already set, the world would be much better. For instance, require them to use legitamate domains to mail from. Also require them to collect the email addresses of people who want out. That way, before each round of spam was sent out, they could merge their list against a not-list so as to not mail to people who had told someone else they didn't wish to receive email anymore.
But for spammers to follow some guidelines, the people on the receiving end would have to do a little to be more "accomodating". For instance, if spammers were to use legitamate domains, ISP's should NOT simply bar those domains from sending email into their domains. Instead, rely upon the users to "opt out". If the spammer complies with the users requests, let them be free to do what they want. If the spammer ignores request like that, then, at that point, bar their domain.
Pretty much, they need to be forced into compliance with some standards.
Your servers may be private property. Maybe they shouldn't be. OR think of them as real life mailboxes. They're on your property, but everyone is welcome to send stuff to you. In the real world, if you get offers you don't like, you CAN generally find the culprit. You can also submit your name to the DMA and most legitamate mailers will oblige and cease mailing to you.
I don't have to pay for your T-shirt if i don't want it. Just like spam. Just like anything else. Unless you go ahead and charge me for it without me saying yes, do whatever you'd like.
I don't mind people publishing anything. Spammers can advertise their services on a web page as much as they want. If I decide to spend the money to use my 'net connection to read those pages, that is my choice. However, I refuse to subsidize their advertisements by having their ads forced upon me. By emailing me spam and raising my ISP's prices, they are charging me for their publications. I am under no obligation to pay for another's free speech.
I guess the rest of us just aren't as used to being stolen from as you are. Maybe someday we can attain your level of godlike indifference when we are wronged. I'll start the meditation: OMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm...
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Yes, but you are missing a fundamental difference in these different types of "marketing." In the case of physical junk mail there is no actual cost in receiving the piece of mail. Those costs were paid in advance by the company sending the mail. With electronic junk mail (spam) the receiver may also incurr a charge for receiving the mail.
This cost can come in different forms. For example, in most European countries, you pay for your time on-line by the minute, even if the call is local. For businesses (even in the US) that have leased lines, it is possible that they pay for the actual bandwidth used, so downloading spam from their mail server costs them money!
Just because it is relatively easy to delete spam, doesn't mean that it should simply be ignored. There are other factors to consider.
---
At least in Virginia, and probably other places, SPAM has been criminalized. Why? The reason ISPs have problem with SPAM is its costs them money for the storage and reception.
Causing finacial damange is something that can be sued to recover. AOL has done it, so has PSINet.
Besides, the implications are a bit uncomfortable with possible free speech restrictions by making it a criminal matter instead of civil.
Besides, I live in the weird triangle in Northern Virginia that AOL, MCIWorldCom, and PSINet describe with their headquarters and talk with Bill Schrader on a regular basis (CEO PSINet). He doesn't like SPAM criminalization any more than I do.
WRONG! It is about spam. What business operating in an unethical manner has a reasonable expectation to conduct trade across state lines free from restraint? To quote from the article:
Jim Kendall, president of the Washington Association of Internet Service Providers, a trade group that works with the Attorney General's Office to maintain the electronic registry, was likewise critical of the judge's ruling.
"If the judge is going to say we're putting too much of a burden on someone who is acting unethically, I have to scratch my head and say, `Excuse me? That doesn't make sense to me,' " Kendall said.
This is why Jim Kendall's Telebyte Northwest remains my ISP!
Also, states are allowed to protect consumers within their jurisdiction on a state by state basis. Washington's Law was enacted under the Consumer Protection Act. Perhaps you'd prefer its tougher replacement, a criminal statute?
--B
How many times a day do you want to press that "Delete" key? 5? 10? 20? 100? 200? 1000? 10,000? ...? Spam grows and grows, because once your e-mail address gets on a spam list, you will NEVER get it off. Those "remove" addresses are either fake or tell the spammer "hey, this is a real address!" and the spammer can make more money selling real addresses than removing them from lists.
You probably receive less than 10 spams a day. Lucky you. Many people in the U.S. have been forced to abandon e-mail addresses because they receive too much spam. 200 spams a day is often the number at which e-mail becomes unusable.
How much does each spam cost? When you add up storage costs, transmission costs and the like, you may find that the cost to the recipient of a spam is about one cent (precise currency doesn't matter). Not much? OK, now imagine getting 200 a day (might be over multiple e-mail addresses). Now that's $700 a year. Would you prefer to keep that $700 for yourself, or spend it receiving crap that you never asked for and that you do not want?
Also imagine that you take 5 seconds to identify each spam and delete it. At 200 spams a day, that's 1,000 seconds a day, about 20 minutes per day, 120 hours per year. Would you rather spend that time deleting spams or doing other things?
Receiving a spam is like being bitten by a mosquito. It's annoying in small doses, but intolerable in large doses. If you were being bitten by 200 mosquitoes a day, would you put up with them, or would you put up flyscreens? If you receive 200 spams a day, would you put up with them, or would you want this blatant abuse of the Internet outlawed?
If you are still unsure as to why spam is a problem, please visit the The Coalition Against Commercial E-mail website for more information.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Spamcop works well most of the time, and is useful for tracing a spam quickly if you don't want to spend the time manually running PING and TRACEROUTE and the like. Be aware when using it that complex "Received" chains can occasionally cause it to misidentify the source, so using it with knowledge of how e-mail works gives the best results.
I use it myself and I report up to 10 spams a day with it. It is most satisfying when you receive that e-mail that says the account/web site/domain has been cancelled.
Now who remembers lawyer jokes? I've found that substituting "spammer" for "lawyer" often works well, and gives us a whole new genre of jokes to work with.
Q: What do you call 5,000 spammers on the bottom of the ocean?
A: A good start.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
... is a commercial web and POP-based email service that charges, say, $25.00 for a lifetime email address.
The gist of the business is this:
We can't guarantee absolutely that you won't see any spam here, but we will monitor our mail transport daemons for high-volume traffic from any one address, and investigate that address. We will also investigate spam mail forwarded to us by our users. The point of this investigation would be to pursue legal and monetary damages from a spammer, putting known spammers (or those whose emails are obviously spam - say, sending email to everyone at your domain at the same time)on deny lists, and charging, say, $100 per email processed and bounced. Emails from spammers will be sampled and examples of these emails sent to root@ and abuse@ and postmaster@ of the domains of origin. Make it clear that if the spammer is not dealt with in rapid fashion, or if the domain does not clamp down on its practices, you will start charging THEM for processing emails from that domain.
There has to be a legitimate service business idea floating around in that flotsam somewhere.
--Corey
Not only will they not deserve liberty or safety, Mr. Franklin, they will be DENIED both!
ISTR Exim allows you to specify an arbitrary character as the separator. If spammers did get wise to the + symbol trick, all you do is change the symbol used.
This is absolutely wonderful. SPAM'ers have rights, too... They're human beings just like the rest of us.
/dev/null and just go back to smoke signals.
And so is the Unabomber.
Heck, who are they hurting? It's not like my mailserv chokes on SPAM twice a week or anything - I get a sick sense of joy when it does... Makes me glad to know the American economy is grinding away.
I say someone finds the judge's e-mail and we all introduce him to the wonderful world of SPAM.
Honestly, it's a federal offence to go around your neighborhood and put anything (flyers, etc.) into your neighbor's mailboxes... You're supposed to go the normal route and pay way too much so that the USPS can lose it. SPAM'ers should be required to live by rules, too - forging IP's and routes and failing to tag with "ADV:" should be capital offences.
I'm tempted to send all my mail to
Tell it to the Supreme Court. It has long been recognized that commercial speech is subject to greater restriction than non-commercial speech.
legal battle over state attempts to regulate spam
To quote Neo, "Whoa!" I know Spam is some pretty dangerous stuff, but they pack it in that jelly to keep it stable. I never knew the states wanted to regulate it.
--
then it comes to be that the soothing light at the end of your tunnel is just a freight train coming your way
Yes but, *you* sign up for a mailing list. If you don;t like the volume, you can filter everything from that list or just unsubscribe.
You don't sign up for spam, you can't just unsubscribe, you can't always filter it out.
You pay the cost of receiving it, both in terms of disk space used and on-line costs.
It is *NOT* a free speech issue. It does not occur in a public place, it occurs on *MY* property, at *MY* expense, on *MY* time.
Spammers are cowardly thieves, nothing more.
dave
So what's the difference between getting an email from some unknown person saying that you can order his book for $39.95, and getting a circular in your mailbox from some unknown person/company saying the same thing?
/.-centric analogy is if each reader had to pay Rob & co. for each comment viewed. I'll bet that if that happened, there'd be a whole lot more anger directed towards the Naked and Petrified folks -- why should we have to pay to see their garbage? Why should I have to subsidize someone else's advertising budget with my mail servers?
As has been mentioned in other replies else-thread -- the reason that spam is Bad is that it shifts the burden-of-cost of the advertising to the consumer, rather than to the person doing the marketing. I have not yet seen a link given to CAUCE, the Campaign to Abolish Unsolicited Commercial Email, but it is a highly informative site that can answer a lot of questions. Such as:
<QUOTE>
"Why can't you just hit and be done with it?"
Unfortunately, pressing Delete may make the problem disappear from your mailbox. But by the time you get to press the key, the costs associated with that piece of junk email have already been extracted from your pocketbook. Hitting Delete is a little like hitting the "snooze" button on your alarm clock: you may have bought the appearance that all is well, but it only works for a few minutes... and the more you hit it, the deeper in trouble you are.
</QUOTE>
I've watched this debate play itself out many, many times before, and I have to say that I'm on the side of the anti-spammers.
Perhaps the best
If Washington, who has the toughest anti-spam laws, can't convinct this guy, what good are the laws at all?
Well, uh, that's kind of the point. The judge decided that the law was so tough that it was "unduly restrictive and burdensome".
Maybe someone should seek out the same judge to get a ruling on DeCSS.
dude... band width theft is a contrived concept. Almost as bad as illicit copying=rape murder and pilleage (piracy)
the difference between spam and "band width theft" is in the eyes of the receiver... I've already been on mailing lists that were worse than spam.
WHich is why this is a free speech concern...
... hi bingo
this is an important victory for free speech... Not a defeat of an anti-spamming law...
If a group like planned parent hood, the NRA, the KKK or whatever sends out a message to a large group of people unsolicited, couldnt this be considered spam?
the anti-spam law made it possible to threaten legal action against all of these groups in the guise of "stopping spam"...
