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CA Appeals Court Upholds Spam Law
Joe Wagner writes: "Criminal penalties for spam, yeah baby! It has just been announced that California State's spam law has been ruled constitutional and valid by California Court of Appeal for the First District: '...we hold that section 17538.4 does not violate the dormant Commerce Clause [of the United States Constitution].' The actual ruling is here. Congratulations to Mark Ferguson and his lawyers (1, 2) for fighting it out for the rest of us..."
Lovely. Now that California has lead the way, when do you think other states will follow suit?
Is there actually a "spam lobby" anywhere that could prevent (read give money to) politicans from supporting or passing such bills in other states?
"Moving through the masses like a fish through water." syrup
"The statute defines "unsolicited e-mail documents" as "any e-mailed document or documents consisting of advertising material for the lease, sale, rental, gift offer, or other disposition of any realty, goods, services, or extension of credit" when the documents (a) are addressed to recipients who do not have existing business or personal relationships with the initiator and (b) were not sent at the request of or with the consent of the recipient."
Perhaps not plain english, but as close as legalese gets.
YES!!!
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
YOU TOO can prosecute all those pesky spammers. Just send $100 to this paypal account and we'll help you. If you don't want to press charges, just send an email to nothanks@prosecutespammersnow.BIZ and we won't press charges at this time.
(IANAL) When do I get my cut of the Civil Suit?
Obviously SOMEBODY is making $4000 every week while they sleep with Barely Legal Lolitas and loose weight.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
This law specifically ALLOWS spam to be sent. It just requires that spammers include a valid return email address and that they remove people from their list who want to be removed.
This is great?
It also only covers spammers who have their equipment located in California. All this means is that spammers will use mailservers in some other state or country.
The only good thing I see about this is that it requires the subject to have "ADV:" in it.
I expect absolutely no change in the amount of spam I get as a result of this law.
Yes, I hate spam.
However, do we really want a precedent of banning certain types of emails? As much as we don't like spammers, I would much rather have to delete "Increase your ejactulation by 581%" than to worry that an encrypted email transmission was deemed illegal.
I demand a million helicopters and a DOLLAR!
Are you sick of all of the SPAM that your receive in your email everyday. Well now there is something that you can do about it.
Our law firm will go after all of these hideous capitalist marketers...
To help our cause please forward this email to all of your friends and spread the word
Also be sure to tell them to vote no on the Congressional Act adding a tax to emails...
Considering that the vast majority of users do not know how to setup filters and the like, spam really is a detriment to electronic messaging. My folks are not the most computer literate people on the planet and the thought of them receiving "No subject" messages with embedded porn makes me cringe. If I didn't have a full time job, I'd work on a system of intelligent agents that actually worked.
At the point of origin, or the destination.
And on behalf of some Canadians, I would love something like this to happen up hear.
If not, I don't care. Spam is annoying, sure, but junk mail is heaping piles of dead trees. The recycle bins by my apartment are constantly filled with weekend shoppers and credit card offers. One place I lived put the paper bin right next to the mail boxes, so you wouldn't have to carry your armload of junk mail. Aside from that, there's also the fact that spam is easier to deal with. I can set up procmail (or even more primitive filters) to do a decent job of keeping my inbox free of crap. But no matter how often I show the contents of my .mailmanrc to my postal carrier, I still end up getting a new shopper every day from a different place, always printed on high-gloss 100% freshly killed tree.
The enemies of Democracy are
Spammers would have you believe that other than your time for "just clicking delete", there's no cost to spam. However, since you and I and all spam victims pay a lot of the cost of spam before purchasing the spamvertised product, market forces on spam are seriously weakened, with respect to market forces on other forms of advertising (radio and Tee Vee broadcast, newspaper and magazine advertising, billboards, stock cars, product placement in movies). For all other forms of advertising, the advertiser pays for the ads up front, before the consumer buys the product. If the ad campaign sucks ("Ring Around the Collar!") or offends (Frito Bandito, anyone?) ad victims can choose to exert market forces on the advertiser. With respect to spam, victims have already paid more than their share of the ad costs before making a decision whether or not to buy the spamvertised product. Market forces apply only weakly to spam, thus requiring government intervention. Criminalizing spam is a step in the right direction.
Spammers are all thieves. Don't forget, don't let your legislator(s) forget it. Down with the DMA!
Texas has passed a law to make it illegal for telemarketers to call people on a special do not call list. If the telemarketer violates this law they will be charged $1000 for each offense
Here is the story from Yahoo
http://www.kubuntu.org/
Indiana has a new "list" you can add your telephone number to to avoid any telemarketers (Well, 95% of telemarketers. Some groups aren't bound by it).
Maybe it's the first step to adding your e-mail to a "no spam" list. If they're doing it with etlemarketers, why NOT with mass e-mailers?
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
Note that it also says, right up front
(emphasis mine). Not just companies registered in California, nor does the email have to originate or be transferred through, or delivered in Calfiornia -- if the company does any business at all in California, it applies.
I like it!
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
What's being done to STOP spam? I for one am tired of sorting through my mail looking for valid messages (spam to real mail ration of about 100 to 1). What's more as the years go on (same mail box for five years) my spam gets stranger and stranger I get more messages in Japanese, Korean, German, Russian and Taiwanese then I do in English.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
I believe that if the recipient or the sender is in California, they are bound by the law.
