Another Go At Making Spam Cost Money

wario78 writes: "The BBC is running a story about the law firm Morrison and Foerster which is claiming damages against the spam company Etracks based in California. They are asking for $50 in damages for each spam they receive, up to the maximum of $25,000 per day. Nice to see a lawyer doing something community-oriented for a change (even if they are just trying to make a profit from it)."

Comments

on re ads

[drDugan]

OK

it seems to me that we all just accept ads as "part of the way we live"

Each time I try to get education, entertainment,
or travel anywhere, I am bombarded with
unsolicited ads. ads that generally fuel the
out-of-control cosumerism all around us.

Read a magazine, get ads.

Watch the news on TV, get ads.

Walk down the street, get ads.

Read the newspaper, get ads.

Watch entertainment TV, get ads.

Even if I want to, I am FORCED to see ads. To be
programmed. (don't tell me to go live on an
island -- I don't want to do that either).

The thing I think is that we don't have to have it this way. I know its radical but imagine for a moment a world where there were no unsolicited ads . This is a real stretch -- many of the assumptions about normal life start to break down if you take this assumption and go with it. We DO have the technology to provide everyone all the information they could want whenever they want to buy something, yet we don't. We make all the businesses compete for visual and auditory bandwidth, annoying the he!l out of everyone.

thoughts?

Re:As much as I hate spam

[Bodrius]

We should treat SPAM differently because it can, and probably will, cost the end-user a lot of money when he ends up paying for bandwidth use.

When I get snail-mail spam (not in caps because it's slightly less evil) I may have the inconvenience of picking it up, and then throwing it away, but I don't pay postage.

Unfortunately, in the Internet the receiver, and everyone in the middle, also pays in resources, and since most users pay for their bandwidth indirectly (and will soon pay directly), it increases the cost of Internet for the consumer. The consumer is paying to read ads he doesn't want to read in the first place and that are not subsidizing any service, and that's not good.

Imagine if you were forced to accept collect-calls and every single tele-marketer in the nation took advantage of that.

The Internet may be self-policing, but we still reserve the right to prosecute for "real world crimes". If a website systematically uses my credit card information for identity/credit fraud, I want them to be legally prosecuted, "filtering them" (not buying from them and spreading the word) is not enough.

SPAM should be treated just like having someone stealing your cable connection, electricity, water or other utilities. There are real-world, monetary damages, which may be small or may accumulate to something significant over time, but either way it's not legal and there may be some penalties involved.

The alternative is regulating through code, but redefining the email standard so as to avoid SPAM would be problematic and (at least the solutions that come to mind) possibly raise some privacy issues.