Two New Spam Laws in Japan

An anonymous reader submits: "The Daily Yomiuri, one of the major newpapers in Japan, reports (in English) that two new laws aimed at spam have just come into effect. In short, the laws require that spammers honor 'opt-out,' provide a valid return address, indicate the commercial nature of the message in the title, and never use randomly generated email addresses. The laws were pressured into effect by NTT DoCoMo, who complained that as much as 84% of all email circulating on its system (i.e., cell phones) is sent at random."

Comments

Concerning

[Bouncings]

I'm starting to get concerned about the growing number of laws regulating spam. A lot of spam I get says "This email cannot be considered spam because it is in compliance with XYZ"

So my question is, are these moderate anti-spam laws really helping or hurting? I see them, in the long run, offering some legitimacy to spam. In that these laws are so weak, that they don't really curb spam, but because they are the only regulation on the topic, spammers will point their ISPs to these laws and demand service.

I'd say maybe the community should fight all laws but out-right bans on spam.

Re:Concerning

[DeadMeat (TM)]

The trick is, they're not in compliance with anything. Spam usually refers to Senate bill S.1618 or House bill HR 3133, neither of which was passed into law. They would have both required working opt-out addresses and legitimate headers, so virtually all spam wouldn't have been in compliance with it anyway.

Incidentally, setting your mail filters to delete all mail with "S.1618" in the body is a terrific spam filter, since no legitimate mail ever refers to it, and nearly all spam does.

Don't get so excited yet

[twilight30]

As someone who is part Japanese and spent two years over there, I'd suggest not getting too excited about this.

As the article points out the government is setting up consultation centres to handle complaints. Redress from the courts, however, is nothing like what we see in Western cultures, let alone British, Australian, New Zealand, American or Canadian courts. In Japan, court cases are long, excessively-drawn-out affairs that do not generally reduce to simple answers. In fact, I'd hypothesise that many outside legal advisers would view the Japanese system as hopelessly hidebound.

I think that the social pressures extant in Japanese society probably could develop into more effective constraints -- about the only aspects of the law that I think would be useful are the 'naming-and-shaming' ones, as bad publicity will lead to a direct and measurable loss of business.

The thing is, DoCoMo might have had better luck in controlling this earlier by :

• funding an ad campaign to its business customers on the 'evils' of cellphone/Net spam
• taking aggressive, direct action to cut off abusers
• consulting with other phone suppliers and retailers that deal with the business community
• developing informal standards directly identifying spam ('ADV' or the equivalent) earlier
• harping on and on and on -- media interviews separate from the ad campaign above

If the phone companies are resorting to calling for help, they must have really lost control of the situation, as they generally don't like to take this route.

Spam

[Vought 28]

If they outlaw spam, then they would have to outlaw phone solicitors (phone salesmen), door to door solicitors as well. This was already argued in a US court. The court ruled that people do indeed have to right to go door to door, including Johovah's Witnesses. What's the difference between a salesman calling you on the phone to sell you something and spam? Don't hate me because I'm stupid.

Re:Spam

[phillymjs]

What's the difference between a salesman calling you on the phone to sell you something and spam?

If a salesman calls you on the phone, he or his company is paying for the call. Likewise, it doesn't cost you anything to open your door if someone knocks on it.

What about cell phones where the call recipent is paying for the call, you ask? Well, there is an FCC prohibition of phone solicitation using auto-dialers or prerecorded messages to be sent to mobile phone users.

When someone sends you spam, you're paying for the bandwidth used to receive it, period. Considering HTML-formatted spam often has a lot of image files that must be pulled down from a remote server, this can add up quickly-- my Hotmail account (which I do not use and have NEVER given the address of to ANYONE, though I do peek in it occasionally to see how much crap collects in it) gets buried in spam.

The recipient-pays-for-the-bandwidth issue will be a bigger deal in the future as more people move to broadband. The way things are going, the greedy cable companies and phone companies will eventually meter their broadband offerings, to squeeze more money out of their customers while at the same time encouraging them to use the service less. Then they can keep overselling their existing network capacity like they've been doing, without having to do much to increase it.

~Philly