Next it will be "for the children"
"I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to say it"
... hi bingo
If every business in the world sent out a million spams every time business was a little slow, email would become useless. You'd have thousands of pieces of spam/day and you'd never be able to read any genuine messages.
One bloke trying to sell you watches can only harrass a few people at once. Spam can be sent out by the million at almost no cost. If every business spammed when they felt like it, everyone would get thousands of junk emails; why should a few companies be allowed to abuse the system at the expense of everyone else?
Also, free speech is overrated. Remember that not all countries have the same laws concerning it. Why should my right not to receive bollocks I don't want be subservient to his right to clog my inbox up?
your laxity disturbs me. tolerance of spam will have you hitting the little "delete" button 10 times for every one piece of legit mail you get. have you ever seen what partial laziness like that will do to an aol mailbox? dear lord... the horror.
Chao
Hmm... Dismissed because the anti-spam law was too harsh, and burdensome to businesses? Funny how the consumer can get run over while the rights of unethical business owners are protected. I can only assume that this judge has a secretary that checks his email for him, and isn't quite aware of how completely annoying spam can really be. Or perhaps he feels that it's alright to send out massive amounts of unsolicited email that has purposely been misrepresented to mask the cheesy sales pitch within? Excuse me, but that sounds like plain old fraud to me, but perhaps I'm mistaken.
Perhaps in protest we should forward all spam to this judge's email address so he can be just as annoyed as we are. Perhaps then he may see the light.
Wet.Mosaic
>>The law bans spam that has misleading information in the e-mail's subject line, disguises the path it took across the Internet or contains an invalid reply address.
Just out of curiousity, is there a technical solution to this? Like, someone sends out an email with a totally forged address, and have the server discard it, and put in the correct From: address?
Anyone know what Judge Palmer Robinson's email address is?
<snicker>
Anyone know if spammers are stripping off the stuff after the + symbol? I might have to get more creative.
-- It is too late for the pebbles to vote, the avalanche has already started.
The defense lawyer in this case wisely does not have an e-mail address posted anywhere. I guess defending spammers he has an idea of how to avoid them. See http://www.osbcle.org/member s/display.asp?b=781708&s=1.
Not necessarily a law, but in Canada the post office allows householders to indicate that they refuse to accept "unaddressed admail", and is supposed to honour those requests. They don't publicize this fact, because they make good money delivering stuff to every household in a targeted area. It also doesn't stop mail that is personally addressed to you or someone at your address (even if it is addressed to "householder").
The consequences of SPAM are much beyond an end user just having to delete the stuff. Consider that easily 90% of the stuff is sent by persons making unauthorized use of poorly-secured mail servers (where relay control is not enabled, or broken, or poorly implemented), or are viiolating the terms of use that they have agreed to with their ISP. Unautorized use of a relay, IMO, is a kind of vandalism, it also can have lasting adverse effects open the organization whose relay was used. (You can say: "idiots should learn basic security before they run servers". This is true, but doesn't change the fact that SPAMmers make unauthorized use of others machines in a way that is likely to cause inconvenience or harm to the victim.)
IMO, if spam is to be considered free speach the spammers should not use fake adresses, stop relaying the spam through mail servers without the sysadmin's approval, stop sending the mails to people who do not want it and so on. We all now how likely this is to happen. Seriously, who would want to have dozens of spam mails a day, all advertising nude celebrities and other equally interesting things? No, away with the spam!
Methinks what we need here is a cranial-rectal extraction tool...
Smell that? You smell that? Burning karma, son. Nothing in the world smells like that...
Stopping big companies from sending spam is trivial. You firewall them. When enough people have firewalled them, eventually even the marketing weenies will Get It, and they'll stop spamming.
The problem is the chicken-boners and the UUNet's of the world who continue to support them by handing out new dial accounts whenever they need one, and then taking weeks to stop their spamming from the new account (if they ever do).
What's needed, though, is not laws. What's really needed is for everyone who can to block everything coming out of UUNet until they clean their act up. Then do the same to any other ISP who can't figure out how to stop their spammers. Whether they do so by installing rate-limited customer-use SMTP relays and blocking other outbound port 25 connections, or stiff, enforced anti-spamming fines, I frankly don't care, but the ISP has proven to be the only effective target for anti-spamming campaigns.
Weenies. It's "ideas belong to everyone" for mp3 but "private property!" when one has to put up with a little spam. Suggest you loose that illusion of control.
Free net access like free speach has some minor irritations. Being bombarded by information one does not want is part of the price of modern life. I suggest you get used to it.
Snail mail spam aka junk mail does not pay its own way - the first class subsidizes it. And it overloads the system badly several days a month, just like internet spam.
WHO CARES IF YOU you YOU get to pay $2.00 - or if I do. That's an artifact of how the local government has decided to get the Telco network paid for - won't be truely decent until the local governments loose or give up control of telco pricing... it's not caused by Spam.
If anyone is to have the freedom to publish whatever they want, then NO ONE can have their publications blocked due to content. Not even spam or junk mail.
As to being charged for what ya don't want: (a) that happens all the time too, get used to it; (b)maybe ya need to look for a ISP that provides an unmetered connection, or an opportunity to filter out all large items, or an opportunity to filter in only items from pre-approved addrsses, or whatever - would deal with the cost without going to the content.
Ahah I see the problem. Email space is like a highway or the rest of the net - it ain't yours.
But when spam follows you home, it feels like its in your garage.
Well it is. Just like junk mail is in the mailbox. Part of the price for freedom of expression - that includes being subjected to the expression of others.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Suppose that this spammer sent 1 million spams per week. Further suppose that each spam took someone 10 seconds to download, examine, and delete. (This is probably very low, but let's follow it and see where it goes.) This equates to 10 million seconds of wasted time per week. 10 million seconds is about 2778 hours, so if people's time is worth US$ 10/hour then the spammer is wasting US$ 27,780 of un-consenting people's time every week. This is the ultimate meaning of denial-of-service; if you cannot use e-mail because you don't have the time to waste, throwing out all the spam to find the stuff which was your reason for having e-mail, you might as well not have e-mail at all.
Unlike spam, paper circulars are inherently damage-limited. Only so many will fit in your mailbox, and you don't have to waste your time downloading them. They are also easy to distinguish from bank statements, personal letters and bills; I need about one second to toss out a circular, not including the time needed to bring all of the mail inside. I'd much rather have junk snail-mail than spam.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
De jure (as opposed to de facto), our government has only the powers set aside for it by the Constitution. Any law which claims powers beyond these is, by the charter of the nation, invalid on its face. It's the job of the courts to determine when the legislature has gone beyond its lawful and legitimate bounds, and I wouldn't want the pols to have any more license than they have now; if anything, they need a lot less.
--
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Don't take away my AOL cds! What would I use for drink coasters? Or small mirrors? Or putty scrapers? Or wind chimes? Or...
Back when they could still fit all that bloat on a floppy, I saw it as a public service so we'd never have to buy blank disks. Then they changed to CDs (which happened to coincide with when they began including MSIE) and I just figured I had to adapt to the new resource.
Well now I've almost become dependant on regular shipments of AOL CDs. I've got wobbly tables that were fixed by slipping a disc under one leg. The filter in my air conditioning was broken until I jammed one of those CDs in there. And that's not to mention how much AOL has done to promote the arts!
So please, whatever you do, don't make AOL stop sending me those CDs!
Any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from Gods.
I think I'll sign up for an AOL account and make it forward all the e-mail received to that guy's account. I'm sure he'll love the 250+ "HOT XXX TEENS WAITING FOR YOU" messages a day. :D
...is only good where it belongs: in sandwiches.
ble. That's the problem. Second mailing lists are the usual targets which means 200-2000 people get the same spam. Some mailing lists havbe been DDoSed like this.
The message on the other side of this sig is false.
Then, once your smtp server cools down after that first stress test, pay a few visits to the alt.bin.* NG and post a couple of replies again using his mailing address.
Finally, to be sure he will experience with everything we had to go through in the last few years, create him an online mail account with a random password and forward all incoming emails to his real address. Subscribe him to most online news and throw the password away!
- If Washington, who has the toughest anti-spam laws, can't convinct this guy, what good are the laws at all?
Well, uh, that's kind of the point. The judge decided that the law was so tough that it was "unduly restrictive and burdensome".Mind you, I'm not saying that I agree with the judge's decision.
"Prejudice is wrong; you should hate everyone the same."
OK, I'm going to reply to two people here, so I'll try to keep this straight.
/. semi-frequently, have both an icq and aolim account, and have at least 10 different email addresses that I use frequently - basically, if people want my email address(es) for spamming purposes, it's not too hard to find. Still, I get about 1-5 spam messages per week. I don't find that number at all excessive. On the other hand, I get at least 3 circulars (other than for stores & such - counting these, I don't want to know) a day.
/. today commented) get 10 spams for each email? I'm not saying they don't exist: I'm wondering who they are, how they got targeted for this much spam, and how much they actually get charged for spam.
/.-centric analogy is if each reader had to pay Rob & co. for each comment viewed. I'll bet that if that happened, there'd be a whole lot more anger directed towards the Naked and Petrified folks -- why should we have to pay to see their garbage?
Yes, I'm aware of the fact that people pay for their internet access, and of the fact that spam costs those people money, and of the fact that spam costs the mail servers & their owners/caretakers money. I also realize that circulars are paid for by companies/people that send them out. My question is, how much spam does the average dial-up user get in one day? (I'm leaving spam to business places for below.)
I belong to 6 mid- to high-traffic mailing lists (and several more low-traffic lists), have an account at many on-line havens for email-gathering spammers (deja, lycos, tripod, etc.), post to
For me, at least, spam is not near as big a problem as are circulars - at least in the realm of how many I receive per day. For others, I'm sure this is a different situation. But how different is it? How many people are bombarded with spam each day? Who are these people that (as someone somewhere on
Just to make this clear, I do hate spammers, get annoyed each time I find a spam in my inbox, and do sympathize with those who receive spam more frequently than I. However, how much of a problem is it for individuals?
Businesses, on the other hand, I can understand having a huge problem with spam. A fair-sized business has what - 100 workers average? And if the spam is going to each one of those workers, that's a lot of spam that the business' mail servers have to deal with. Spam hurts businesses - this I can see. That, there should be strict laws for. I don't know legal jargon, so I can't think up a fairly-easy-to-uphold law, but I'm sure someone could.
Raunchola: First off, you're assuming that people don't recycle.
