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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