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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.
Let's get something straight before I go any further. Spam (email and fax) is theft. It's theft of my resources - my bandwidth, my disk space, and my paper and toner supplies.
Unsolicited physical mail does me relatively little harm. It does take a bit of time to sort through it, but the USPS won't toss out my VISA bill because the annoying weekly flyer has taken up the last of my mailbox space.
In contrast, I've lost email because spam filled a partition. (Some broken mailer hit me with 20+ copies of a multimegabyte file in less than an hour.) My fax machine, being the cheapest I could find since I was mostly interested in outgoing faxes, uses a plastic strip that can only handle a relative handful of pages. Every junk fax that I receive significantly increases the risk that an important fax will be cut off.
If the courts rule that it's legal to steal from me, the results are obvious and inevitable. No more fax, no more junk mail, no answering machine (same legal logic applies), no telephone. You want to talk to me, you'll do it just like the Founding Fathers expected - you'll send a letter or you'll visit me in person because the cost of me offering any alternative is too high.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
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.
Don't sign up the (stoopid luser of a) judge that ruled spam faxers have a constitutional right to use your connection, equipment, paper and toner. No, he's already stuck his foot in it, and he won't change his mind.
Instead, sign up all the judges on the appeals court that will hear the appeal, and fax them your junk e-mails, etc. They're the ones who will decide next. If they can't get any useful faxes (like submissions from Fax.com), maybe they'll see reason.
(flame) Lusers named Limbaugh are a hopeless case.(/flame)