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Fax-Spam Prohibition Ruled Unconstitutional
An anonymous reader submitted a link to this Orange County Register story which reports that "A federal court has ruled in favor of Aliso Viejo (California)-based Fax.com in a dispute over the federal statute that bars sending mass, unsolicited faxes, the company said. Two years ago, Missouri sued Fax.com and another broadcast-fax advertising service that has since gone out of business for violations of the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act." Missouri's Attorney General plans to appeal.
So they can waste your physical toner and tie up your fax machine for fun and profit? Anyone have fax.com's real physical fax #? We could email them a bunch of black pages with small white lettering advertising sexual relations at a hot hot hot senior community.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
But that's exactly why spam is not theft. You are voluntarily offering to be contacted by random people via email.
That's absurdly twisted logic. That's like saying that simply having a cell phone means that you are volunteering to receive calls at your expense from anyone that wants to sell you something.
My having an e-mail address is not an invitation for random people to contact me. It is so that people and companies can reply to me when I contact them. If I choose to post it on a web page about turkey vulture watching, then I am inviting contacts from people about that particular subject -- and no other.
If you don't want unsolicited emails, set up your mail server not to accept them.
And how do you propose doing that when the spammers forge the from address and use subjects that sound legitimate? I already block blind-copied mail from untrusted senders, all mail from China, Brazil, Korea, and Taiwan. I block mail that has any of the following country domains in the Received: lines:
.ar - Argentina
.br - Brazil
.cn - China
.cz - Czech Republic
.de - Germany
.id - Indonesia
.il - Israel
.it - Italy
.jp - Japan
.kr - Korea
.mx - Mexico
.my - Malaysia
.pl - Poland
.ru - Russia
.sg - Singapore
.tw - Taiwan
I have a huge list of keywords from the subject and body that get blocked. I use mail-forwarding accounts so that I can give out different addresses based on the level of trust I have for the entity I'm giving the address to. I then filter accordingly.
And I still get spam.
That's absurdly twisted logic. That's like saying that simply having a cell phone means that you are volunteering to receive calls at your expense from anyone that wants to sell you something.
No, it like saying that by looking at your caller ID and answering the phone you are volunteering to receive calls at your expense from anyone that wants to sell you something.
My having an e-mail address is not an invitation for random people to contact me.
Your setting up a server to accept emails from random email addresses is... It's no different from a store owner suing people for trespassing just because they offer to sell him something. The store owner can tell that person to leave, and if the person doesn't leave, then it's trespassing, but the store owner is implicitly allowing anyone to enter the store. S/he can explicitly revoke that implicit permission, but not retroactively.
It is so that people and companies can reply to me when I contact them.
You can't force people to read your mind. That's what you're asking for.
If I choose to post it on a web page about turkey vulture watching, then I am inviting contacts from people about that particular subject -- and no other.
And if you wrote that on your web page, and the person sending you the email read it, then you have a point. Otherwise you're talking about mind reading again.
And how do you propose doing that when the spammers forge the from address and use subjects that sound legitimate?
I've never - not once - had a spammer forge a from address to an address of a friend or a company with which I wanted to receive mail. If a spammer did such a thing, then you'd have a case that that spammer was knowingly trespassing on your system. But I've never heard of such a case.
I already block blind-copied mail from untrusted senders, all mail from China, Brazil, Korea, and Taiwan. I have a huge list of keywords from the subject and body that get blocked. I use mail-forwarding accounts so that I can give out different addresses based on the level of trust I have for the entity I'm giving the address to. I then filter accordingly. And I still get spam.
That doesn't change the fact that every single one of those pieces of spam were accepted by your computer.
If you want to argue there's an implict authorization when connecting to an open port, yes, there is, just like there is to walk up to a door and knock on it. But I stuck a sign on the door that said 'come in if you're not selling something', and given my own terms for accessing that computer on that port, and I've clearly printed them out where everyone who connects can see them.
