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Paper: Technical and Legal Approaches to Spam
tgeller writes: "David Sorkin, a Chicago-based law professor who also runs spamlaws.com, just published "Technical and Legal Approaches to Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail" in the University of San Francisco Law Review. I think it's well-thought-out, intelligent and complete. Spam litigation (which The Suespammers Project tracks) has been slow, partly because few lawyers know much about the issue; this paper will have an impact on legal community cluefulness."
But it's clear that technical solutions alone have a limited effect. Filtering solutions may stop up to 95 percent of the spam, but that doesn't keep it from clobbering those who can't install a filtering system, whether due to lack of ability or lack or resources.
The technical community has been guilty of terrible arrogance in this area. Spam is both a technical and a social problem. If you don't address both causes, you'll never get anywhere. Of course, lots of policy folks don't know squat about technology, and their short-sightedness is just as much of a problem. ("When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.")
--Tom Geller, Suespammers.org Founder and Administrator
P.S. Full disclosure: Brightmail is a P.R. client of mine, and I wrote the press release referenced above :). I see systems like Brightmail's as important and worthwhile tools, but not the complete answer.
Tom Geller
This point needs to be reiterated.
"Freedom of Assembly" has always been held to mean two things. You can have a meeting with like-minded people, and you can eject all others. This protected the NAACP membership list in the 50s and 60s, and the KKK membership list a few years ago.
"Freedom of Religion" means that you can attend the church of your choice - or none at all. At the same time you can refuse to attend any or all churches.
"Freedom of the Press" means that you can print truthful information that embarasses the government. You can also refuse to publish things that the government wants you to publish. <u>High Times</u> Magazine does not have to include a monthly message from the Drug Czar, etc.
"Freedom to Petition for Redress" means that you can ask your Congressional delegates to pass a law, etc. But it doesn't require you to write them about every passing thought you have.
So why do so many people think that "Freedom of Speech," the final element of the First Amendment, means that you have to listen to every idiot standing on a soapbox?! OF COURSE "Freedom of Speech" includes the right to ignore the other person. And not just passively - unwanted guests at assemblies can be forcefully removed by the police and prosecuted for 'trespassing,' so it's not unreasonable to invoke the power of the state to suppress people who just won't accept that their message is unwanted.
A few years ago, spam was tolerated because the social cost of hitting "delete" a couple times each day was less than the cost of fighting it. It was often compared to the effort involved in tossing a couple of pieces of daily junk mail in the trash.
But now many people are seeing three or four times more spam than real messages. It's not unreasonable to expect this ratio to be much worse in the next few years. Imagine finding your snail mail box full of mail, with hundreds of envelopes, each and every day. You have to spend at least an hour, each and every day, looking for your bills, correspondence, etc. Many of the envelopes are intentionally disguised to look like important messages. (E.g., it's a letter from the IRS - announcing an "Inventory Reduction Sale" at the local "Herb Tarlek" Car Lot!")
If this isn't unreasonable, what is?
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
mail.dlitz.net - Spammers will be shot. Resistance is futile.
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I don't have to imagine that.
Sickest one I saw yet was some credit card company that sent me a full-size (10x12") envelope done up to look like a FedEx package, complete with fake "express delivery" labels and machine-generated "signature" on it. The logo wasn't FedEx's, but the colors were identical.
I had half a mind to grab a couple of Pantone swatches, a FedEx envelope, see if they matched, and if so, mail it off to FedEx's corporate counsel, asking them if they had a trademark on their color scheme, and if this direct marketer wasn't somehow diluting their brand with its misleading packaging.
Then I realized the cure would've been as bad as the disease ;)
*sigh*
Rule #1 ("Spammers lie") in action - applies to telemarketers and junk mail spammers as well as spam. At least the pigfucking credit card bottom-feeder had to pay to send it to me.
Imagine an internet of the future with billions of world wide users. If I send 10 billion solicitations a day (at a click of my mouse), and only 1/100th of a percent buy the hair tonic (at $20 a bottle) I'd rake in $20 million in revenues. At what cost? Practically no cost to me, but such schemes could render the internet useless overnight if enough people did it. Spamming software might be a feature of MS Office on day. Imagine, if everyone did this.
Is SPAM free speech? Of course not. If SPAM is free speech, why can't I broadcast my thoughts on 101.1 FM without an FCC licence?
Someone you trust is one of us.
I'm almost all the way through the document, and it still hasn't degenerated into name-calling....
This concept solves one of the major problems in trying to nab spammers... Locating them. Spammers can hide. They can move. They can generally stay safe forever. But there is that one common thread... Someone wants to get their hands on your money. To do that they need to provide contact info of some sort. BINGO!!! You have someone you can nail.
Disclosure: I believe it should be loegal to kill telemarketers and spammers. Don't give me that "It's only their job" shit. It didn't work in Nuremberg, it won't work here.
And the "freedom speech" angle doesn't work here either. I demand to be allow to exercise by freedom of speech by not being afflicted with these people. The freedom of speech does not give you the constitutional right to an audience.
Damn. I started this thinking that I wasn't going to foam at the mouth. Sigh.
anti spam law (I can't stand PDF files)
360 degrees of Karma
The thing I see missing from all the discussion of spam on /., as well as this paper, is the quantified difference between true spam and helpful courtesy emails & alerts.
.nl addresses that put 10,000 emails in your box by raping a mail relay, or porn promotions that include web bugs to check when you've opened the email and start spamming you with a message a minute.
Right in the abstract, the author lays down his bias: "Unsolicited Electronic Mail, also called 'spam'". Not all unsolicited electronic mail is spam! To make a simplistic example, If someone from way back in your past (like high school) sends you an email from out of the blue, it's unsolicited (you didn't ask for it) but it's hardly spam.
In the same vein, e-commerce companies emailing their loyal customers about limited time offers and promotions is far different from the crapflood-esque pyramid schemes from
Spam is malicious, and has a penetration rate under 1 in a million. Direct mailing from web vendors to their customers has a much higher penetration rate because they are sending their customers information about stuff they are used to buying!!.
To those who argue that direct mailing should be easily opted out of, consider this: how easy is it to opt out of the existing direct mail offers you receieve via snail mail? It usually takes some real effort. Why can't this apply to the web? Is it truly so awful that Amazon tries to find other things you're interested in based on your interests, and lets you know?
My company participates in direct mailing, and a lot of customers respond. Far, far, far, far less write us up angrily for sending them direct offers (I can count the number of times it's happened on one hand).
From the paper:
"Some definitions of spam include only messages that are commercial in nature. "Commercial" is generally defined in terms of message content rather than the sender's actual or presumed motivation for sending the message; a typical definition includes any message that promotes the sale of goods or services."
Only commercial offers are spam? Come ON. Direct marketing is as American as apple pie. The Internet is no different.
If you're going to wage war on direct marketing, wage it on all fronts: telemarketing, direct mail, direct email. There's no need to single out email.