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email from john@iz.cx with the following subject
$$ MAKE $$$$$ PROSECUTING SPAMMERS!!! $$
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
Go here for more information But also note they charge your $5 to do it online. DONT. You can simply mail in a letter (printable from this form), throw on a stamp, and away you go.
And it does work. My junk mail has decreased dramatically.
-- Knowing too much can get you killed, but knowing who knows too much can make you rich.
In a nutshell: If you have a previous relationship with a company/person, or if you request it. People can send you ads. However you can still send people unsolicited ads if you include the string 'ADV:' as the first four characters of the subjectline. If you are sending material that you have to be over 18 to possess, you have to have the string 'ADV:ADLT' as the first 8 characters of the subjectline. In all cases, you must include a way o remove yourself from the list.
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This case is very similar to what happened with the WA law, with the WA court ruling that a law that deals with the fraudulent aspects of spam (that includings not including valid return email addresses, or a way to opt-out of future mailings without significant hassle). Because the WA law allows WA residents to take on out-of-state spammers, the spammers were trying to argue that the law violated 1st Amendment rights and the Federal Commerce Clause. However, the WA state attorneys followed previous rulings that allowed states to regulate intrastate business when fraud was involved, and the law was kept constitutional. It sounds like the CA case was decided along similar lines since the law specific states that proper identifying and opt-out mechanisms must exist.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
What are the odds of getting someone big to do this, like Hotmail or AOL? Then we'll really see how against spam the big companies are.
Too big to fail? Does that make me to small to succeed?
A replacement of or enhancement to SMTP to require secure, unforgeable authentication of an email's sender in order to make this enforceable. Otherwise it is for naught.
My friend has one of those fathers that left when he was a small kid and pops in once in while to give him a car, business, just sort of out of the blue.
/.ers can help me make the call on this.
Anyways we're going down to his house in bakersfield next week. Apparently his father has a T1 line going into a csu/dsu into a router on a pretty unsecured network into his house. All windows machines running IIS, can't remember the spam package he's using but here is the dilema I face, maybe my fellow
Up until last year I was a happily working dot com guy. Every company needed sysadmins so for a guy like me that understood tcp/ip networking and o/s installation it was great. Jobs were everywhere. Then I got laid off a week after buying my house. Been surviving, still got the house, but you just don't derive as much pleasure from life living day to day on ramen and cigarettes your bought scraping the change that fell out of people pockets from your couch.
His father wants our help. He know's I can help him convert everything over to BSD, which in itself would secure him a bit, get a firewall in place and a billing system. Currently he is making $2,500 a week net and has customers lined up out the door to use his spamming services.
My moral dilema is, do I help the guy to make a quick buck (which also makes the wife happy) or do I stick to my guns and say spam is wrong?
It's a really hard choice to make when you're faced with the reality of well.. reality. Bills don't pay themselves. I sometimes wonder if the goverment is lying about how bad it really is out here because I got 5 sysadmin friends in the bay area out of work now. 5 sysadmins that I personally know and hang out with. Their job hunts have been the same as mine for the last year, HR ppl just bringing you in for an interview so its "make busy" work.
I dunno, today might just be a weird day, its an odd coincidence that slash would be posting a story on this a week before i'm supposed to go help it.
Personally, I don't think this is much bigger than mail fraud. IMHO, Rather than criminalize sending unsolicited email, I would criminalize sending spam without an ADV: prefix or ADV ADULT: prefix.
This would effectively give them the freedom to send as much unsolicited junk to people who want it, and let us who don't want it to filter it out.
As far as regulating technology goes, I think there's bigger fish to fry. Here's some examples of how the FCC helps the communication monopolies keep thier monopolies...
UWB technology gets stuck in red tape
Roll your own DSL
My point: Communications and tech have been regulated for YEARS. So while you're pondering if criminalizing spam MAY set a bad precident, existing technology and communication monopolies are doing everything to criminalize and patent truely liberating technology (Ultra-Wide-Band) (DSL without the telcos): (That is before they figure out how to use it for thier own advantage)
...and that's just one very small facit of the problem...
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
Read it. The law says that spammers have to provide an "opt-out" address, and users have to send their real email addresses to them, the spammers.
Duh.
So now the spammers will have a list of valid, guaranteed active email accounts. To sell, which is what opt-out addresses in spam are for. Not to opt out, but to verify that they're real.
And since this is a state law, the spammer can get away with this by being out of state. Not that spammers ever care about the law. The law merely encourages users to ACT LIKE IDIOTS and send real email addresses to spammers who will then use them as verified, premium spambait!
The principle is so simple that it is amazing that it is so often misunderstood.
Your freedom of speech does not obligate anyone else to listen.
Your freedom of speech does not obligate anyone else to finance the distribution of your speech.
You are free to write all the emails you want, just don't expect me to spend my time and money receiving/storing/reading/deleting them.
If the guy wants to sell penis pills so bad, then let him buy a web site, a web writer, e-commerce software and some banner ads to advertise it.
He certainly cannot expect me to give him storage space and bandwidth any more than you can expect the local radio station or newspaper to give you space or airtime.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Spammers can still email people. People who want to get ads about penis enlargement, or hot teen sex, or credit repair can still recieve it. But people who do not want it should not be forced to recieve it. This is what people have been begging for spammers to do since day one. People asked spammers to stop and they didn't. People started munging their email addresses when posting in public forums and spammers de-munged them.People blocked email addresses of spammers and spammers just changed addresses. People started blocking domains of spammers; spammers just registered new domains. If spammers won't listen to the people, maybe they will listen to the law. And if they still don't listen, the people can do something about it.