It's not my fault if your software decided to not inform you of these condition. You're in charge of your computer, you shouldn't be using software that hides the fact I'm denying you permission to enter. Your problem, not mine.
What you basically claim is there is no way to tell someone they're illegally in a computer system, and that is clearly legally nonsensical. People have to make a reasonable effort to check if they're trespassing or not. You can't walk up to a door past a sign telling you not to enter and then claim you 'weren't looking that way'.
It's certainly not an excuse to trespass because you hired a guide who stood in front of the sign so you couldn't see it. Your software is an agent of you, and what it does on your command, you do.
The mere fact you continued communications with me shows you got the message. I communicated with you over the only channel possible, and you managed to read the 200- at the start of my message and missed the rest of it. Your problem, not mine.
I've made the notice as large and noticable as I can. And as an additional courtesy, I informed the DMA, who is running a list washing service, I don't want any such email. I have it next to my email address on various web pages. I've made a good faith effort to notify people that I do not give them permission to connect to my machine for the purposes of sending me unsolicted bulk email, and spammers are not making any effort what-so-ever to check if I have or not. They are simply walking onto my computer and using it for whatever purposes they see fit.
And that, folks, is deliberate negligence at the minimum. And negligence on someone's part that leads to a crime is not a defense in any court of law, especially if the 'negligence' suspiciously resulted in profit.
And that makes it trespassing, plain and simple, or the computer equivilent, often referred to as 'hacking'.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I used to have several digital fax "inboxes", which I used for both business and personal purposes. Some of these were paid accounts, others (most notably OneBox.com) were free.
In fact, I used to work as a programmer for a company here in Atlanta called Ptek, which in turn has a business unit called Voicecom. Voicecom offered (probably still do) another "all in one inbox" business solution, whereby faxes could be delivered directly into your email inbox for your review. This blurs the lines between what used to be separate communications services, and I expect this trend to continue as people continue to want all their communications tech from a single point of access.
Therefore, I offer the following point: what separates (in this environment, at least) email SPAM/UCE from unsolicited faxes? We've got more anti-spam legislation going into the mix every month it seems; could some of this be leveraged to fight the battle against junk faxes?
For reference, I now receive an average of four to five junk faxes a week on my primary OneBox account. It's annoying
When a business sends out faxes hoping to trick somebody into buying some random piece of crap, that's protected expression. But if an individual does it as a form of protest, it will probably be called illegal harassment.
Theft is OK, as long as you only steal a little bit at a time.
Lemme get this straight. There's no law against something, so nobody files complaints with the Attorney General, because they know they're gonna be told "Fuck off, it's legal, if you don't like it, write your Congressman."
So they do what they're told. They write (and fax :) their Congressmen, and Congress passes a law against the something. And then they complain to their Attorney General again, saying "Hey, now it's illegal, do something!"
And that's this fuckweasel's argument for him thinking the law is ineffective? *bitchslap*, HEY, ASSHOLE, is the law against burglary somehow "ineffective" because the police started to get more complaints about break-ins after a law against theft was passed?
As a final insult, after hiking up the skirts of Justice, he then proceeds to ram it home: Upon realizing that federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction over actions bought by state Attorneys-General, and that State courts judge cases brought by private parties, he rules unconstitutional the right of private action.
Congress, in a rare display of clue, anticipating that your State prosecutors (having first told you "fuck off, it's legal") will continue to tell you to fuck off by doing nothing to enforce the new law, includes a private right of action. Congress, in effect, is saying "If your idiot Attorney General can't be bothered to bring charges, you can file suit for $500".
11 years after that, a judge tells you to fuck off, confirming what you already knew - writing your Congressman is a fucking waste of time, even when he does pass the law you require, your Attorney General will still ignore it, and when you try to use it yourself, a judge in the thrall of the Direct Marketing Association will simply throw out the part of the law you need.
This has to be appealed, and it has to be overturned. A man's home is his castle, and theft by conversion cannot be free speech.
This judge is an insult to the bench, and his ruling brings the law into disrepute.