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

Sounds fair to me.

[acceleriter]

Could someone please post the email addresses of the judge(s) responsible? I understand that there is a great untapped market among Dutch jurists for at-home college degrees and penis enlargment machines, and these would be helpful to mining that.

How often would we need to change addresses?

[leastsquares]

A couple of months ago I signed up for a Road-runner cable connection. At the time I hadn't finished putting my new PC together so I didn't connect for about the first 4 days. Guess what I saw when I did check my road-runner POP account for the first time... ...that's right, two emails offering me the chance of earning a degree, now, based on work-experience. Hmmm.

Needless to say, I've never have, nor will, use that email address. I dread to think how much junk has collected in that inbox so far.

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.

As long as there is recourse, spammers dont give a

[t0qer]

fuck. No I'm seroius! I met a spammer in person! I reposted "Spamming for Dumbasses" on several spam related stories so do a search if you want some more detail.

Basically from the spammer I saw and met, they completely take the argument of network resources out of the argument. If its on purpose or not, they play completely dumb to the problem of cloggin up mail servers.

Right now, spamming IS and WILL be a legitimate business until proper legislation is made. As the spammer I talked to said, "Spamcop is interferring with my AMERICAN right to do business" Not that I agree with him, I was a sysadmin for 7 years so I know what damage he does to the systems out there. Funny thing is though, he's right! As anoying as it is, as much as I hate to admit it, spamming isn't really illegal anywhere yet.

Another problem is with the laws that are created. One such law states something along the lines of, you must remove someone from your mailing list if they ask you. My spammers way around that was to keep a master list which he never touched, and just remove people from the sub list. I.e.

His company was Company X
He spammed for and from Company Y
He gets a remove from list for company Y, but not X
and the spam just keeps on comin.

I made another +5 post about the Italians deleting that guys web site hosted in america. If we really want to put an end to this problem we would not allow spammers to look for loopholes like the one I explained above. Anyone that tries to find loopholes in the laws has no respect for them at all. Last time I checked all our laws are written in english, I may not have a law degree but I can follow the books well enough. Why does our goverment allow loopholes and circumvention to laws to be legal? Maybe we SHOULD take a hint from italy.

You live somewhere, you follow the laws, simple as that. Be it real world or internet. People that circumvent those laws are scum.

--toq

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.