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Clearly, requiring spammers to behave with some sort of ethics is a noble goal. However, it appears that the judge has decided that this law does not violate the constitution for the wrong reasons. So, as much as it pains me, I must disagree with the judge. The law needs to be rewritten to be more restrictive. My logic follows below.
I read through the judges decision, and here are some interesting snippets which show the judge does not understand the nature of the internet, and the defendant clearly did not present sufficient argument in several areas.
That implies that (1) the geographic location of the electronic mail server can be determined by the sender of the mail, (2) that the servers which will be passed through (or at least are at the origin or destination) are known to the sender, and (3) that the residency of the recipient is known to the sender.
Which implies, again, that the residency of the recipient is known or can be inferred. Both the Attorney General and Ferguson apparently don't know how the assembly of e-mail address lists occurs. When compiling a list of addresses who might be interested in a particular subject, address assesment almost never occurs.
If I were to decide to assemble a list of addresses that might be interested in my product, I could go to a newsgroup, download all the headers available, and compile the attached e-mail addresses into a list. However, that list of e-mail addresses has no other information embedded within it. Any of the e-mail addresses listed may be hosted with a server having a privacy policy which prevents disclosure of the end user's address. Therefore, I have no way of determining what the residency of those recipients is.
Here lies the most important part of the argument, conflicting state laws. The entire basis of the court's rejection of the unconstitutionality hinges on the assumption that the residency of a UCE recipient can be determined. If it is impossible to determine the residency of a UCE, the law becomes unconstitutional.
How many free e-mail services do not require an indication of a user's residency? How many of those servers that do require it verify identity? For an entire segment of the population, it is completely impossible to determine the residency of the users, thus, this law should be found unconstitutional.
You're missing the other meaning of free speech.
You are not allowed to make other people pay to execute your right of speech, especially commercial speech. That's why commercial faxes are illegal. That's one reason why spamming can be illegal. Most spam is also fraudulent, from making illegal commercial claims to forging addresses.
But you already knew that.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
That still isnt going to eliminate the stupid Taiwanese spam I get all the time.
I mean, US spam, I at least can read.
I keep trying to pick fights, but I can't shake this Excellent karma.
Hormel Food Corporation, which debuted its Spam(R) luncheon meat in 1937, has dropped any defensiveness about this use of the term and now celebrates its product with a website . . . . [Citations.]" (Heckel, supra, 24 P.3d at p. 406, fn. 1.)
Does that mean /. can use the old Spam logo again?
(only partially kidding...)
So basically, you're asking Slashdot how ethically principled you are?
Sorry, man, but you're the only person who can make that call.
Sorry, I thought the (snail) would have been more specific. What my little rant was about was the amount of Spam I get via the US postal service, not E-Mail.
Just because the mailer takes the cost of postage, does not mean there is not cost associated with the end user (me) not being able to make use of the mail. I can't wait until all my bills come in electronically.
Open Source Identity Management: FreeIPA.org
DMCA is bad. Yes. I agree. Threatening lawsuits against ORBS is bad. Right with you there, the internet functions well as a self-governing system. Also, don't tax transactions on the internet, okay, no problem. But if it involves an annoyance such as spam, please, bring in your law enforcement.
As a sysadmin, I hate spam plenty. As a sysadmin, I employ various mechanisms to employ spam. I don't consider this legislation to be any great cause of celebration.
Another damned comic
+++ NO CARRIER
The court has said that when you mail, you have a duty to figure out in advance what state the mailbox you're mailing to is in, and then find out the e-mail laws of that state and obey them.
Yikes! That's not at all the way E-mail works. You often have no idea what state the other guy's mailbox is in, and it's a pain, or impossible, to find out in many cases.
You may cheer that this law puts this burden on senders of UCE, but the reality is that if this decision stands, you are letting all states put whatever rules they care to pass on E-mail, and putting a duty on everybody to know all the laws and know the state they are mailing.
To add insult to injury, this law defines new syntax for the Subject header! The government should not be defining the forms of e-mail headers. The IETF does that. This is also compelled speech and apparently the defendant didn't even bring that issue up.
Less you think I'm defending spam, you can read my essay on the insidious evil of spam to find out the contrary.
But we must fight spam the right way, and setting precedents like this is a dark day for e-mail and the internet in general.
California had another spam law which wasn't so bad because the recipient had to notify, thus making it clear what state they were in.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Because of this:
Or, in CyberPromo vs. AOL:Or CompuServe vs. Cyberpromo/Sanford Wallace
Leaving aside the fact that the First Amendment is a constraint on Congress, not private operators, it seems clear that commercial speech is (rightfully) not protected to the same extent as expressive speech.You people generally want to be able to do whatever you want on the net, yet at the same time you want to restrict what someone else can do. Tread carefully, or else you may find yourself being restricted next.
[sarcasm]The next thing you know, denial of service attacks, sending viruses, and defacing web sites will be illegal.[/sarcasm]
This kind of paranoid, anti-government sentiment is really silly. Telemarketers are legally barred from calling people after 9:00PM and there's no laws being considered to limit when you can make private phone calls. It's illegal to send junk faxes to people, yet the government doesn't limit your sending of "normal" faxes.
Anti-spam legislation is just a specific type of anti-theft legislation, just as are laws prohibiting shoplifting.
Let me get this straight. Links are speech. Code is speech. But e-mail is not speech?