Even if they do, this costs them money as well. Probably more $ than if they didn't recycle. Recycling costs money too. Is the cost of recycling worth the cost of saving the environment and landfill space? I don't know, but I figure it depends on the person in question.
Kyrrin: Perhaps the best
True. I see your point, but I'm trying to figure out for myself how much of a problem spam is in the community at large. I'm also trying to find good arguments for spamming, or at least good arguments that say spam isn't as bad as people make it out to be.
Kyrrin: Why should I have to subsidize someone else's advertising budget with my mail servers?
You shouldn't. But how much of a problem is it, unless you run a business that has many employees who all get spammed frequently?
Raunchola: Now what sounds like less of a problem?
I'm not sure, that's what I'm trying to figure out. They're both problems, I think we need laws to govern both (spam & circulars), and I think those laws should be well-defined enough to uphold in court. Now what those laws would say, I just don't know.
Eruantalon
Eruantalon
The Annals of Middle-earth
- False information identifying the point of origin of the message or that hides the true origin of the sender (False Header)
- False or misleading information in the subject line (False Subject Line)
- A third party's e-mail address (domain name) without permission
If a person wishes to send unsolicited commercial e-mail, they are still allowed to do so freely within Washington. They must simply use a legitimate e-mail address which they are authorized to utilize, and not use a subject line which may mislead a person to think it's from a long lost friend, a reply to a prior message, or some other similarly misleading subject.Unlike some anti-spam measures in other states, this law simply requires that those who send e-mail to recipients within Washington state follow ethical business practices. Nothing more. It then provides a means for the recipient (and the state) to enforce it (at least, to enforce it against any organization which itself has assets within the USA). Ethical business practices are not, nor have they ever been, an excessive burden on business.
The judge who made this decision is:
Robinson, Palmer, Judge whom you may email or phone at 206.296.9103
Which I found on page 31 here.
As an example, individuals flying over Oregon State (and other states, I imagine) are required to wear seatbelts at all times- not just during turbulence and takeoff/landing. Most airlines also have this policy, but Oregon has made it law.
Does that mean that the pilots are "forced to check that their passengers are not in Oregon" if they want to take off their seat belt inflight? I really doubt it.
Back to the matter at hand, the law's passing was GREAT in the antispam community. There is a registry of Washington State email addresses and domains that spammers can crosscheck their lists with to make sure they are excluding those in Washington.
From a more philisophical standpoint, this law was drafted quite nicely. And it was doing a good job at getting the ball rolling for other, better antispam laws in other states. Yeah, it should be a federal law (probably, people would argue this too), but that hasn't been close to reality yet. Let's start a state at a time.
Also note that several people have won damages using this law. This is NOT the first time it was tried in court.
-ted
That's just it, though, isn't it? Net access isn't free. I pay a monthly access fee, and so do nearly all of you. The precious few of you who might actually have $0 net access give your time in the way of dealing with spam.
However, just because I pay for net access does not mean that I don't get spam. Therefore I pay for spam. And I hate it!
Just as in the physical realm, there should be opt-out lists in the digital realm. Better yet, spam should be solely opt-in. Then, the recipients have no reason to complain!
Beagle
The first amendment right you're bringing up here does not imply the right to force others to deal with that which you publish. You can feel free to publish whatever you like - nobody will stop you - but you cannot force others to read it, open it, or even receive it. Not even spam or junk mail.
It's one thing to use a push medium where you the publisher pay for the delivery of information. It's a wholly different matter to use a push medium where the recipients of your information pay for the delivery of that information. It's just not right to make them pay, and that's the reason there is such a high amount of regulation of junkmail companies (in the physical realm).
One of the greatest things our government did with respect to junkmail (in the physical realm) is that you do not ever have to receive a package or a piece of mail. Simply write Package not accepted - return to sender on it and drop it in the mail. The sender will bear the burden of paying return shipping charges for whatever they tried to send to you. Even more fun, tape a box of bricks (up to the limit of 70 lbs) to a business-reply envelope, if they sent one to you. The company has to pay for the delivery of the entire package!
As we can in the physical realm, we should be able to opt out of junkmail in the digital realm. To that end, the Washington law is not out of line. Presently, and unfortunately, there exists no such opt-out database.
I can't speak for everyone, but, as much as I dislike spam, I don't think it's really possible (or moral) to ban it. However, sending unsolicited messages to someone who asked you to stop is called harrassment. Sending messages from a false e-mail address is called fraud. I think everyone at /. can agree that fraud and harrassment are beyond the bounds of free speech. Those are standards that hold across content borders; everyone has a right to say what they want, but not when it infringes on someone else. Someone's porn in a little corner of the net doesn't infringe on someone; if you go there, you choose to go there (and yes, a site which trickes you into doing it should prosecutable). If you mail unsolicited porn to minors, then I'm happy to "censor" you.
We have also added a similiar statement to our website to help deter the spam that we receive at our domain. I haven't enforced it yet, and would like to hear of any more successes in getting the spammers to actually cough up the money that they have all cost us in time and effort. One particular method that I have found very effective and useful is the free Spamcop service. They will automatically track down the origin of the offending spam email and notify the appropriate administrative and abuse contacts of their ISP. I've had several responses from the ISPs stating that they have terminated the users account. Check it out at: http://www.spamcop.net
I don't pay a dime for the email i recieve. One flat fee gets me all the email and surfing i want. Your ignorance is showing. Maybe you need to tuck it into your belt and no one will notice.
Do you honestly think all that bandwidth is free? Oh no. You're paying for it, along with everyone else who put in their $20. That flat rate will increase as the spam increases. Only the anti-spam proponents and the beleagured ISPs are holding the line. What's gonna happen when 0.1% of every small business in America wants to send you a "special offer?" Your email address will be useless; with or without the delete key or filter lists. And sorting through spam amounts to the same inconvience as sorting through real mail for letters and bills and then throwing away what i don't want. I'm not arguing about the time wasted. My time is valuable, but that's not the heinous part. Therefore, I'm skipping the time-wasted part of it for now as it's a different issue. Laws could and should be enforced to kick off the trully fraudulent offers, but "legitatmate" spam should be allowed to exist. "Only 'legitimate advertisers' should be allowed to steal."
Not a chance.
--
"I can't wear this shirt because it has DeCSSsource code written on it, and that's a violation of my right to free speech, but I don't like what this person's sending me so let's make a law that make's them stop... Better yet, let's devise a way to block them from accessing our internet!" Tell you what. I'm going to print up 10,000 DeCSS T-shirts at a cost of US$1.00 each. I'm then going to send everyone a T-shirt whether they want one or not.
Oh, by the way, you must pay $1 once yours arrives. What? You don't want it?
But... that's inhibiting my right to free speech!
--
Still, I get about 1-5 spam messages per week. I don't find that number at all excessive. That's pretty low for your usage profile. /. today commented) get 10 spams for each email? I average about 10 a day, more or less. I'm not saying they don't exist: I'm wondering who they are, how they got targeted for this much spam, and how much they actually get charged for spam. 10 years on the net gets your name around. You wind up on all those email addy CDs. I, of my $20 for internet access, I would figure $3 of that my ISP must spend managing spam, those are $3 they could be better using to give me better service. That amount is growing. However, how much of a problem is it for individuals? Businesses, on the other hand, I can understand having a huge problem with spam. My time doesn't suddenly become less valuable once I'm at home. This means they're stealing from me, instead of my employers. This less of an annoyance? Anyhow, there are plenty of things that waste my time. Therefore, I'm not going after spammers for waste-of-time issues. Theft of service is the stronger point.
Right now, there are few spammers (but they're growing). What if spamming becomes legitimized in the eyes of the general public? If 1% of every small business in the U.S. decided to send you one email per year, your mailbox would be useless; even assuming the net backbone infrastructure could handle that load. (it can't) On the other hand, I get at least 3 circulars (other than for stores & such - counting these, I don't want to know) a day. As much as I dislike circulars, and feel they're a waste of my time, I'm not paying for them. I find them much less objectionable. For me, at least, spam is not near as big a problem as are circulars - at least in the realm of how many I receive per day. I don't find theft-in-quantity any more objectionable than small theft. They're profiting by stealing from me and, in addition, are annoying me (like circulars do). It's the addition of the "theft" part that differentiates them. How many people are bombarded with spam each day? 10s of millions. My rough guess based on the number of people online. Who are these people that (as someone somewhere on
--
I don't have to pay for your T-shirt if i don't want it. Just like spam. Just like anything else. Unless you go ahead and charge me for it without me saying yes, do whatever you'd like. The cost of receiving email is borne principally by the recipients. This is an inverted economic structure from postal mail; in which the sender pays an incrementally higher cost per copy. I'm gonna steal your $1 so you can have the privilege of receiving a T-shirt whether you wanted the shirt or not. Still don't like it? Too bad, I've already got your $1. No refunds. Besides there are lots of people who want my T-shirts! [yeah right]
Anti-T-shirt-sending laws would inhibit my free speech. Spam isn't porn.
Spam isn't [necessarily] obscene.
Spam is theft.
--
First, moderate this up. This guy's got some good points.
This post begs the question, though, who's to do the ruling? The federal government? Some sort of multi-national group like the UN?
I have always thought that the way to combat things like spam is through programatically battling them. Write software to block it! Why legislate when we can simple install some software?
Let's see, if we apply the judge's ruling to it's logical conclusion, it is unduly restrictive and burdensome to do the following tasks 1. Type ADV: in your subject line or at least present an honest description of your junk in the Subject Line 2. require us to show the path the mail took across the internet (which is usually done automatically anyway) 3. Post a valid reply address in your email As usual, this is another case of a legal system trying to take existing laws and bending them to fit the virtual world. This doesn't work. In most cases, the law's requirements are easier than breaking them. So, what is it called when you drive a bus full of Judges and Lawyers off a cliff and there's still an empty seat or two? A missed opportunity RB
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ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
I hope the anti-spam law in CO doesn't get overturned. I already have quite a nice lawsuit building at $10/spam * 4-5 spams a day :) Hmmmmmmm wonder if I can sue more if I miss important email because all my space was filled with spam...sueing, it's the American way :(
"You point your finger at the moon, the fool stares at your finger."
does this mean I can start up my telemarketing scams again?!??
No, honestly though, this is a pretty dangerous precendent to be set, don't you think? Is this not basically inviting spammers to keep on spamming more and more people? I mean, this kind of harassment isn't legal in r/l, so why should it be legal on the net??
