Dutch Court: Bothered by SPAM? Get A New Email Address

Brenno de Winter writes: "The earlier mentioned ruling on XS4ALL has been analyzed by Linux Journal in this article. The ruling states that it's easy to change e-mail addresses, so don't worry about SPAM too much. Yeah right! RFC's don't apply to the Direct Marketeers since they were not involved in the standarization. Neither in our consitution, btw .."

Comments

I hate spam

[Apreche]

as much as the next guy. I mean when someone uses bots to collect tons of e-mail addresses and send them porn ads 100 times a day, its just not right. However, I don't get spam. No, I don't use a filtering program. No, I don't sue everyone who spams me. I'm just not careless with my e-mail address. I have a yahoo address I never check which I use on suspicious websites. Otherwise I just doublecheck to make sure when I fill out a form that I have all the checkboxes set to "don't send me crap".

I'd be lying if I said I never got any spam. I got on piece of it a few weeks ago. Before that, I can't remember.

Spammers are bad, but if your mailbox is full of it its more likely your carelesness with your e-mail address than it is spammers out to get you.

Re:I hate spam

[armchairlinguist]

Goody for you, but spam is still a problem for the many people whose addresses must be posted publicly for business or technical reasons -- the same ones the Dutch court apparently doesn't care about, since they also can't change their addresses easily.

Re:Drug Dealers...

[Tosta Dojen]

From the article, a better analogy:

If You Don't Like the Way I Drive, Get Off the Sidewalk

This is a more accurate representation of spammers' attitudes.

Legislation

[Cardhore]

All (some of) you people sit here and moan and bitch about patent legislation, addendums to the copyright laws (like the DMCA), the FCC adding no-copy flags to TV broadcasts, and region coding. But when it comes to spam you all scream "Legislation!" "Put and end to spam!" "I can't take another spam e-mail!" "Spam isn't freedom of speech, it's abuse of network resources!" "I have to pay for this shit!" Many of you would be entirely happy to see spammers behind bars. Am I the only one who sees how hypocritical this bullshit is? Folks, there are technological solutions to this technological problem. Let's not sink down to the RIAA's level, please.

Re:Legislation

[Mawbid]

Most of what you're seeing is not really hypocrisy at all. First of all, the anti-legislation posts (on DMCA etc.) and the pro-legislation posts (on spam etc.) are largely from separate groups of people.

Some people belong to both groups, but that's not necessarily hypocrisy either. It can be if you oppose legislation in general or wherever technological measures could be used instead. But people may have other criteria such as being against legislation that's bad for them and for legislation that's good for them. Nothing wrong with that.

yeah right indeed....

[jeffy124]

Most people have email addresses assigned by work/school -- firstname.lastname@company.com, fl##@company.com, flastname@company, etc, and they can't change that without changing their name in the courts.

Also, the same theory could apply to changing my phone number to avoid telemarketers. Let's see the general populous react to that.

Likewise, avoiding junk mail by changing snail mail addresses.

Great inconveniences on both changing snail mail and phone numbers. Gotta notify friends, family, work, the state (get new DL for snail mail), the IRS (or other applicable tax collection agency), my bank, etc.

As one person mentioned, what's the judge's email address? I bet it falls into the category of work-assigned addresses.

Only if you see things in black and white

[Valdrax]

It's only hypocrisy if you can only see things in a black-and-white view that people must be anarchists or totalitarians to be consistent. Most normal people believe in the concepts of "good legislation" and "bad legislation." You might be surprised to know that most people consider SPAM and copyright to be two completely seperate issues.

Copyright law is about putting limits on ideas and concepts and selling them. I'm not 100% opposed to copyright, but I believe that current trends in legislation are destroying the balance between copyright owners and customers that makes copyright work properly. The issue here is whether or not people can take or do something with works someone else created without compensating them.

SPAM is about the ultimate expression of our crass commercial society where businesses now treat people as consumers instead of customers. It's about shoving ads down people's throat and putting the burden of the cost on them. As far as spammers are concerned, we exist just to consume advertisting from them, and we should shut up, pay the costs, and like it. The thing is, they're not providing me with a service that I want in exchange for my added cost of living. The issue here is whether or not someone can create something and force people to have to bear the costs for it when they didn't want it in the first place.

However, copyright protection and spam do share one important thing in common. Technological solutions are all useless without forcing people to adopt them. The question is whether or not we should support the "injured" party in either case. In the case of copyright, I don't believe we should. That's a matter of corporate welfare to protect an industry against technology that makes it obsolete. In the case of spam, I do believe we should. It's a matter of forcing someone to pay costs for a product he didn't want.