;P )
In a matter of speaking...yes (pun intended)
Noone forces you to take code, and pay for it, before you can see what it is, and without you asking for it previously. Not many people shove pages of code in your face out of the blue, without your consent, and then make you pay for the experience (although I'm sure some people would be excited by such a prospect...there are some sick, sick people out there
Noone forces you to follow a link - it's there if you want to follow it - but if you don't, it doesn't do anything. Think about watching a TV broadcast that contains a commercial with a link -- noone forces you to dial up to your ISP (possibly incuring phone charges or by-the-hour ISP charges) and follow that link. You can sit on your couch and ignore it.
The way email works, incoming mail (whatever it is) gets put on a mail spool. That spool is (generally, by pop3) downloaded to the end-user's computer, at their expense and without their prior consent (after all, it's their ISP account and their phone account that are being used - not the spammer's). The spammer foists the cost of their advertizing off on you - in the form of phone/ISP charges, not to mention server space and analysis time (the time it takes you to analyze your mail and decide what is/isn't spam, regardless of whether you do anything further with it.)
So spam costs the recipient money. The right to free speech doesn't extend to forcing others pay for the distribution of that speech. So, while they have a constitutional right to say what they want - they don't have a constitutional right ot make you pay for it.
Sign him up for as many spams as possible.
What we end up with as a net result (pardon the pun) is that there is a law on the books restricting speech on the net; if this law survives further appeals, it becomes precedent for further laws restricting net speech. Personally, I would rather deal with spam and keep the regulators as far from the net as possible.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
If I want to set up a stand on my front lawn and tell everybody about how great my penis enlargement system works, I can .. because I have free speech. If I want to promote my penis enlargement system on my Web page, I can .. because I have free speech. If I want to rent a hotel convention center and hold a series of meetings raving about the effectiveness of my penis enlargement system, I can .. because, well, you get the idea. Spammers have, and always have had the right to free speech. You are going one step further by claiming that massive (and often distributed) attacks on open relays and ill-prepared ISPs constitutes "speech." I must admit that this is one of the more puzzling arguments I've heard in favor of spammers.
.. not just from a bandwidth perspective, but from the perspective of computational resources as well. Back then, stories about these ISPs closing up shop were a dime a dozen.
.. when was the last time that you took a piece of "fucking C++ source code", purchased a list of 20 million email addresses from some promoter, sniffed out an open mail relay on some poor boob's network, and unleashed a bulk mailer bot to share your "speech" with the world? You're missing the point. Nobody is saying "MAKE MONEY FAST!!" isn't speech that is subject to First Amendment protection. What is being said is that the method of delivery is illegal. A spammer has no more right to steal the resources of others to mailbomb millions of people than I have to break into your house while you're sleeping and try to sell you a can of oven cleaner.
I realize that the days of the "Mom and Pop" ISP have pretty much gone the way of the dodo, but back in the mid-1990s there were quite a few of them. Unfortunately, many of these ISPs (which were pretty bandwidth limited and served a relatively small amount of users) were put out of business because of the overhead effects of spammers
This isn't to say I don't like spam, but if fucking C++ source code can be considered speech, why isn't "Do you want a longer penis?"
I'm starting to suspect that I've been trolled here, but assuming you're serious
Maybe the guy selling penis enlargment sauce really feels deeply about it and wants the world to know how truly great his product is.
Great! Then he can set up a stand on his lawn, put up an advertisement on his Web page, or put on a convention at his local Holiday Inn. Nobody is saying he doesn't have a right to promote his product. What people are saying is that there are some methods that cannot be used to do so. This has been true in the past, and it is true today.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
This is one of the few clear-headed posts in here. I hate spam just like everybody else, but hitting delete a few times a day (or setting up filters) is far far less annoying than the kind of clueless laws that the government likes to regulate the internet with.
Listen slashdot! You don't want the government's hand in this!
Remeber how they "solved" the pornography problem? (CDA I, II, etc., forced use of censorware in libraries)
Remember how they "solved" the movie piracy problem? (DMCA?)
I want as little regulation of what I do on the internet as possible. I think the spam problem is best solved by (1) hitting delete, (2) technological/social solutions, or finally (3) civil torts.
There are too many spammers in Bakersfield for that reference to uniquely identify him.
But if you'd post a sample of his spam, the Lumber Cartel (TINLC) will recognize him, get his T1 yanked by his provider, and then his network of IIS boxen will be secured for free ;-)
I feel for you, but think about how it is for HR people - they're being laid off badly, too, and there are a lot more resumes coming in now. They're almost certainly overwhelmed, and not being intentionally rude...
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
Who pays for spam? The people who's computers it goes through.
Think if the paper-spammers started putting "postage will be paid by adressee" on their ads.
I've got something to say. I got your address off a mailing list, so I'll come over to your house and yell it out of your window.
P.S. Please have dinner ready by 6. Thanks.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Now if the other states and countries would just follow. Something (besides filters) needs to be done about SPAM.
/. community never ceases to amaze.
The
There is celebration because the sending of unsolicited email has been outlawed.
When there is a discussion about trading illegal copies of copyrighted music, movies, or software, the majority of the people here say "fuck corporations" and do whatever they want. Talk about misaligned priorities.
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
the california law is a well written law that explicitly defines what the law means when IT refers to spam.
And surprisingly, the way the law defines spam is how most of us would want it defined.
Please be very carefull when contacting politicians about spam laws that you states/country defines it they way California does, otherwise it could be twisted pretty badly.
