XS4ALL Wins Anti-Spam Suit

johnpc writes: "In a court case started by Dutch ISP XS4ALL, a judge ruled yesterday that spam outfit AbFab is forbidden to send spam to all subscribers of said ISP. The judge writes: 'The essential point is that XS4ALL has no legal conveyance obligation. (...) XS4ALL does not wish to convey messages which its customers have not asked to receive and therefore does not wish these messages to be delivered through its systems, in this case from Abfab. The question of whether the unsolicited sending of large volumes of advertising messages by e-mail should be referred to as 'spam' or 'electronic direct marketing' is not relevant to this dispute.' This is obviously not a solution to the spam problem within the Netherlands, but it is a step in the right direction. You can read an english abstract of the ruling. Unfortunately, most of the actual case documents are in dutch, some of which are still being translated."

Comments

I have to laugh

[Slash Veteran]

I have to laugh everytime I read one of these "spam is illegal/spam is made illegal/spammer is found to be violating the law" stories.

If the US congress tomorrow passes a law that clearly and completely illegalizes spam, the amount of pr0n and online diploma spam I get will drop ZERO PERCENT.

How do you sue? Like I'm going to sue a korean mail relay. Stop. You are wasting my time. This problem can't and won't be solved by Trent Lott and Tom Daschle. Stop pretending it will.

Re:I have to laugh

[ender81b]

You are right. Any spammer based outside the U.S. will be able to spam at will. BUT inside the U.S. they will be liable to prosecution AND any company USING spam who is inside the U.S. will be liable for prosecution/civil suits. Believe me, enough of these get prosecuted and you won't have many left willing to risk it. If you *knew* that if you reported spam to a government agency they would prosecute the spammers wouldn't you send every piece to them?

Wham-Bam 90% of spam is eliminated.

Re:I have to laugh

[Teun]

But you miss part of the picture, already before this company got it's clients in trouble.
AbFab had sold their services to a few big names in Holland and this made them get on their knees begging the public for forgiveness about the spam they had send by means of AbFab.

Any legal solution has to include punishment for the companies trying to sell the goods, not just the mail boys.
And they are generaly in your own country!

small steps folks, small steps

[bojan]

Instead of fighting HUGE spammers, why not take smaller ones to court to set precedents. Then build up to larger and larger ones?

This is a great step in the correct direction.

Great, what about the rest of the planet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fantastic, Dutch ISPs will now be able to block spam with impunity. However, I don't really see how this will help the state of affairs for the majority of the global online populous (aka netizens).

I don't understand

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing I am really confused about is what makes congress fellows hesitate about passing a law to ban spam? Does that conflict their personal interests, or is that (possibly?) unconstitutional, or is it just technicalities? Doesn't banning spam benifit everybody except spammers?

This is such flaming bullshit

[AgentTim3]

disclamer: I only ask that you READ all the way through this mess before modding it as troll. thx.

Get ready for a long one. YES, spam sucks. We all know it, we agree with it, no one likes it. Guess what? DEAL with it!

In order to legislate the Internet, parallels must be drawn between it and regular society. Why? Because the Internet IS regular society, en masse. You've read all the shite about it being a global community, well, it IS!

We've all seen the posts before comparing spam to junk mail and why that makes it legitimate. No one has bothered to fully explain that so I'm going to, because IT'S TRUE.

You move into/purchase/rent/lease a house. Your address is thereby registered in various marketing pools. By participating in surveys, signing up for credit cards, buying various things, your Home Address gets propagated around the Real World net. Advertisers troll these networks and eventually pick up that you, Person A, live at Address B. And so they begin to send you mass mailings. The ones you receive may be personalized to your community. Depending on how much information you've volunteered to the Network, they may be personalized to your age/sex/religion/choice of pets/favorite video game console/etc. These people pay money to the (very much legitimate) US Postal Service to see that their advertisements/coupons/etc. are mailed to you.