But seriously, imho, this all comes down to the american judiciary system (sorry boys, I'm a proud Canadian). This is the danger in having elected judges. To get elected, you have to have a lot of money. Where does that money come from? Industry. Who are you going to protect in the courthouse? Industry.
So isn't it just fitting that a precedent like this be set in the states? I mean, sure, I'm a Canadian, and we're under a completely different legal system, but bet your boxers that we'll have some judge up here pulling the same thing in the coming months.
-Greg
Master of the Obvious
If the place of residence is not avaliable, the spammer is not covered under the law. Unless they send the mail with 1) a false subject 2) an invalid return address 3) fakes the path it took.
I am a resident of Washington State. I have 2 valid email addresses located on servers within this state. Neither can/will disclose my current residence, as with *most* isps. The second part of the law has no teeth. Its like you said, nearly impossible to compile a list of Washington residents. The spammer in question violated the 3 conditions above that the law also covers.
This isn't a question of what's decent, like your tennessee example (I'd like to see the case on that one, got the link?). It's a question of what's legitiment business.
Multiple comments above simply take for granted that spam is guaranteed under freedom of speech. First, we'll assume we're dealing with United States law here, since it's a state. The law does not restrict the sending of information (free speech). It simply makes it unlawful to advertise via mass mailings (spam) with false subject lines, fake return addresses or faking the path.
The Supreme Court has upheld the necessity of anomimity of an individual for free speech. But they have not expanded this protection to corporations, and have infact ruled against it (campaign finance, anyone?).
This law only requires they identify their message and themselves. This allows several things. 1) the spam can now be filtered. 2) the recipients now have a way to communticate their desire not to receive any more. It in no way stops spammers from actually sending out large amounts of email.
The only part of this law I could support is that dealing with incorrect reply-to addresses. When I receive junk mail at home, or phone solicitations, I have the right to ask that I be removed their mailing or calling list and then they must comply with my request. I should have the same rights with regard to spam, so I should have a way of contacting the "spammer" to make such a request. Otherwise, I agree completely that it seems absurd that so many /. readers seem to think censorship is just fine as long as that which is being censored is something which annoys them.
JeffersonQ
Judging by the comments, everyone's saying that this is a free speech issue, and that spammers have every right to say what they want.
Technically, they're right.
Let's remember one thing here. The Constitution does allow freedom of speech. But, it doesn't allow you a platform from which to speak. You can picket my business if you want, but I can keep you off my property. You can run for political office and make up a bunch of signs, but you can't put them on my property without my permission. You can make up a message to put on a highway billboard, but if I own the billboard, I can tell you that you can't put your message on it.
So, if I want to keep a spammer from his alleged right to spam me, which utilizes my resources and my time, I can, and there's nothing that the Constitution can do about it.
But hey, if Palmer Robinson wants to give the green light for spam, so be it. He shouldn't have any problem with spammers sending spam to palmer.robinson@metrokc.gov, should he?
--
The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
"Throwing away circulars is more of a problem than deleting spam. Circulars are made of paper & ink, they go in the trashcan, they go in a trash-collecting truck, they go to a landfill, they take up space in the landfill, they rot slowly, they hurt the environment. Spam is made of.......umm, electrons, it forces users to hit the delete button/key, it goes away forever. Which one of the two seems less of a problem to you?"
Ah, a common argument...well, here goes.
First off, you're assuming that people don't recycle. There you go, simple solution...recycle and save space in the landfills. And here's some news..."just hitting delete" doesn't get rid of the spam. Sure, it deletes that little message, but it won't stop the spam from coming.
Let's talk cost. Let's say you want to send out 5000 mailings via snail mail. At a rate of 33 cents (bulk rates not withstanding), that comes out to $1650. That's just the mailing cost, other costs (paper etc) aren't included. If you sent those 5000 mailings via e-mail, all it costs you is the $20 you spent for the account, and possibly $100 or more for the Sooper-Stealth-Spam-Machine spamware you bought.
So what does this mean? It means that traditional junk mailers are going to be more careful who to send to. Why waste $1650 on people who aren't interested? It'd be more feasible to mail to people who are interested, right? That's what we call opt-in. Now for the spammer, the cost issue isn't there. They can send as much mail as they can, and it only costs them $20. So, why would they care to target their crowd by going opt-in? For them, it's much easier just to spam a lot of people and hope that they get some responses. If not, then they're just out $20...provided that their account gets nuked. And if it does, they can just spend $20 more for another.
The spam problem won't go away. Why? Because spammers, in theory, have unlimited resources, and they don't have to pay the costs that traditional mailers do. If junk mailers could send that much mail for $20, my mailbox would be stuffed with junk mail. Spammers can send that much for $20, and that means my inbox...an inbox that I'm paying $20 to use...is going to be filled with mail I don't want. I'm not paying $20 a month so that some spammer can use my inbox as his marketing forum.
Now what sounds like less of a problem?
--
The real Raunchola isn't cool enough to have any imposters
...so I should think that the /. anti-censorship cabal would be all opposed to any law that regulates it. What, you say? It costs corporations millions of dollars in lost revenue because of the bandwidth.
But if we argue against spam for costing money that cannot be easily quantified, then we must also do likewise for piracy. But if I oppose piracy then I can't be a /. anti-censorhip wonk. Non sequitur! your facts are uncoordinated!
I am a /. anti-censorship advocate. I am Nomad. I am perfect. analyze. analyzzeee.. errrrorrrrizeee.... BOOM!!!
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
When I send E-mail, I often don't know where the receipient is. State regulation of E-mail would create a requirement that I must know, and that I must then check the laws of that state to see if I comply, or risk being sued or prosecuted there.
This is a passage from the law in question:
(a) Uses a third party's internet domain name without permission of the third party, or otherwise misrepresents or obscures any information in identifying the point of origin or the transmission path of a commercial electronic mail message;
I strongly feel that if you are spoofing your return address, using other peoples SMTP servers for relaying, or just plain hijacking mail servers, the burdon to make sure that I am not in Washington (I am) is yours.
There is absolutely no reason why you should fake email addresses, return addresses, etc. on unsolicited email. If you have no way of knowing that I'm in Washington, then Don't send mass, unsolicited emailings while spoofing you address! Or be prepared to pay the piper.
I am against censorship... and I feel that sending unsolicited email should be protected. I have filters, blacklists, etc. to help foil these attempts to email me. But when a SPAMmer essentially tries to deceive me by saying they are coming from nonexistantuser@nonexistantdomain.com, and aren't conforming to the RFCs for abuse policies, etc. I don't think its should be protected. Its an issue of truth in advertising.
-k
Even better, just put his e-mail address as your Slashdot e-mail address. He'll be getting Spam like there was no tomorrow.
kwsNI
Most spam send to a lot of people in the bcc field. I was quite pleased to find that Hotmail has implemented a system that sends bulk mail to a seprerate folder. So far it has correctly filtered out 4 out of 4 spams.
I hope Hotmail don't try to restrict this. solution. It really is very effective.
I really don't think that it is censoring people to require that they tell the truth about what they're selling, and not falsifying return addresses and message paths. I mean, if someone knocked on your door in fireman gear, told you they needed to check a gas leak, and then when you let them in they tried to sell you a way make 123 billion dollars in 48 hours, you would probably be less than pleased. And if he gave you a card with the address and phone number of a random person who was going to get blindsided by your complains when you showed his ass the door, that wouldn't be too hot either.
Ok, there is a point that business advertisement can be considered free speech. This is true only under VERY limited circumstances. If they don't have functioning removal methods, it is harrassment. Most of the Spam is fraudulent anyway, and that is certainly not considered protected speech. Whatever is left I don't mind receiving every now and then, it's the refuse of an imperfect system, but it sure could be a lot better!
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Ah, I agree that it should be regulated, just like US Mail is regulated against illicit advertisements, but you're never getting rid of spam. There's always a way around these things, and big companies will always find them. Sharkey
www.badassmofo.com
Re-Opened for your viewing pleasure
You know, people are seriously over-critical of Spam. Its never going to be eliminated, and only those who aren't super-protective of their e-mail will get it. But that's the same with junk mail, isnt it? I mean, that's what P.O. Boxes are for, right? Anonymity and filtering? Same deal with Spam. I have public e-mail accounts for the inevitable Spam to go through, and more private e-mail accounts for only the messages that I want. Its not so hard kids, just don't go giving out that precious e-mail address and you'll be fine. Sharkey
www.badassmofo.com
Re-Opened for your viewing pleasure
Well, no.
Porn spam annoys, too.
A more logical comparison would be between, say, commercial internet sites versus spam: If I am looking for chocolate covered penguin fins, I can do a search, look for the ones with sprinkles, and either call them on the phone or cross my fingers for their secure site. If someone starts emailing me and advertising this product, however, I'd be completely annoyed, because it's wasting my bandwidth and time and disk space. Anyway, this isn't so much censorship as stopping them from stealing resources.
Junk mail isn't a big deal, but when they start tearing your trees and panelling down to make their wood pulp, then it's not censorship to stop them.
Hmmm. 30 to 50 sales a month is from $1198.50 to $1997.50 per month. This "package" is probably in electronic form, so no overhead. Just an internet account at $20 a month. So all this guy did, to make this kind of money, is to write a book detailing how he did what he did? DANM! Looks like I will start making payments on a new Porsche! Oh, yes, if you want to buy my book on spam prevention, or online buisnesses just send check or money order to ........ :)
I wish I had no morals.
Speeding never killed anyone. Stopping did.
This law was simply bent on ensuring that this email was not misleading (ie. abided by the standard decorum of non-virtual advertising) and showed who sent it. Without these two things, the right to arrange 1 and 0s anyway you choose means little, because no-one will read it.
__________
He who fights and runs away,
I think it's our own fault that we get so much junk e-mail to begin with. The more we sign up to get e-mailings, the more our address get's out on other lists. If you really hate getting spam, then don't sign up for so many things to begin with. E-mail should be treated no differently than snail mail, IMOP, trying to get laws like this passed is a waste of government money.
-- galihad
Even if we do get "effective" spam legislation passed at a national level what do we do when the spammers move off-shore? We need comprehensive spam legislation from "all" countries that participate on the 'net or all we do is make them move the servers that they are based on. I'm not really advocating government intervention (the thought of how badly they could screw this one up is a really nasty one)but we as a community need to try and do something before they do step in. Any ideas?
First I forward it to Spam Recycle, then send a copy to my ISP, then delete it.
