Fighting Spam With A 17th Century Law

A reader writes "Here is an interesting article which describes how a law from the year 1610 could make Spam illegal in Australia. The same story in german can be found here." Actually, since the law stems from King James I (the VI, if you are Scottish), as such, could be held British Commonwealth wide.

Comments

related article in alt.sysadmin.recovery

[fanf]

Now, *that*'s entertainment.

Trespass to chattels

[fmaxwell]

This same legal construction has been used in the U.S. in lawsuits regarding unwanted access to servers and computer resources. AOL has used this as a legal tool against spammers in lawsuits.

Re:Canada is no longer a commonwealth

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm afraid you're wrong. Ever wonder why we have a Governer General? She's the Queen's representative in Canada...

Re:Precedent for US?

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I can recall, the french looked to the early goverment of the USA, and took ideas after the French revolution (the French goverment formed after the USA did). In the end the British were forced to adopt a stronger form of parlament, also after the idea of a congression of representatives, like in ancient Greece, or in the early American goverment. So I have looked at other systems of goverment, thank you.

Like I just wrrote, we took our system of goverment based on the ancient greek society. The greek had this term for such a goverment, it was called a DEMOCRACY. You might do some reading on the subject sometime, or at the very least look it up in the dictonary.

As an expert (as in with a degree in the subject) on ancient Greek history, let me explain a few things to you:

1. The US representative democracy quite deliberately rejected the Athenian model. Athens was not ruled by a representative council (your "congression of representatives"), but directly by a public assembly in which all citizens could participate (while day to day matters of policy were carried out by the strategoi, boule, etc., they were granted their authority directly by the assembly, which could recall them or override them at any time). This is NOT the system of government we have in the US.
2. While the governance of some of the Greek leagues (in the 4th and 3rd century BCE) did play a part in providing the American founders with models for the creation of the American federation, these were not democratic bodies, but rather bodies with structures more like the old League of Nations - representatives were selected by the city governments, not directly by the people.
3. British law before the Glorious Revolution (the bloodless coup in which William and Mary were installed by Parliament)and the Civil War (the British one, by Parliament against Charles I when he attempted to disband a Parliament that acted against his interests), still depended largely upon a somewhat representative parliament for the creation of most of its laws. (I might have details wrong here, as I'm not an expert in British history). After all, the cry of the American revolutionaries, no taxation without representation, referred to their desire for representation in Parliament (what nowadays we'd call "direct rule").
4. Ultimately, the form of the American government depends upon the researchs of the founders into a number of constitutional theorists, including Polybius, a Greek historian of the Roman Republic. The Roman Republic had a representative constitution which was heavily weighted toward the propertied classes, not unlike the original US Constitution (before it was amended to allow direct election of Senators, and before e.g. the Voting Rights Act - our much maligned electoral college is another example of this kind of weighting, as it provids a stop-gap to prevent direct elections). Though one would have to say that the Roman Republic was not *the* model for the American federation, it was a more important model, surely, than Athenian democracy.
5. Finally, this is all about Constitutional law, not common law. In US practice, though IANAL, I understand that common law underpins Constitutional law, and that English common law prior to ~ 1770 is valid precedent for US Federal law and most state law (excluding the Roman-law state of Louisiana) unless it is superceded by the Constitution or by US written law (this is because the US has a written Constitution, unlike Britain with its common law constitution). There was in fact an important legal case in the middle 18th century in which Jefferson attempted to apply Roman law to a case in Virginia (regarding slavery) which settled (under the Virginia constitution at least, but I think it was accepted as precedent by the other colonies) that Roman law did not apply in English-speaking America, only English common law.

The moral of this story? DON'T GET WORKED UP IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT.

Anonymous, because I don't need the karma.

You wish you were British????

[Stoutlimb]

And you think that you have issues with Big Brother now... wait till you see what the English have in store for you... Pretty soon in England you won't even be able to take a sh!t without having it logged in a GPS-enabled toilet and uploaded to a mainframe database to be added to your profile.

Careful what you ask for... The brits are the worst for privacy issues.

Clarifications

[TekPolitik]

1. Common Law, not Statute

As others have pointed out, this is a Common Law rule not a Statute, and it's a lot older than 1610, dating back to the 1400s. And it's a civil (torts) matter, not a criminal one.

2. Potentially Applies Throughout the Common Law World.

The most significant cases for this are The UK (except Scotland), the US (except Louisiana), Canada (except possibly Quebec), Australia and New Zealand.

