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

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.