SpamRecycle collects spam, determines the true address (if possible) and notifies the ISP of the spamer, it also distributes lists of known spam addresses to ISPs so they can be blocked. SpamRecycle also testified before Congress about spam. My ISP is prety good about keeping spam from reaching their customers, and usually act when customers forward spam to them. I never reply to spam, not even to opt out, that would only verify that they have a valid address, and I would get more spam.
"Open code, in other words, can be a check on state power." -Lawrence Lessig
Someone sign this judge up for some spammer lists and get back to him in about three months.
But is junkmail illegal? I personally have more of a problem with getting paper junkmail which takes more time to dispose of as I attempt to be a good recycler...all I have to do is hit the delete key in my inbox, but I have to drive to the recycling center with all my paper as I do not have curbside services. Why is there no law against sending this crap to my house, taking up space in my mailbox, wasting my time just the same as electronic spam? Because that would be silly. There are many ways to deal with spam on your own rather than getting the gov. and courts involved.
Don't believe me? The internet is doubling in size, what, every 9 months? The biggest argument against spam is that it doesn't scale well.
Twice as many people means twice as many spammers. Assuming it doesn't get to be a more popular per user.
What can you do? Get your local politicians email addresses. Add them to every distribution list you can find. Wait for the law to arrive. (Both the cops for you and the legislation for the country.)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"You certainly have come up with a way to exploit the law, but no argument to refute the previous poster's claim that the judge was correct and that it's a bad law that tries to implement a wrongheaded method of solving the spam problem.
After reading the article and ruling, I have a few issues and comments about it.
First, I thought the semantic games over what to call the messages were stupid. "Spam" is obviously derogatory, and "direct marketing" is a spinmeister's word for what the messages really are, "unsolicited advertisements." Might as well call them what they really are.
Second, I agree that asking businesses to check every email address on their list against a database for each and every jurisdiction that has its own laws regarding email would create an undue burden on businesses.
Third, isn't there already a law that states that people should be allowed to have themselves removed from mailing lists at their request? If so, then shouldn't advertisers have to provide some straightforward means of doing so?
Fourth, I don't have enough knowledge of interstate commerce laws to even begin to comment on whether the law violates them or not, and the article didn't say much of anything about it either.
Finally, I don't know of a fair way to allow people to opt-out of receiving unsolicited advertisements. Every possible solution I've come up with has also had a high possibility of adverse side-effects. They would also be subject to various courts' interpretations of the words "advertisement", "unsolicited", etc. Anyone have any good ideas?
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I think it depends on what the regulation entails. In this case, the law requires that unsolicited advertisements be labeled as such and that they contain a reply-able address so that someone may ask to be removed from the mailing list if they do not wish to receive any further mail from that source. Doesn't sound all that restrictive to me. Basically it tells companies that they aren't allowed to try to deceive people with their subject lines and that they must provide a means for consumers to opt-out of the mailing list. Sounds perfectly reasonable.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
I hate spam as much as anyone, and I report both the spammer and any drop boxes to the appropriate service provder. That said, though, this ruling is good.
Anyone remember the case of the California resident who set up a web site that some sheriff in Tennessee (I think) decided was indecent? The sheriff entrapped the guy by sending him a package of kiddie porn. The California cops were tipped off, and the guy was arrested and extradited to Tennessee. Of course, the kiddie porn charges were dropped (there was obviously no case), but he was now in Tennessee and tried -- and convicted -- for indecency or obscenity based on his web site in California.
Distinguishing addresses in Washington from addresses anywhere else in the world is well-nigh impossible, a fact that we all recognize when it comes to porn, or the CDA. An electronic registry is really no better. Think about how many jurisdictions there are in the US, not to mention the world, each of which might have their own registry (think Australia, with its new censorship laws!), and it's clear that this is an impossible burden. Furthermore, the act of gathering such a list itself has its own privacy implications, and I could well imagine some spammer taking revenge on this registry.
Now, prohibiting the SENDING of spam from Washington would be quite another matter -- a state has legitimate jurisdiction over what takes place within its boundaries. A federal law prohibiting the sending of spam from anywhere in the US, or by any US citizen from anywhere, would also be another matter. Putting a burden on the sender to prove that a potential recipient or consumer of information is not a member of a certain class is just asking for trouble.
>>"That's just a derogatory term that's on the other side of the
>>table," he said. "Direct-marketing people don't like to hear the
>>paper mail called `junk mail.' "
>But it IS junkmail, and "direct marketing" is just a good name from
>the other side of the table.
Exactly. Pedophiles don't like the terms "pervert" and "kiddie-f******",
but it doesn't make them any less true. Nor do we agree to call hookers
"sexual service professionals," etc.
A rose by any other name . . .
1. Content-neutral: For instance, a ban on bulk unsolicited e-mailing in general would pass muster, a ban limited to porn spam would not.
But then you have to consider the definitions of all of those words, particularly "unsolicited" and "bulk." These definitions can be twisted quite a bit if you are creative enough.
If everybody on the Net is officially permitted "one bite of the apple", the flood of spam would be worse than it is now (with a tiny minority spamming as often as they can get away with it). There are (at a conservative estimate) 10^7 people on the Net with something to sell or a message to spread; if each of them sends their one spam over the course of the next year, that's one spam every three seconds.
Yes, after which you can never be spammed ever again. I'd gladly take a year's worth of crap in exchange for never having to put up with it for the rest of my life, wouldn't you?
The fact is, we can't go censoring speech just because we don't like it. I don't like spam any more than you do, in fact I probably like it even less. But I can't deny that they have the right to speak, just as I have the right to subsequently tell them to stop bothering me.
The problem is, spam is protected by the First Amendment, as is every other kind of expression.
However, implicit in the right to say what you want is the right to hear what you (and, by extension, others) say. Implicit in that right is the right to not hear what others say, if you so desire.
I would propose a solution like this. All commercial e-mail, solicited or not, must include an opt-out function (opt-in would be better, of course, but we're talking about setting a bare minimum here). Now, let's say I opt out of e-mail lists from, say, l33tpr0n.com using this. If I ever get another e-mail from l33tpr0n.com again without first giving my permission, then it is considered harassment.
This protects l33tpr0n.com's right to free speech, while protecting my right not to be harassed by them. It's not an ideal solution, but I can't think of anything better that continues to protect people's Constitutional rights.
Spud Zeppelin dun said:
Well, among other things, it doesn't force me to store his offers for watches on private property, and it doesn't cost me money and/or labour costs to listen to him try to sell fake Rolexes, not to mention telling him to perform impossible acts of self-copulation with aforementioned watches. ;)
The same cannot be said of spam (including UCE). First off, the vast majority of sites with full-time Internet connections pay by the byte or by the hour (and, especially outside North America, a non-negligible number of home users, too; UUCP connections (where you HAVE to download all the mail) are still relatively common in Europe, Asia and South America, and are STILL some countries' only connection to the Internet (if memory serves, Mongolia's main ISP is UUCP-only, and this is also true for most African ISPs outside of South Africa and africa.net accounts), and people in most countries pay by-the-minute for phone calls period (incidentially, most countries also ban telemarketing--North America is one of the few places where it is legal--because it costs folks to receive it; this is also why junk faxes and telemarketing calls to cell-phones are illegal even in North America)...); the costs are often non-negligible, especially with the volumes of spam being sent (I did a quickie analysis around two years ago, which is posted here under the title "Spam By The Numbers"--this gives you a really good idea of the sheer amounts of crap that get sent to your local ISP daily if they aren't using specific block-lists like the MAPS-RBL list; nowadays it is also probably a very conservative estimate--with big mailspams on big ISPs, it can easily hit the gigabytes). This cost will, eventually, be passed on to the consumer-level (stuff like unlimited access being cut, or prices going up because they have to pay for the new RAID-5 array just to store all the spamaceous crap), so don't think you home users get away without paying the costs of spam.
Secondly, tracing down a source of a spam and getting them to stop spamming you is not exactly trivial. Spammers very commonly use throwaway accounts at freemail providers (and previously, AOL, Netcom and Compuserve accounts due to the sheer number of "free trial" CDs they would give out) and will obfuscate the hell out of headers (this is, in part, what the Washington bill was aimed at); not only that, they will often "relay-rape" servers, routing spam through insecure third parties' mail servers (there are a rather surprising number of these out there--Sun and SGI have notoriously insecure versions of Sendmail shipped with their programs, boxes in a lot of third-world countries and @Home boxes are insecure, and I won't even go into Windows mail daemons or mail daemons on old IBM mainframes--suffice it to say that spammers are the main reason most sites worth their salt don't relay mail anymore except for customers, and an increasing number won't even let you post mail without downloading mail first--Mindspring and Broadwing, among others, had to implement this). To make things even worse, spammers have over the years either set up shop at outright spam-friendly ISPs or at sites that couldn't be bothered to give a damn about net.abuse; at one point an entire backbone site on the 'net, Agis.net, had to be literally "IDP'd" (basically: many, many sites started refusing to share any traffic--not just mail and news, stuff like FTP and HTTP and the like) because AGIS hosted literally seven or eight of the worst spammer's havens on the Internet (including Sanford "SpamKing" Wallace's site, etc.) and refused to give them the boot after nearly EVERY other national-level ISP at the time HAD given them the Golden Boot. (Eventually AGIS did boot them and wrote up a strong, anti-net.abuse AUP. The AGIS boycott wasn't trivial--they were literally the third or fourth largest site on the net, many national-level ISPs had them as a primary or secondary network service provider, and they provided the only network service for a lot of sites including all of Alltel's Internet network.) And to make things even WORSE, many (if not most) spammers actually use "remove lists" or "do-not-spam" lists as actual confirm-lists for live addresses to spam; these lists are even bought and sold among spammers, and it is literally next to impossible to get one's address off one of these lists once they have been added on (about the only way I've found is for the email account itself to go dead).
It doesn't help that most of the folks in the "serial spamming" business--the hard-core folks-- are sociopaths (no, I am not making this up--most of them would actually be diagnosed as sociopaths). Sanford Wallace, for example, was in the junk fax business before he went to spamming--he is also widely regarded as being the person most responsible for junk faxes having been banned. Wallace is also almost singlehandedly responsible for most of the anti-spam AUPs in place, with a few other folks was largely responsible for getting AGIS "shunned" a few years back, and is almost singlehandedly responsible for nearly every anti-spam bill that has been proposed to a legislature worldwide. He finally got out of spamming when literally no ISP in North America would touch him with a 40-foot barge pole--and this, only AFTER he'd gotten AGIS IDP'd, been fined well into the millions of dollars for contempt-of-court charges, been literally banned by a Federal court in Ohio from sending mail to any customers of Compuserve, been banned by a Virginia judge from sending any mail to AOL customers, been fined by that judge for disregarding that order, paid well over US$300,000 in Internic charges for domains...this is the psychology we're dealing with. Sad individuals...