Its a tough thing, for me spam is an ad for business. But I would hate a law to stiffle free speech.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The decision also available here from the court itself said the lower court erred in not letting Ferguson pursue tresspassing charges against the spammer, despite his evidence that physical damage was done to his computer. I admire his creativity: the physical damage he cites is the fragmentation of his hard drive due to the spam in his inbox.
Has he also considered the physical damage that can occur by increasing your ejaculate by 581% and shooting it 13 feet?
Dude,
Everybody has to make a living. Everybody has to live with there own conscience. What are you asking for?
If you want someone to tell you its okay to send out spam, well try again. SPAM is wrong because you are basically syphoning off the system. This guy's dad makes a few bucks in a morally negligent way. It does create hard currency, but it won't do anything for your conscience or your resume, and chances are you will always regret working there.
If you have a conscience. Many people don't. Perhaps you are one of them. In which case, go help the spam guy. Its easy to rationalize. Hey! If not you someone else, right?
But this is a decision you need to make and no one else. Asking slashdot for advice is about as predictable as asking. "I was installing an OS on my PC, and was wondering whether I should use Windows or FreeBSD. What do you think?"
Anyway, good luck, and please take me off any lists you might come in contact with.
www.avacal.com -- the home page of pete shaw
What you can do is, go to those spammer sites for opting out, then fill in the email address of you congress person, your senator, your mayor, your president, John Ashcroft, and every other politician that you have the email address.
That's what I do.
I believe that, sooner or later, we will get a really tough law against spammers, especially if you do this at the pr0n sites.
Although I fully sympathize with your plight, being in the middle of the same thing myself, the long-term consequences are far more dire.
Taking the job is a black mark that will follow you for the rest of your professional life. No one that you'd actually want to work for will knowingly hire a spammer. Your employment options will be forever limited to spammers and spam-friendly organizations. You will also not be able to reveal the nature of your employment to your friends, for fear of their reaction.
If you simply fail to mention that piece of your employment history on future resumes, you'll still have a curious gap that future employers will ask about.
A quick trip through mythological or Biblical references will show you this is how Evil traditionally works: Wait for a moment of supreme weakness, then make the victim an Offer He Can't Refuse.
Ultimately, as an earlier poster pointed out, you are the final arbiter of your own ethics and what you think you can live with. But if you want my opinion, I recommend avoiding the Faustian Bargain. The long-term costs to your professional career are simply too high.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
How can I setup Sendmail to deny all emails where the Reply To: != From: address?
Filtering for message subjects which begin with "ADV:"
How can I verify that the sender's domain (or parent if they have a tertiary level domain such as neal@cowboy.slashdot.org) has a valid MX record?
On a side note, I don't understand the comments on who is donating to political parties in order to gain support for pro-spam policies.
From my understanding, the majority of spam is completely useless... even if I wanted to buy that timeshare in Afghanistan and use it as a base of operations to make $63,924 (first month!) sending marketing material to Al Qaeda members. There was some enterprising reporter (in LA, IIRC) that actually followed up to 200 or so spam emails trying to buy the product or the like, and 95% it was fake.
So what the hell is the point? If the spammer's time is worth nothing, they should try Linux instead. But their time is worth something and they're wasting it sending spam that they can't even make money from. Maybe they just use it to see who responds and then sell those addresses. But if that's true, and only 50% of the people respond, then eventually that list of emails gets really short... and since I can buy millions of email addresses for $39.95 I don't see how these spammers can afford to give anything to politicians.
Maybe that spammers are trying to get you to send them your credit card and then they run off on a giant shopping spree at your expense... but if that is the case then there would be even more anti-spam legislation.
... send a singing telegram to various courtrooms, legislators offices, and legislative chambers. Make sure the telegram pitches some fraudulent get-rich-quick scheme or illegal pornography. Send the telegrams repeatedly and at the most inopportune times.
Eventually, the judges and legislators MIGHT get the point.
Just try to perform it as "morally correct" as your conscience demands. That means if you discover an anti-spamming law that you can comply with by changing some code, change that code. If you know that the DMA maintains a list of addresses that have requested "No spam, please," then try to keep that list current on your systems. Just because your boss is "ethically challenged" doesn't mean you have to always do it his way. (Just when he's looking over your shoulder ;-)
Hell, who knows, you might eventually drive his company in a more legitimate direction, which might even prove to be more profitable in the long run. Y'know, you could even then legitimately advertise your services as "ANTI-SPAM S.xxxx compliant"
Just do the rest of the hacker world a favor and make his spam-slinging engine leave some spammy header traces that our spam filters can spot, please! Spam plays the numbers game, and if 5% of us are savvy enough to filter it out, SO WHAT? It doesn't cost you any business you would have otherwise tricked us into giving you.
Hell, it'll even save you time NOT sending it to the spam-hating addresses. It might even keep the rabid anti-spam crowd from chasing your IP address back a day early, letting you operate a bit longer each time.
John
John
This is, I think, one of the most regrettable mistakes that lawmakers make when they are considering "direct marketing". I don't get as many people calling to want to sell me something as I do people wanting me to donate something, often to a cause I would never dream of supporting. I'm guessing they use the same telemarketing firms and data.
Please, Mr. Lawmaker, tell me why the hell "non-profit" marketing is intrinsically better than "for-profit" marketing?
Bullshit, mail would still be affordable. Mail has alwyas been affordable in this country and even going back at least 200 or 300 years in England. And marketing trash mail only started on a large scale in the past 50 or so years. I'd gladly pay more for postage for the occasional letter i send in exchange for a drastic reduction in the number of junk mails i received and had to throw out unread.
