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."

Comments

Where's the distinction

[sllort]

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.

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 .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.

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.