It's funny you should mention guys "selling watches", though. If he makes it a business as much as, say, most spammers do, just selling watches on the street is outright illegal in many areas. If it's over a certain volume, in many places he has to buy a specific business license. If he is found selling illegal goods (like, oh, counterfeit watches or selling adult material to under-18s or selling shares in a pyramid scheme or even selling stocks without a prospectus) they can lock him up and throw away the key.
Of note--the FTC has estimated that over 80% of all spams are for "fraudulent" and/or outright illegal schemes. Those that aren't are often adverts for adult sites which are of questionable legality for under-18's (and, depending on local ordinances, may be of questionable legality for anyone--for instance, adverts for marital aids and the sale of marital aids is illegal in Alabama and in a number of Southern counties).
In short, there are a lot of differences. You might visit CAUCE here, or spam.abuse.net for detailed info on the history of spamming and the real costs to Internet users. Those of you running Linux and *BSD boxen might want to in particular hit spam.abuse.net's info on securing your mail server, or hit Sendmail's web site which, along with the latest version, has extensive info on spamproofing your mail (including blocking open relays and spamaceous sites through the MAPS-RBL and stopping Bad Guys from relay-raping your server).
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
It truly suprises me that more people on /. just don't seem to get it. Asking the government to protect you from spam is just as bad as asking them to make laws to protect you from porn
Except that porn on the Net is something you generally have to actively seek out. The existence of porn on some web server somewhere costs me absolutely nothing. It doesn't cost anyone anything aside from a little discomfort for the puritans out there. Spam, OTOH, is delivered every day to just about any email account one creates. It costs me time and money (through increased costs to my ISP which get passed on to me).
Besides, the law in question doesn't require that much. It requires three simple things that any legitimate business should be doing anyway:
1) Don't use misleading info in the subject field
2) Don't disguise the path the spam took across the Net
3) Don't use an invalid reply address
This is not unreasonable.
I wish people would stop begging legislators to inflict laws on the Internet and start asking for a technical solution.
The reason people are clamoring for this particular type of law is that the attempts at technical solutions didn't work. No technical solution is going to be able to eliminate spam that has inaccurate subject information, forges routing information, has invalid reply addresses,etc. People have tried filtering, but spammers create new email accounts to spam from faster than people can add them to blocked-senders lists. Allowing only people on an "approved-senders" list is too restrictive and removes much of the power of the medium. You can't filter based on subject line if the subjects are faked (and 99% of spam does that). You can't even filter based on where they're sending the message from if the route information is forged. The reason we need laws like this is so that technical solutions will be feasible.
And besides, if these spamming asses realize that they could lose big bucks, maybe then they'll realize they shouldn't be doing it. The burden of stopping junk email should NOT be on the recipient. It's just ridiculous to make people expend time and money for being the victim of spam. This is the reason why there were laws passed banning unsolicited commercial faxes. Email is no different.
Isn't protecting spam a lot like protecting someone who walks through the streets at night screaming "PANTS ON SALE AT YOUR LOCAL KMART!!!"
If this guy is arrested for disturbing the peace, then Kmart doesn't sell as many pants.
But who cares???
Does commercialism have a right to seek out the consumer at such lengths? I think I'd rather search for a company I want to do business with rather than having companies come to me.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
how is spam really all that different from someone approaching you on the street and asking "Hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?"
Your question should be, how is spam really all that different from thousands of people blocking the entrances to your store, using your bathrooms, tracking mud all over your nice clean floors, and asking each and every one of your customers, "Hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?"
Sure, you may only have to hit delete three or four times a day, but how many other mail accounts does your ISP support? Do some multiplication here.
--
how to invest, a novice's guide
People may have a right to create "junk speech", but they have no right to do it in my house or place of business. They have no right to use my resources to do it. Perhaps spammers would object if I borrowed spray paint from their garages to paint my message "UCE is Theft" on their houses, cars, and lawns?
Framing the debate in terms of "free speech" occludes the real issues -- trespassing, theft, and harassment. Bulk snail mailers have to shoulder the cost of postal rates and printing. Unsolicited commercial e-mail shifts those costs to access providers.
(I've been to that gas station in rural Idaho, by the way.)
--
how to invest, a novice's guide
uce@ftc.gov to 'register'. Since all uce I get is forwarded to uce@ftc.gov with no consideration, I figure, why not just cut out the middle man (me) and have them send it directly to it's final destination?
Actually I haven't 'registered' for anything 'free' in a long time now anyway.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
> sent to almost a million people in Washington.
Correction: the article says he sent between 100,000 and 1 million spams PER WEEK, although not exclusively to Washington state residents.
The $39.95 packages were "How to Profit From the Internet," which I think is probably just a "you can be spammer too" kit.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Your question should be, how is spam really all that different from thousands of people blocking the entrances to your store, using your bathrooms, tracking mud all over your nice clean floors, and asking each and every one of your customers, "Hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?"
Sounds like some gas stations in rural Idaho I've been to, actually *g*. Seriously, if you had that happening in a physical store, you'd put up something to keep them out, so why not do the same with spam? To keep the analogy going, just because the police can't arbitrarily arrest the street hustlers, doesn't mean you can't hire security guards, bouncers, etc.
So in this case, make your "bouncer" a set of filter rules to bounce mail. There's a pretty good set of filters for Netscape Messaging Server (much as I don't like the product, I inherited it in one project) available here that should be readily adaptible to many other servers. If you're an ISP ( Doing some multiplication here...) then not only will this cut down on the amount of crap you're spooling, it also has value as a selling feature; given the tight market for ISPs nowadays, the more value you can add, the better.
I'm going to stick by my original point: inasmuch as we might not like it, people have a right to create "junk speech". The best solution is to implement ways to tune it out....
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
I know all about relay rape, thank you very much, one of the strategies I mentioned in my original post was "closing open relays." And I'm well aware of the cost of spooling the messages -- hence my discussion of applying spam filters if you're an ISP. You almost make it sound like I LIKE spam, or underestimate it's impact. Neither could be further from the truth: I'm in the trenches fighting the battle you describe on a daily basis. I'm asserting, however, that the solutions to the problem must be technical (ways to not listen) rather than legal (attempting to silence the speaker). And like I said, the ultimate technical solution is to simply spread awareness: if the response rate to spam tends much closer to zero than it is already, spammers will (theoretically, at least) finally shut up because they can't support themselves doing it any longer.
:) Oh, FYI the last news report I saw also said Alabama had abandoned its attempt to outlaw marital aids... of course, I currently live in Connecticut, which required a court decision just to force to legalize birth control pills.
;)
And incidentally, since time IS money, it does technically cost you labor to listen to the guy on the street offer you a fake Rolex
One parting thought: In my original post, I also mentioned the potential health risks associated with "telling [the street hustler] to perform impossible acts of self-copulation with aforementioned watches." -- I've found that people in that particular profession tend to be quick to anger, and oftentimes armed. Again, why I said I'd rather receive the "Hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?" via spam than in person
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
I beg to differ.
The company I just recently left had a serious issue with spam mailings. To summarize, about 1/2 of the employees were laser repair technicians, and spent a good deal of time on the internet researching Windows issues both on many public forums, to include USENET. The result was an average of 60K mail messages per month to my site alone that I would term "spam". This is obscene. We had a system in which we were forced to distribute mail services across two servers per site, when in reality, only one should have been needed.
Why? The added traffic from spam was crushing. Ultimately, we were able to get spam filtering enabled pre-mail server at the firewall. Guess what, it didn't knock off nearly enough of the "spam". Why is that? Misleading headers and initial subject lines. I'm in favor of making these laws stick, because there is a legitimate amount of measurable money lost to these spamming imbeciles.
-Jer
Oh, I disagree. If this law goes through, I have a business plan proposition for everyone to join in. Start up a free-web-mail (hotmail-style) service in Washington with the hook of "Since this service is hosted in washington, and the company is a legal resident of the state, all spam mail received through this service that is out of compliance with Washington state law will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law" etc. Also, allow forwarding (free or fee? *shrug* tack a text ad onto the .sig of the email?) from this address, so you can not only filter all mischeivious spam, but know that the ISP will prosecute the sender. How many of us would sign up for that service? Especially if it came with lots of fun tools such as bulkmail folders, auto-spam complaint generators (a little scriptlet that reads headers and attempts to contact postmaster@/abuse@relevant.address.com?)
Hell, I'd even pay for it. spammers can FOAD. If states implement it differently, all the better for the consumer (in that it remains only for spam, that is, I admit that caveat), and better for some states in that it will dramatically increase ecommerce through servers in their states because of people seeking protection from spam.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Has this judge actually READ the law? It only requires that spammers user real addresses, and don't misrepresent themselves. I thought in general that misrepresenting oneself was illegal, anyway, but a law that spells this fact out for spam/UCE is overly restrictive?
Please. Anyone got this judge's email addy? We could type it in at some nice, Truste-certified websites for him and see if he still feels that this law is too restrictive.
Returned Peace Corps IT Volunteer
Of course, this is easier said than done... but that's what really needs to happen. There are too many holes with anti-spam laws being passed on a state by state basis, and this case brings out potentially the biggest one. Hopefully it will result in a positive result (i.e. moving such a law to the national level).
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In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
what do we do when the spammers move off-shore?
They won't move off shore. They can't. At some point, they need to take my money (that's why they're in business, right?), and I'm right here. They might be able to move their servers offshore, but some part of their business must be here in the US so that they can collect my money. Shut down that part of the business, and the spam server will wither and die, no matter where it is.
Suppose, though, that they collect their money via credit card, and they enter the charges from overseas (ie outside US jurisdiction). I would suggest that it could be made legal to refuse payment of charges on your credit card if you can prove that the transaction originated as a result of an unsolicite email, sort of like you can refuse charges that result from unsolicited delivery of merchandise.
The spammer's counterpunch to this would be to accept only money orders or cashier's checks (this after Mastercard/Visa cut them off). There's not much you can do about this, but how many people do you know would willingly send the equivalent of cash to an off-shore address to a recipient who is known to violate US law? The flow of spam would soon slow to a trickle, and the worst offenders would become well-known and be easily blocked.