100% agreement. Everybody thinks that non-profits are somehow more noble in their goals, so deserve special treatment. When one calls me during dinner, it's every bit as annoying an interruption as when some phone company calls trying to get me to switch.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Thanks for all your replies. I'm gonna do it for the money cause I need it, I got a feeling a lot of you are in the same boat.
I seem to have hit on an interesting thread through when it came to the current HR culture when it comes to finding work. I'm wish slash would run a story on it. I know i'm not the only one thats been in the HR revolving door for the last few months.
Granting corporations natural person status, thus giving them the same rights as citizens under the Constitution, was a really bad idea. Through their resources, they have the ability to defend their rights and interests in ways no private citizen ever could. This is why we have our current situation where we have to desperately defend our rights against these giant corporations who are either supported by the government or practically laughing at the government for trying to stop them.
You compare corporations to blacks and women. There's a problem -- blacks and women are people, and corporations aren't. How a judge ever came to conclude that a legal entity that exists merely as an organizational concept and a logo on the side of a building could or should have the same rights as a human being I don't know.
The enemies of Democracy are
Um. Last time I checked, my UCE was no different than my legitimate list traffic and personal email, except that the return address was usually invalid and the content utterly pointless.
This means that really UCE is no different than junk mail I get in the mailbox. Both are equally annoying. I have to look at both to determine whether or not this is a valid correspondence and then I have to put the invalid correspondence in the trash. In fact, UCE is less harmful than unsolicited mail, since I only have to hit 'd' on the email, but some of the postal mail I get really ought to be shredded since it contains offers for credit and a bit too much information for safety.
The benefits of this law are two and two alone: valid return address and opt-out procedures. Personally, I've had a lot more trouble with idiots using MS Outlook for email sending me documents for my advice than I've ever had with UCE.
I do not have a signature
I think a much more sensible goal would be, 'try to maximize the freeness of the net for most things'. Someone could hook up a giant spam machine to the backbone of the net and DOS everybody in the world. Is that 'freedom' or is that just wiping out the resources of other people for selfish reasons? You simply cannot expect all things to have a natural balance that arises as an epiphenomenon out of normal activity. Many things have no such balance and WILL go completely out of control unless checked. Spam is one of those things, just like telemarketing. The natural way of things is for greedy bastards and con artists to TAKE all your time and attention just so long as they have a mechanism for doing so. Spam programs, telemarketing war-dialers, are those mechanisms. There is no way to stop this natural but completely negative result other than setting and enforcing rules.
If you had to pay a nickel for each email you sent out, there wouldn't be anywhere near as much spam. It's up to you if you consider spam to be harmless, but you do pay for it, and apparently you kill a lot of time looking it over ;)
... because I'm not knowledgeable about them anyway. The ADV: string in the SUBJECT is plain stupid and is a perfect example of why a judge shouldn't be making technical decisions on the evolution of SMTP.
This string should have gone into it's own header, possibly even as an X-Header, for example X-Advertising. Then it would have been easy to put proper qualifiers on the nature of the spam, not just ADV: and ADV:ADULT.
I respect your wanting to pay the bills, but that respect only goes so far. Don't update this clown's spamming machinery. Please.
The Tenth Article of Ammendment of the US Constitution clearly states:
This clause above all others should say that states clearly have the right to enact legislation, even stuff that may even be unconstitutional on the federal level (because of limited powers of the federal government).
People in the EU please note this as well (before all of your national sovernty is gobbled up by the EU federal government). Each US state is an independent soverign entity, and can even pass treaties with foreign governments (subject to congressional approval... another story there).
On a more philosophical viewpoint, it is very healthy for 50 states to have 50 sets of laws (it is too late to stop that anyway.) If you think that living in Idaho is just like living in Mississippi, I would challenge you to actually go and visit both places.
The main point is that each state should be a testing ground for new political ideas, and if they are successful (like some of the anti-cell phone laws... just as an example) they will be adopted by other states.
If some bad laws are passed (again using the anti-cell phone laws as an example) there are some nice things about it.
What I'm trying to get across here is that there is a genuine role for state governments to play in the regulation of commercial enterprises, and they may even have some roles to play in the regulation of the internet.
And the other thing... the message that I'm replying to mentioned that it was just worrying about each of the 50 states. With the internet, you also need to worry about the other 200 + countries that your e-mail message could end up in as well. Just try to be the sender (or even the recipient) of porn in Saudi Arabia.
I've already sent a stern email off to the responsible service provider (xo.com), but the details of the case make it tricky. The POP used to inject the spam appears to have been in the USA (NY), then bounced off an open relay in Japan (which I'm ignoring as a useless target for litigation), but I'm in Australia.
Any suggestions as to how to cause the spammer in question major pain for this fraudulent use of my email address?
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
First of all, the idea that you're stealing someone's resources by sending them e-mail is absurd. When you connect a computer to the Internet, and have a mail transport agent listening on port 25 and accepting mail, you are inviting the public to send you mail.
By this logic, DDOS attacks are legal. "Hey your port 80 is open, and I'm just using it..." Fortunately, the court is smarter than that. Hell, it even says in the ruling that spam has a cost (see the paragraph which starts with "Like traditional paper "junk" mail, UCE...").
If someone sends you junk snail-mail, and it fills up your mailbox, you can't claim that you've suffered a denial of service because no new mail will fit in. The First Amendment protects junk mail, as long as it isn't fraudulent, etc. But this court says that a lesser protection is afforded to mail that travels on the Internet. In other words, Internet information has a lesser First Amendment protection than other forms of speech.
Forging the "from" line and/or return address isn't fraudulent?
Anyway, to continue the thought I started above, there certainly is a cost associated with spam. Sending a letter to a company is legal, but sending them 80,000 and making their mailroom do nothing but sort them for days is pretty questionable. (Of course, real mail could be thrown out easily, but e-mail is harder to deal with). Having a mail server is like having a mail box which accepts mail from the post office. Sure anyone can send you letters (as long as they follow the post office's guidelines). But death threats and scams are still illegal. Sure the server is saying "we want mail", but that doesn't mean that just anything is acceptible.
Also, I think the restriction is on commercial mail only, not all internet mail. The law states that it affects "advertising material" specifically. In fact, junk faxes are included in the same law, so the law is clearly is not entirely about internet mail.
The scariest part is the fact that spam is only allowed if you include a valid return address. Does this mean that anonymous remailers could someday be outlawed? This precedent would seem to support the consitutionality of such a law. I believe the U.S. Supreme Court has held (although I can't remember the precedent specifically) that anonymous speech is in fact protected by the First Amendment, and you don't lose any such protection just because you choose to be anonymous.
Using anonymous remailers for sending advertising materials can be outlawed. It has been, in California. It's also illegal to send anonymous death threats, BTW. The idea that the tool and its use are two different things (guns don't kill people... etc) is compatible with this ruling, and will doubtless be used to protect anonymous remailers, if needed.
Meanwhile, just because you're anonymous doesn't mean that you're not responsible for your actions. If your anonymous comments cause damage, you are responsible. Besides, this ruling doesn't do anything to stifle free speech. It does establish protocols for certain kinds, kinds which the government has the right to regulate (commerce). Big deal.
As the parent post states: To add insult to injury, this law defines new syntax for the Subject header! The government should not be defining the forms of e-mail headers. So now it's okay for the courts to be deciding Internet protocols. Think of all the damaging laws that can now be passed that will rest on this precedent. Limits on encryption, limits on anonymous remailers, God knows what else! And no First Amendment protection.
A new syntax? Wow, that's almost as bad as forcing you to put a valid return address on postal mail, or forcing you to put the stamp in the upper right corner of the envelope. Those bastards!
I just don't get it. Sorry for being so hard on your post specifically, but I just don't understand why some people are so worried. The law clearly says "for business purposes" and "advertising materials", so it only affects commercial ads. I'm fine with that. Spammers should be fine with the law since they are still allowed to shift costs to me as long as they do it properly. Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure that the government of California has the right to regulate commerce within the state, so it's not like they're overstepping their authority here. The law says that it applies to entities "conducting business in the state", so California isn't trying to tell other states what to do or anything.
By this logic, DDOS attacks are legal. "Hey your port 80 is open, and I'm just using it..."
But in a DDOS, your specific intention is to cause a service interruption. In the case of spam, a clogged inbox is only a side effect.
Fair enough. However, the findings in this case still state that spam does some damage (of various kinds, such as costs to the recipient). Side effect or not, this could still be a good reason for putting restrictions on the behavior. Basically the law is saying that you can't engage in an activity which harms others (even if you're not intending to cause harm) without having some restrictions on your actions. Seems reasonable to me.
Forging the "from" line and/or return address isn't fraudulent?
If the purpose is to deliberately mislead the recipient into believing the mail was sent by someone else, then possibly. But I don't think putting a non-existant return address on snail mail is illegal.
Actually, I don't think the postal service is supposed to send mail which does not have a valid return address. They want to be able to return the letter to somebody if it doesn't go through (e.g. the addressee has moved). While it is probably not illegal, sending out thousands of them in a way which causes trouble for the recipient and/or the postal service could get you in trouble. How about sending out a thousand copies of a letter with a fake return address, no contact info, and a warning that "If you don't reply, we will send you many more of these letters in the future?" With all the stress and complaints to the postal service that this would cause, I would bet that the sender would be in trouble. Sued for damages by the postal service? Maybe.
Of course, in the case the law in question, the "valid e-mail address" clause actually just says that some kind of valid contact address must be given for purposes of removing the recipient from the sender's e-mail list. So it's not even as bad as that. It could fall under a "Truth in Advertising" clause. You can tell people to visit www.whatever.com, but you have give them at least some small amount of information as to who you are. Again, seems fair enough. Isn't not saying who you are innately deceptive?
Of course, real mail could be thrown out easily, but e-mail is harder to deal with
That's preposterous. I don't know which e-mail client you use, but I find it easier to press the delete key, than to walk from my mailbox with an armload of multi-sized junk mail falling out of my hands to the trash can.
I was using the mailroom analogy here. If a mailroom gets 500 identical pieces of mail from some solicitor, they all go in the recycling bin before anyone ever sees them. Compare that to 500 people who each have to figure out what the heck this e-mail they just got is all about. The server could use a spam filter, of course, but they're not perfect. We don't have any at my job.
As for a single individual getting 10 junk mails vs. 10 e-mails, they're probably about equal in difficulty. I grab my mail on my way into my apartment complex, while I have to turn on my computer and start some programs to get my e-mail, so actually the snail mail would be a bit easier for me.
But death threats and scams are still illegal.
I'm not saying that they should be legal with e-mail. Only that e-mail shouldn't be subject to a lesser standard of 1st Amendment protection than snail-mail.