Now we move to the Internet parallel. You have signed up for an Internet Address. The Internet is public. I will repeat this. The Internet is PUBLIC. Therefore people on the Internet can determine your address, just as much as I can browse the white pages looking for Real World home addresses. Depending on how much information you have submitted through various channels to the Internet, people may have put together certain profiles about you. Just as in real life, they will determine which advertisements are best suited to you, and make sure to send them to your PUBLIC address.

Being that this is Slashdot and no space to write novels, I would hope that we have all seen the obvious parallels between Home Addresses and Internet Addresses. If not, reread the above paragraphs until it makes sense.

Now, onto the problem (and indeed, I will propose the Solution)...

The US Postal Service requires MONEY in order to send out bulk mailings. The cost IS proportionate to the amount of mail that one wishes to send out. If I wish to print one million full color ten page Pennysavers and send them out to my "most likely to buy stuff" list of targets, I must pay a requisite sum to the Postal Service in order to see that these ads are delivered. This is where the Internet FAILS MISERABLY. ISP's do not care about bulk mail. Open relays allow far too many people to send far too many identical messages without caring about how many poor souls are copied on the same duplicated message. The ISP level is where it MUST CEASE. The current system is retarded and asinine. Those that maintain SMTP servers MUST begin to charge appropriate rates for bulk mail. There is no reason not to do this. Yes, I hear you whiners coming with "I'm a busy business professional, mail rates will hamper me!" BULLSHIT. *I* am an extremely busy business professional. I send AT MOST fifty emails a day. DAMN sure that they are all NOT identical ads merely being copied to various other people. At the ISP level, this is not in any way difficult to filter out and charge for.

I propose a simple and effective email charge system, where bulk mailers are FORCED to pay an appropriate amount in order to mail to a few thousand, tens of thousand, etc people.

The problem now is that our "open" network allows spammers to do their business virtually for free. If we can force them to conform to a business model that mimics the Real World and no longer lives in Fantasy Land, I will guarantee you that our goal of receiving less spam will be accomplished. However, I can't say this enough: Attempting to legislate against this practice is not only ineffective, it is UNCONSTITUTIONAL and completely worthless. Restricting people from advertising their products to PUBLIC networks and PUBLIC addresses on those networks goes against everything our country was founded on.

There also exists a second solution, which I'm sure many people will bitch about as well. But it's simple: Maintain TWO email addresses. Keep one public, open to any senders. Go through it as your business needs demand, and filter out any important emails. Keep the second address PRIVATE, that is, only accept emails from people on your "accept" list. I submit that this is really not that horrible a thing, and many of us are doing it already. Is my /. address my "main"? Not even close!! I have a personal address which I give out to coworkers, close friends, etc., which they have instant access to. The access list blocks any emails orginating from unfamiliar territory. I check my other, public list as I need to, and filter out the crap that builds up in there.

In short summary, legislating against spam is yet another of the giant wastes of time that government spends its time doing. It needs to be addressed from the economical model (reasonable ISP charges) or from the personal level (maintain public/private email addresses). Anything else does nothing but waste clock cycles.

--t

Re:This is such flaming bullshit

[Thorizdin]

I think I agree with your intent, but not your logic. When you say the Internet is a "public" network, you are only partially correct. A truly public network would not be owned by companies like UUNET, Sprint, and AT&T, not to mention the countless companies whose infrastructure makes up the Internet. I agree totally that new laws won't do what is needed, what is needed is for ISP's and enterprises to take their claims of harm (wasted bandwidth & processor cycles) to court and make it very expensive for companies to use UCE. The problem with trying to create a system that forces the Spammers to pay the network providers is there isn't "one" entity like the Post Office that handles email, or even email policies for America, much less the rest of the world. I think a better long term approach is to force opt-in, which will force advertisers to go down the pay the recipient track. ISP's and other service providers will have to watch for abuse from endusers, but disk qoutas and aging would handle most of that problem. If users started getting out of hand max email per day qoutas could be built fairly easily.

Thorizdin

Re:This is such flaming bullshit

[bero-rh]

Now we move to the Internet parallel. You have signed up for an Internet Address. The Internet is public. I will repeat this. The Internet is PUBLIC. Therefore people on the Internet can determine your address, just as much as I can browse the white pages looking for Real World home addresses. Depending on how much information you have submitted through various channels to the Internet, people may have put together certain profiles about you. Just as in real life, they will determine which advertisements are best suited to you, and make sure to send them to your PUBLIC address.

Not really.
I receive loads of pr0n spam, and I'm actually one of the guys who are seriously offended by this sort of crap. I also make a point of publishing the fact that I don't want spam in my .signature, and nobody "targets" that.

And there's another difference you're overlooking. "Real" junk mail doesn't cost the recipient anything (other than the time to throw it away), while many people actually pay for their net connectivity by volume or by duration, both of which causes them to pay for receiving spam.

And, of course, at least some countries have laws allowing for "no junk mail" stickers on mail boxes, and disallowing delivery of junk mail to those. This actually works; I've received only one piece of junk snailmail this year [and its sender won't dare to do that again], in contrast to roughly 400 spam mails per day.

I propose a simple and effective email charge system, where bulk mailers are FORCED to pay an appropriate amount in order to mail to a few thousand, tens of thousand, etc people.

If it's used to compensate the recipients for their loss, it may actually be fair.

Restricting people from advertising their products to PUBLIC networks and PUBLIC addresses on those networks goes against everything our country was founded on.

Not quite. It has never been legal to steal, and spam is stealing bandwidth and connectivity cost.
A rough equivalent to stealing bandwidth by spamming is stealing capacity of a bus or train - so if you think spammers should be protected by the constitution, you're implying that people who ride a train/bus/plane or any other piece of PUBLIC transportation without a ticket should be protected, as well.

Re:This is such flaming bullshit

[some guy I know]

The Internet is public. I will repeat this. The Internet is PUBLIC.

The Internet is not public. I will repeat this. The Internet is NOT PUBLIC.

It has some public elements. Parts of it are held by public institutions. Other parts of it are exposed to the public.
But the vast majority of the Internet is owned by private companies.

Re:This is such flaming bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree with the notion that one of your proposals could be the solution to the spam problem. Charging for mail sent and using different addresses for different purposes are two often-heard proposals, which are just as often rejected because they either do not work or are even more in fantasy land than the current system.

Just two facts: If you're using separate mail addresses, what are you going to do with the mails coming in on the "spam magnet" address? Ignore them? If so, why don't you just stop using an email address in these situations at all? If you are sifting through the shitload of spam to find legitimate messages, you might just as well use one address for all as sorting them first only to look at all anyway isn't going to save you anything. Then there's the problem that it's simply impossible to keep mail addresses secret. They leak through CCs, worms, web greeting cards ex-friends on a mission, etc.

Then about the send-fees: Faxes already cost the sender money, and I get a shitload of faxspam anyway, clogging my fax machine, costing my time to money. If you want a system like paper junk mail, use paper junk mail.

Re:Hey, it's progress

[macinslak]

Mayhaps I misunderstood this?

A judge ruled that an ISP doesn't have to use its own resources to deliver advertisements (for free) for someone else to whom they have no obligation of any kind?

US companies have no such problem that I am aware of, and it greatly disturbs me that a judge in any country should have to state this explicitly.

This is not the victory that many of you think

[kcbrown]

The judge says that "XS4ALL does not have a conveyance obligation".

Now, XS4ALL is not an U.S. based ISP, so certain concepts like that of common carrier status may not apply. But such things used to apply in the U.S., even if they don't apply today.

The reason this isn't a victory is that it essentially declares that the ISP may transport ("convey") whatever data it pleases.

Well, it is a privately owned company, and I can see some merit to the argument that what it does with its resources is its own business.

But now apply the same logic to all ISPs, particularly the large ones, in light of the behavior of the media. That's right, folks: this ruling means that ISPs have the right to refuse to transmit any data they see fit. In short, they have the right to censor. After all, there's nothing that prevents them from selectively filtering.

How would you like it if an ISP decided that it didn't want to bother transiting any Slashdot traffic? Or Kuro5hin? Or any non-mainstream web source? What if they start dropping data based on the content of the data itself? Think it can't happen?

You say you could go to another ISP? Tell us that when the only ISPs left are AOL/TW and AT&T (the former, at least, has a very large interest in being selective about what you, the audience, see).

This may be a "victory" in the fight against spam, but it has ramifications that are so bad that I'll take the spam, thank you.

I'm responding to a troll. Shoot me now.

[The Famous Brett Wat]

The Internet is public. I will repeat this. The Internet is PUBLIC.

Rather than repeating yourself, it would have been better to clarify which sense of "public" you meant. Open to all the people, like a public meeting? Maintained at the public expense, like a public library? Open to the view or knowledge of all, like when a fact goes public? I have a couple of servers permanently connected to the Internet, and only parts of them can be considered "public" in any of these senses (and not at all in the "funding" sense, alas). Perhaps you simply meant that you can't control what people do with information that you've disclosed (made public). I can agree with that, but I think "the Internet is public" is a poor way of expressing it.

I propose a simple and effective email charge system, where bulk mailers are FORCED to pay an appropriate amount in order to mail to a few thousand, tens of thousand, etc people.

Which bulk mailers will be forced how and by whom to comply with this?

If we can force them to conform to a business model that mimics the Real World and no longer lives in Fantasy Land...

Hate to burst your bubble, but at this moment in time the Internet exists in the real world, and your proposal exists in fantasy land. How were you intending to transpose them?

However, I can't say this enough: Attempting to legislate against this practice is not only ineffective, it is UNCONSTITUTIONAL and completely worthless.

To which constitution were you referring? The Internet does not have a "constitution" of which I'm aware. I take it that you're not proposing to legislate that ISPs should have to charge for bulk mail, then? Or would that be both constitutional and worthwhile? You mentioned forcing people to comply, so I assumed you meant law, but now I'm not so sure.

In short summary, legislating against spam is yet another of the giant wastes of time that government spends its time doing. It needs to be addressed from the economical model (reasonable ISP charges) or from the personal level (maintain public/private email addresses).

Oh, so you are against legislation in this case. You expect every ISP under the sun to spontaneously start charging for bulk mail. Well, if that's our only solution, then my guess is that spam is here to stay.

My bet is that an improved set of mail protocols will be the answer. That's why I'm working on them full time right now. Ask me about them in another four months or so.

Re:Here it is: the first of many

[dirk]

"Point of this ruling is that XS4ALL has the right to block spam"
The point is even better than that. The ISP can tell a company not to send email through it's servers. If that company does, then the company can lose up to 2.5 million whatevertheircurrencyis. XS4ALL doesn't have to change or try to block any spam at all from the company. Overall, this brings down XS4ALL's operating cost, plus reduces the spam their customers get. Good news, I hope it goes forward.

This is the point I'm not sure I agree with. According to the ruling (at least the English translation, which I'm assuming is accurate) "XS4ALL has no legal conveyance obligation", which means they don't have to relay the spam. I'm not sure where this translates into AbFab can't send mail to the mail servers. IT seems to me it would more logically mean that XS4ALL doesn't have to deliver the mail if it is sent to their servers (they have no legal obligation to convey these messages to their users). It's kinda like if I get mail for someone else at my house. I have no legal obligation to convey that message on to the correct address, I can just throw it out. But I can't charge the person who sent it to my house (even if they did it on purpose). They other question is what happens if a user requests email fro AbFab. Out of all their users, I'm sure their is at least one person who wants whatever crap it is their selling. As this ruling talks about unsolicited email, if a person signs up for it, can they be charged for sending it?

Doesn't spam cost the receiver money?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems to me that we should not receive spam for the same reason people with cell phones don't receive telemarketing calls.

That is, people who use cell phone pay for their service. Don't users of email similarly pay for their email?

Since I am paying for my email, not someone else, I would think I should not have to deal with SPAM.

Hmmm...