3. Only Applies Where Implied Consent is Negated.

There is clearly implied consent for person-to-person email, even if inadvertantly misdirected. The assertion in this case is that there is no implied consent for spam.

4. This is NOT Going to Cause Paranoid Problem X.

The issue of implied consent, which is dealt with by the courts in remarkably sensible ways, prevents every single absurd outcome suggested here. This will only nail things that society considers abusive practice.

5. You Can't Draw Conclusions of Law Based Solely on a Brief Article in the Popular Press.

It takes other things, like, for example, knowledge of the way courts interpret things, and in the case of Common Law, full knowledge of all the rules involved (which are many) to draw conclusions with any validity.

I wish them luck, in the meantime...

[Spoing]

...I use a few tactics to thwart the vast majority of this dreck personally.

First, the basics;

1. Turn off HTML email viewing.(*)

2. Turn off return reciept.

   If you have your own domain, do not reply to innocent-sounding email that looks like it was sent to the wrong mail address. 9x out of 10 it wasn't. They are polling for your valid address and just want a response so they know who really should be spammed.

Next, the filters (personal, not network wide -- sorry!);

1. If the To:/Cc: fields are directly to one of your valid accounts (not a mailing list), allow it through.

2. If it is From:/To:/Cc: a known good address or list, allow it through.

   All other mail is shuffled to Spam.

None of these filters will prevent spam from simply being mailed To: you directly. Yet, if you check your spam headers you'll see that only a small sampling actually do this -- they don't want to send out individual messages. It raises thier profile too much.

Also, yes, this will not catch the case where you are added innocently to a mailing list by an unknown sender. That's why I suggest that you do not delete the spam automatically. (I've determined that most folks who do this are people I don't want to talk to anyway, so it kind of works out even if the message isn't delivered.)

Now, if you want to apply more sophisticated filters, go ahead. A blank or missing "To:" field seems to be popular with spammers these days.

For me, I'm not going to bother. I fiddled around with those for about a year four years ago and ended up deleting good mail accidentially and learning more about Procmail -- not that learning about Procmail is a bad thing.

* To prevent someone from figuring out that your address is a good one, ofcourse. Viewing rendered HTML email may, depending on the viewer, give a hint that they have a valid address. Some mail programs do allow you to render the HTML without fetching resources from a remote server. When in doubt, do without.

Re:Precedent for US?

[pubudu]

I never claimed that the founders DID NOT take a que fromtheir environment, and maintain a qazi English system of rule. However, the fact remains that Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin both were into Greek Mythology, as most folks back in that day were of the classical education. Indeed, the basis of American politics is very much a rip-off of ancient Greek society. At that same note, one does not simply invent a new form of goverment over night. Thank you for you comment, but you obviously don't know what your talking about. Thanks anyways.

An interesting theory, and one shared by a disturbing number of academics, but ultimately unsupportable. There was no right of revolution in Greece, but our Founders claimed it. Compare the Declaration of Independence with Chapter XIX of Locke's Second Treatise. There was no natural right in Greece, but our Founders claimed it. Compare Jefferson and Locke again.

The ancient Greeks thought commerce was the exclusive domain of slaves and resident aliens, not the work of a gentleman; our Founders promoted it. See John Locke again. The Greeks tolerated no distinction between Church and State; compare the First Amendment with Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration.

The basis of political organization for the Greeks was the polis; it was well understood that too large a citizenry would break down the attachments between citizens and hence civic virtue. The Federalist Papers are quite clear that this was a fatal flaw with the Greek system; an expanded sphere was needed. The Greeks relied on confederations for anything requiring more than a single city; Madison and Hamilton attack this as a recipe for failure. Madison's cure for faction is precisely to break people's attachment to their own local loyalties and tie them to a great state in which most of their fellow citizens are anonymous.

True, we did copy Greek art in our capital. No, wait, the Greeks painted all their stuff in gawdy colors; we copied the Romans. In the architecture. We did not copy their institutions, nor did we copy those of the Greeks. These are the mistakes from which all friends of popular governments recoil, disheartened.

In short, Locke, not Solon or Lycurgus, is the intellectual founder of the the American regime. Of course, seeing as my dissertation is on this, I may be a bit partial.

Re:Attorney: yes

[Capsaicin]

Heh. I'm halfway through my first-year criminal law class, and I'm sure that there's an equivalent crime

Nope, you would need an 'asportation' for larceny to run