You miss my point. My point is that it's not enough to say that "it's speech, therefore it must be allowed without restriction", which is approximately what you're saying. First, the CA state law affects only commercial advertisements and affects both e-mails and faxes, so it's not about e-mail in general. And second, those advertisers can still speak. They simply have to follow a couple of simple rules.
As for the difference in how e-mail and faxes are being treated compared to snail-mail, remember that spam puts a burden on the recipient which snail-mail doesn't. That was the whole point of this case. Plus, there are ways to track your e-mail and fax receipt which aren't possible (cheaply) with snail-mail (send- and recieve- confirmations and images embedded in HTML for e-mail, standard fax confirmation messages for faxes). E-mail/fax are different than TV, radio and the like. Perhaps they should be treated differently?
Also, I think the restriction is on commercial mail only, not all internet mail.
But as I said in my post, it's the precedent which is scary here. This could make it easy to pass some ugly laws in the future.
There is no precedent here. California is legislating in an area which it already had the right to legislate (commerce) applying laws to a new medium (e-mail and faxes). Advertising is already regulated in several ways. Some kinds of ads aren't allowed in some places (cigarettes on TV, for example), and others have restrictions (that disclaimer before half-hour infomercials). California is finally regulating ads in all mediums. So what? The state is not giving itself any new powers over the internet or over commerce.
Besides, like I said before, there are other reasons why it would be hard to generalize this law to other forms of internet communication. The court ruled that spam e-mail causes damages, and placed the blame on the sender. This is a major restriction. Not only are damages required before restrictions can be applied, but it is the one who caused the damage who is fined. Thus anonymous remailers are quite safe. They are just tools. It's the user of that tool who is held responsible for the problem. If that's a precedent, then it's a good one. Blame the human, not the tool (and only if real damage is done).
Using anonymous remailers for sending advertising materials can be outlawed. It has been, in California. It's also illegal to send anonymous death threats, BTW.
I have no problem with making death threats by e-mail illegal. It probably already is as is the case for snail mail. But advertisements, unlike death threats, are generally afforded First Amendment protection. I'm concerned that ads by e-mail are being singled out here. I think that's a bad precedent.
Meanwhile, just because you're anonymous doesn't mean that you're not responsible for your actions.
But which actions are you referring to? If the "actions" are speech (commercial or non-commercial) then such speech should be protected by the First Amendment.
A new syntax? Wow, that's almost as bad as forcing you to put a valid return address on postal mail, or forcing you to put the stamp in the upper right corner of the envelope. Those bastards!
But the worst that happens if you forget a stamp or return address on snail-mail is that the mail doesn't get delivered. You don't get sued or go to jail! There's a huge difference. I have no problem with people using filters to filter out mail witha questionable return address. Getting the courts involved scares me.
To summarize what I'm saying: 1) Spam causes damage. I can see several reasons why this is so (e.g. shifting costs to the recipient, especially with faxes!), and the court in this case affirmed this -- see that section of the ruling that I mentioned before. 2) The First Amendment gives you the right to speak, but not the right to speak without restriction. 3) Regulating a form of speech which causes damage is reasonable. 4) The state government of CA already regulates advertising in every other medium anyway. (And as a side note, advertising in mediums such as TV, radio, and billboards don't do damage like spam does!)
So, to address these last three points. Advertisements may be free speech, but nobody's right to speak is being reduced. Commercial advertisers sending unsolicited messages are being asked to do some things (e.g. add "ADV:" to the subject line) when doing so because the type of speech they choose to use causes some damages (at least a slight cost incurred by the recipient). So the sender still has the usual First Amendment protections. For the first time, the recipient is also protected somewhat against incurring damages against their will.
The "actions" I refer to are in fact speech. You have every right to speak freely. You're still responsible for the consequences of your speech. The First Amendment gives you the right to speak. If your speech causes damage, you're responsible for that damage (e.g. fighting words -- you can say them, but legally you're held accountable for provoking the other person!). If your speech violates the law, you get punished. All that's happening here is that some damage-causing speech is being regulated. Not restricted, mind you. A protocol for it is being developed, that's all.
As for the new syntax, I have this to say. Commerce gets regulated sometimes. If a half-hour infomercial ran without that disclaimer at the beginning, they'd be fined. If a porn website didn't check the ages of its users, it would be fined. Likewise, the state of California is regulating spam. If you don't follow the protocol, you'll be fined because you caused some damages. (I don't see anything about jail time in the text of the law. Fines either, actually. There must be more to it.) California is just regulating some kinds of e-mail and fax advertisements, just like they do all other kinds of advertisements.
Your point is valid and certainly appears sincere. No idea why some dimwit marked you as troll.
Yes, spam is speech. I think what is desired is a distinction between
The reason many people feel the first type of speech should be treated as less sacred, is that it normally requires some sort of force or fraud. Yes, spam is a type of (nearly harmless, but nonzero) fraud, in that when you connect to my SMTP server, there is the implicit assumption about what I allow that connection for, and spam violates that assumption. Just as when I enter a restaurant and ask for food, there is an implicit assumption that I'm going to pay for it.
I'll admit that it's a bit gray and the consensus of the purpose of SMTP ports are not well-defined enough, so calling spam fraud is somewhat subjective.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
As far as the law is concerned, location is easy. Does your corporation operate in the state of california? (i.e. do you pay state franchise taxes or operate a branch, warehouse, office, etc. in the state) If yes, then you must comply, if not go on about your business.