Comments, questions, or rude remarks, anyone?
Since unsolicited commercial email is acceptable, I'd have to say that unsolicited personal email is acceptable too. Especially when it constitutes political expression and it's directed at a public official.
I encourage all of you to share your political opinions with this court (no terrorist or death threats, please). Email early and email often. Do everything you can to share your opinion with the judge that SPAM costs its recipient MONEY.
I don't doubt that there are a lot of non-residents of King County, Washington reading this, but keep in mind that this is a case of national importance. If anti-spam laws fail at the local and state level, there is little chance of national anti-spam legislation. Share your opinion with this judge that the issue he is deciding is of more importance than he seems to realize.
Basically, what it boils down to is that the servers I maintain are private property. If I post a tresspassing notice on them (or the state sets some sort of tresspassing laws), they ought to be obeyed, and the government ought to support those rules.
You already have the right to sue the spammer if he "tresspasses on your private property", as you do for any other tort. Do we really need to make this sort of thing a criminal offense?
DrLunch.com The site that tells you what's for lunch!
If you come into my house, I am the person who decides whether or not you are trespassing. I can ask you to leave if you do nothing but sit in the corner and rant continuously about laser printer supplies.
(This is going to be unpopular, but) I agree. The judge (from the looks of things, I couldn't hit the ruling) is probably right for the wrong reason(s). Spam is an insoluble jurisdictional issue because Spam is an ECONOMIC issue. Many (not all!) in the anti-spam community might be described as a bit economics-challenged. This is not to poke fun at them, but just to say that follow-the-money applies when it comes to a group of lawyer-politicians proposing a nice-sounding anti-spam law (effectiveness be damned! It employs more lawyers!!!) just as when it comes to a spammer sending nasty ol' spam (and I agree, just about all people dislike UCE, including me).
/. community who asks for it a bit of gold to try the concept out. (I've made this offer on Slashdot in the past, with surprisingly few takers, but now there's a casino and a lottery) so I expect better results. Think about it, with a "stamp" that pays you, you might not mind spam so much. If you keep a Flying Rat e-mail address secret and "blocked" it will never get unpaid spam. The Flying Rat software will be open source, AFAIK.
The question becomes, what can be done that's actually effective? Plenty of laws can be written to sound good and they obviously don't work! (Disclaimer: Warning, the following is going to sound crass and commercial -- spam, if you will -- even though I'm about to offer to GIVE AWAY MONEY!! and I'm not imposing on anyone's e-mail bandwidth, so moderate me down and see if I care.)
Well, after last year's FC99 in Anguilla, and a number of conversations, we came up with The Flying Rat Project (the name comes from an old joke about never seeing baby pigeons, combined with the idea of pigeons carrying messages in ancient times). Yes, right now it only uses e-gold (that will change, this is a kludgy proof-of-concept, not what we have eventually planned) and yes, I dream about eventually making some money on the damthing (horrors! I'm not a lawyer who wants more laws just to make money for the chattering-class, I'm an evil-greedy-capitalist-Firengi-pig who wants there to be a market in e-mail and thinks that economics might -- just might -- work better than yet-another law!). Anyway, it works, and has for a while without much notice.
For now, I'll give anyone in the
Thanks for listening, you can create an account Here (please choose a good passphrase and remember it!) and then just e-mail me the account number and I'll click you a bit. For free (but try to play around with Flying Rat some, before you gamble it away). Thanks.
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
Someone posted this on Sitereview.org this morning. It does look like a viable solution to giving out your email address for a particular transaction. The service is pretty new and I haven't tried it yet. Has anyone had any experience with these people?
Geeky modern art T-shirts
When you get spam, you've paid for it. You've spent time to download and delete the messages. The transfer of that data has been paid for by the ISPs, backbone providers, unwiting relay hosts, and in some cases, you the receiving party.
In fact, the only person who HASN'T paid for that message is the person who sent it.
The only thing here that seems absurd is your mischaracterization of the issue. It is a matter of property rights, not "free speach", as you would agree if equivalent actions were taken in the physical world (e.g. someone plastering unwanted bumper stickers on your car, spray-painting a message on your door, throwing notes wrapped around bricks through your windows, etc).
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
It's like I always say: Judges should not have the power to nullify a law for any reason. If the law is unconstitutional it should be repealed through the legislative process. The best way to get a bad law repealed is to enforce it strictly, as Abraham Lincoln said.
1: The proof is in the pudding. The strict enforcement of laws that are passed will show whether the law is beneficial in a practical sense.
2: If we didn't have this stupid judiciary back door for unconstitutional laws, there would be much more pressure on legislators to examine the law before it passes.
-JD
Can I point out an important contrast between what you say about how spamming is wrong because its abusing YOUR bandwidth and YOUR servers? Many people on slashdot seem to agree with you (as remarked by your current score)..
Yet there's the other side of it. What about the NAPSTER side of it with colleges. Doesn't the college reserve the right to choose how THEIR bandwidth and THEIR private property are to be used?
You can't have it rabidly both ways at the same time. Choose which one, or give a better way to make that decision.
This ruling was just plain bad. Spam is not helpful, it's not beneficial to anyone but the sender, and it's costly to everyone else. If Washington, who has the toughest anti-spam laws, can't convinct this guy, what good are the laws at all?
/. just don't seem to get it. Asking the government to protect you from spam is just as bad as asking them to make laws to protect you from porn. I wish people would stop begging legislators to inflict laws on the Internet and start asking for a technical solution.
I'll have to respectfully disagree with the first sentence, but the rest is right on. In answer to the "what good are the laws at all?" question, NONE AT ALL.
It truly suprises me that more people on
Think about it. We use a password to protect against illegal entry into your private systems and accounts online. Sure, it's an inconvenience, but honestly, can we really expect any law or government to stop people from abusing an unprotected service on a global network? No. The most we can expect is laws that can be selectively enforced because there's no way to wholly enforce them. I'm NOT saying we wouldn't see a reduction in spam...
Now, if we truly want to stop spam (in the Self-Propelled Advertising Material sense) e-mail clients and servers will need to be upgraded. This is unfortunate, it'll be a real bitch to accomplish, and it will be years before everyone is protected. There really isn't an alternative though.
How: The client software needs to download a 'Terms of Use' unless they are explicitly permitted to send to the e-mail address. The 'Terms of Use' can contain anything really, but it needs to divulge a 'keyword' that the server will recognize and thus permit the client to upload e-mail. The user sending the e-mail of course would need to type in the keyword and the client would send it to the server.1
In the end, the 'Terms of Use' document will prevent spamming because the spam-bot won't know be able to figure out what the keyword is--the server will reject the e-mail.
FSO: (Frequently Stated Opinions)
Mailing lists won't work: Your mailing lists will be on your 'auto-accept' list or whatever you may call it.
Too much extra effort: Not really, you can add people that you frequently receive e-mail from to your list with the click of the button.
Can't be done: OK, then live with spam. No one is going to stop it.
numb
Why people would think of a law prohibiting spam is really beyond me. I get junk mail at home that I can ignore and I have a little button on my heyboard that corresponds to a function known as a "delete message" function that really works wonders.
Slashdot social engineering at it's finest
Why is there no law against sending this crap to my house, taking up space in my mailbox, wasting my time just the same as electronic spam?
Because the postal bulk mailer pays postage for the cost of the mailing. A spammer pays no postage, transferring the costs of delivering bulk mail to the ISP and eventually the customer
Costs? The mail has to be delivered somehow (bandwidth), and stored somewhere (mail server). This traffic wastes both storage and bandwidth, and forces the ISP to upgrade to higher capacity equipment than he would otherwise need. The ISP can't recover any of this expense from the spammer, so one way or another, the customer picks up the tab.
Some people pay per-minute charges for their ISP connection--even if they simply delete the spam after they download it, they've still paid for the time required to download the latest "Make Money Fast" mailing.
So what's the difference between getting an email from some unknown person saying that you can order his book for $39.95, and getting a circular in your mailbox from some unknown person/company saying the same thing?
Really, I'm not trying to be a troll, I'm wondering. How is getting junk mail different from getting junk email (spam)? They both are unwanted pieces of mail you received that you'll probably end up throwing away. OK, so those who have dial-up connections actually pay to read spam, but then how much spam does the average dial-up user get in one day? (Unless they're stupid and go with AOL or some other similar company where you can get 100+ porn spams a day, or something like that.) If they get their dial-up access through someone who at least tries to care about their customers, there's less problems with spam (due to more secure information, employees of the ISP who actually care about losing customers, employees at the ISP who will respond to complaints about spam and actually do something about it, etc.).
Throwing away circulars is more of a problem than deleting spam. Circulars are made of paper & ink, they go in the trashcan, they go in a trash-collecting truck, they go to a landfill, they take up space in the landfill, they rot slowly, they hurt the environment. Spam is made of.......umm, electrons, it forces users to hit the delete button/key, it goes away forever. Which one of the two seems less of a problem to you?
I'm not saying spam is good or circulars are bad. I'm not saying that people who send 100,000 useless messages/day shouldn't be punished. I'm not saying we shouldn't have laws against spam. I'm saying that we should decide how much of a problem spam is, how much of a problem circulars are, then create laws based on the seriousness of the problems associated with both spam and circulars. Should the guy in WA have gotten off free? Should companies who do useless mass-mailings get off free? And who decides and how?
Eruantalon
Eruantalon
The Annals of Middle-earth
Washington State Attorney General sues spammer
The text of the law (mirror)
4 individuals sue a spammer
The Washington State Attorney General's Office (spam section)
-ted
One tool that I have found to be quite effective against spammers, especially those with forged headers, is http://www.spamcop.net They are able to scan the spam's email headers, determine the origin of the spam, and then generate an email for the offending spammer's ISP administrator to deal with them. JM2C
The "slashdot position" is that a little bit of censorship is like being a little bit pregnant. There's a "slashdot position"? I thought we were all individuals expressing our opinions. I feel so... homogenized now. Yet the "slashdoterotti" are delighted to have censorship for spammers. Why? Spammers annoy them, porn doesn't. Porn is about content. Spam is content neutral. This is a theft of service issue.
Do I own my mailbox or not? I say I do. Spammers say I don't. The law hasn't figured it out either way yet.
--
I go on the net and LOOK for porn. Spam just gets sent to me whether I want it or not. I hate porn spam as much as I hate "get rich quick" spam.
It has nothing to do with censorship, it's the question of why should I deal with shit I didn't ask for, nor wanted. When I go out, I expect to see advertisements, I expect to see ads in the magazines I read, the webpages I visit. I'm fine with that. I have a problem with people invading my space without my consent and who are definitely not wanted. Junk mail included
The judge ruled that the law is "unduly restrictive and burdensome"?! Since when is having to truthfully represent yourself restrictive? Using fake headers or return addresses or domain names or inacurrate subject lines is forgery or illegal impersonation or misrepresentation. If i opened up a brick & mortar business and misrepresented myself in a similar way, i'm sure i would be subject to legal action. when somebody does the same thing via email, they should also be subject to legal action. having to be truthful is certainly not "unduly restrictive and burdensome"; rather it is just the opposite. this law is nothing but constitutional!
But is junkmail illegal? I personally have more of a problem with getting paper junkmail which takes more time to dispose of as I attempt to be a good recycler...all I have to do is hit the delete key in my inbox
I applaud your efforts and determination to recycle the paper wasted by junk mailers, but you miss the point entirely. Unlike junk mail (and the far more irritating junk phone calls), with email and usenet SPAM the cost of delivery is borne by the recipient, either directly (as in Europe, with their per minutes line and ISP charges) or indirectly as an ISP charges slightly more for internet access to offset the cost of the bandwidth which the SPAM has taken (and SPAM takes a tremendous amount of bandwidth).
Junk faxes are illegal, and have been for years, because the cost of toner and paper are borne by the recipient, and each junk fax costs the recipient real dollars. The same is true of SPAM.
Recycling paper may be more of a hassle than deleting unwanted mail, but multiply the bandwidth and disk usage of your unread mail by several million and the cost to the consumer for unsolicited SPAM is appalling. And while we could stop deforestation and meet our paper needs next growing season by planting hemp and producing paper from it rather than trees, there is no similar way to reclaim the bandwidth, diskspace, and people's time (also a considerable expense) which SPAMmers routinely steal from their victims.
The judge's decision is a farce, both logically in terms of the legalities themselves and in terms of their real-world effects. Not only should the state of Washington appeal the decision, but someone should take a very hard look at his portfolio and bank accounts. And everyone should forward their morning's SPAM to the idiot as well -- let him share in the consiquences of his ill-considered decision.
Finally, I recommend you take a gander at
http://www.privatecitizen.com/
$30 will go a very long way toward helping you avoid those long treks to the recycling center, and help you win back a big chunk of your valuable time. I have used this service and it does stop junk phonecalls altogethre, and junk mail slows to a tiny trickle. Highly recommended!
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
You do make a valid point. I also agree that unsolicted commercial snail mail is a problem I would like to see addressed. Especially AOL CD-ROMs and other similar non paper things. But ...
"There are many ways to deal with spam on your own rather than getting the gov. and courts involved."
This is the loophole spammers are looking for. People who are willing to let tons of e-mail pass over the net because they only associate a line of text in their e-mail client program with spam. In fact, spam causes Gig after Gig of hard disk space to be taken up on servers around the world. Essentially using up someone elses resources against their will for something they more than likely do not want. This doesn't even take into consideration the wasted bandwidth that accumulates as more and more spam is sent off around the world each minute. This is not unlike someone advertising to you via FAX machine and using YOUR ink and paper to advertise to YOU.
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
Really, we shouldn't allow the medium to dictate our metaphor here: how is spam really all that different from someone approaching you on the street and asking "Hey buddy, wanna buy a watch?" It's generally unwelcome, yes, is a low-percentage approach to generating sales, and oftentimes triggers anger on the part of the recipient, but (as others have already said) it's also constitutionally-protected speech. Quite frankly, I'd rather receive the junk through email (if I have to receive it at all) than have my physical mailbox jammed full of flyers and/or have to deal with street hustlers. At least with email relatively few physical resources are being used (at least compared to print) and there's little risk of physical violence (unlike an angry response to a street hustler).
So what's the best remedy to fighting spam, if legally they have a right to say it? The same answer as works best with street hustlers: pretend not to be listening! Close open relays. Run procmail and filter everything, discarding headers that appear to be forged. Refuse to work for people who generate junk mail; there's plenty of work for the technically-savvy in this country with companies that don't send it. And make sure 'net newbies that you know are well aware of the obvious choice: boycott anyone who sends you unsolicited mail, unequivically, regardless of how lucrative it is or how much it fills a need.
This is my opinion and my opinion only. Incidentally, IANAL.
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
The article does nothing to support the Judges findings. There is nothing in there that shows the arguments from the defense, or why the judge ruled in their favor. I'm guessing that the judge did not understand the case or the ramifications of the ruling very well. I dont see how "having them check an electronic registry of e-mail addresses to determine whether intended e-mail recipients were Washington residents and therefore protected by the law." is hindering interstate commerce. Maintaining such a database would be kind of a pain, but the government created the law, so they should have to go through the motions it entails. I'm sure this will be overturned.
Here's a link to the actual law
//Phizzy
"Most European technology just isn't worth our stealing," -- Former CIA chief James Woolsey, referring to Echelon
I wonder if any of this judge has ever tried to run a business and received spam. Working at an ISP, I know that a lot of spam passes through here and that we have a lot of clients on 56k modems (not ISDN).
When a company has to download, wait, store, read through, and destroy junk mail that's not clearly identifiable as junk mail, it takes time. It hurts their business. Most businesses I know that use e-mail engage in interstate commerce and are adversely affected by spam.
So, in all reality, this judge really has no clue about what will or will not truly adversely affect interstate commerce.
When voting, be sure to elect tech-savvy officals!
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. - G.B. Shaw
This ruling appears to have nothing to do with whether spam (or indeed any of the defendant's actions, which included forgery) is OK or not - it is a technical ruling that says that the state of Washington cannot impose a law affecting interstate commerce.
State laws should be drafted with listed clauses stating that an offence is an offence if the spam is:
The laws should also explicitly state that if any of these clauses is held to be unconstitutional, the remaining clauses would continue to have force. States should expect clause 3 to be thrown out, and shouldn't depend on clause 2 to survive either. Clause 1 should survive.
Hopefully this will get appealed. On one of my domains I have the following clause: The sending of any unsolicited email advertising messages to ANY ADDRESS from this domain will result in the imposition of civil liability against you in accordance with Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code Section 17538.45.
I have been spammed 3 times at the email address above (yup, it's active, and yup, some of my other accounts get spam daily... it seems just the email addy discourages spam for some odd reason). I was able to track down two of them, and sent bills for services rendered, as outlined on the site. One ignored it, one paid me $35 in accordance with my pricing policy. All my postings on newsgroups have a disclaimer about entering into a contract. I hate spam with such venom that I spend money just to make an example of the perpetrator. If I find out who they are, I always follow up with a legal notice to their ISP and host. It was drafted by an attorney, so it goes a long way towards shutting that part of their operation down. The second spammer who ignored the bill had his home ISP account cancelled, and it's a remote part of Arizona. He's now stuck with AOL. Yes, spammers hop to and fro getting free remailers, but I doggedly continue to play whack-a-spammer. Did I mention I hate spammers?
Hopefully the legal eagles in Washington will appeal, it looks like they have a good case. It really sucks when laws are made by folks with no concept of new technologies. Some anonymous person here said it best: sign the judge up (and the jerk's new employer) to every spam list... like going to a business opportunity newsgroup and asking for ideas to make money off of the internet.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
The bottom line is that everyone wants to censor -- it's just a question of when. Animal farm, anyone?
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-- Slashdot sucks.
Spam is "all that much." You're making the mistake of thinking that because something doesn't hurt you very much it must not be a problem for anyone else, either. This is very dangerous and sadly short-sighted.
Spam costs my company money in the form of bandwidth and employee time (most notably, my time). World-wide, spam clogs data line and slows traffic, clogs storage and makes some news groups useless while making messages expire faster on others. Spam makes the entire Internet slower and more expensive. Spam makes people afraid to give out their e-mail address, thus hurting e-commerce and legitimate information exchanges.
Spam is a 180-degree reversal of snail-mail direct-marketing, where the transaction cost is paid by the sender. With electronic spam, the sender typically has very low costs; the hapless receivers pick up the tab for him.
Spam should be exactly as illegal as a DoS attack, and there are simple, credible arguments comparing the two.
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Some exerpts from the story:
Benefits? Consumers? It's SPAM! How can you consider people who get spam to be "consumers"? But wait, let's look at the rest.
So THIS is restrictive? It should be someone's "right" to send you unwanted commercial email that has misleading headings, is spoofed, and you can't reply to? What business would resort to these tactics unless they were pawning off worthless crap?
Apparently the guy who had this suit called against him. Here's another quote:
But it IS junkmail, and "direct marketing" is just a good name from the other side of the table. The article says that the spam was some "special offer for only $35.95" sent to almost a million people in Washington.
This ruling was just plain bad. Spam is not helpful, it's not beneficial to anyone but the sender, and it's costly to everyone else. If Washington, who has the toughest anti-spam laws, can't convinct this guy, what good are the laws at all?
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"Okay, who taught the cat how to type ctrl alt delete?"
I warned when this law was passed that it was a tremendous waste of the efforts of the anti-spam community. The judge is entirely right on this one.
States have no business regulating geography-independent things like E-mail or just about anything else on the internet. While a state might regulate mail *from* people within the state, the idea of a state being able to regulate anything -- spam or otherwise -- on mail to the state is an extremely dangerous precedent.
When I send E-mail, I often don't know where the receipient is. State regulation of E-mail would create a requirement that I must know, and that I must then check the laws of that state to see if I comply, or risk being sued or prosecuted there.
"Who cares if spammers have to check where they are mailing?" Indeed, who does. The problem is that states can and have passed other E-mail regulation rules, other than anti-spam. New Mexico tried a law against "indency." But I wouldn't care if the law simply approved of motherhood. The problem is we don't want to have to worry about what states the people we send E-mail to are in, or the people who hit our web sites. Or, if you like, the states that contain the routers that route our packets.
In our eagerness to fight spam in every way possible, it is a mistake to go over the top and use the wrong tools. In the end we would get 50 different sets of E-mail regulations to worry about, and a need to know where every e-mail address is before we mail to it.
That's why it does violate the commerce clause. It makes people outside Washington mailing people in an unknown place (that's also outside Washington, as it turns out) forced to check that their address is not in Washington. The state is not allowed to do that.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation