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Opt-In Junk Fax Law Survives Court Challenge
An anonymous reader writes "From Privacy.org: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit has upheld (PDF) the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) of 1991 against a First Amendment challenge. In the case, Missouri v. American Blast Fax, junk fax company Fax.com and Wal-Mart argued that the law violated the First Amendment because it imposes fines upon companies that send fax advertisements without the consent of the recipient. The case is the latest court victory for opt-in privacy laws." I hope the same logic is applied to spam.
Faxes Cost more then email, ink, paper, wear-n-tear and people can't recieve faxes while one is incoming. I hope this can be applied to spam, but the costs are much lower, and email can be downloaded much faster. Email servers can handle lots of incoming mail at the same time.
Still it sets a good precedent that could be very useful in the future.
Sure, an email doesn't usually cost a lot to receive. But tens or even hundreds of emails a day, multiplied for instance by many employees in a business can add up to serious increases in a lot of costs.
And not just bandwidth costs. How about billing costs? You're a $300/hr consultant who has to spend half an hour a day sorting through your email trying to figure out what's spam and what's not. That's not an "intangible" cost. That's $750 a week. Sure you could find better ways to block it or sort it more efficiently or whatever, but that's another thing imposed on you by those sending the emails.
When such a large percentage of email is sent every day, I don't believe you can say the monetary cost is insignificant.
There's no law against sending unsolicited postal mail, so far as I know. Why should there be against faxes and e-mails?
In the case of postal mail, the sender pays. If a company wants to waste their money sending stuff that's their business. In the case of Faxes and Email, the receiver pays. It means those sending the information don't pay but waste the money of people receiving the stuff. The economic difference is why an email box is full of spam, but your postal box may only get 3 to 4 items a week.
Well, none of us ever click on the stop-sending-me-this button, with good reason. When the spammer knows that theres a real person at the receiving end they INCREASE the amount of spam they send you, and tell all of they're spamming friends.
The only thing the company you call will do is sell your phone number (for more money!) to more companies and the amount of fax-span you get will INCREASE. It's sad but true.
"Entropy is the bad-guy, and he is everywhere"
Nor does it say *I* have to pay to hear you ( i.e.: resources to receive the fax.. and Spam too ).
It only guarantees your right to say it.. nothing more..
Funny how the retailers demand it, but if its bad press against them, they use the DMCA to squelch speech.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
AC comments get piped to
First of all I did not say you can stop anyone from speaking. That WOULD be a violation.
.
What I said, in more simple terms: you have a right to speak, and I have a right *not* to listen.
The discussion specially was concerning me paying to hear you speak. ( via the resources it takes to receive electronic 'speech', its not free ) Again that is wrong. You ( a generic term here ) do not have the authority to charge me to listen to you speak. Nor do you have the right to force me to listen.
Thus the concept that the 'right to be heard' does not exist. Nor should it.
As a side note, I have the constitution and bill of rights on my wall above my desk, nowhere in there does it say I have to listen to you. It only states that you have a right to speak. Nothing more, thus no right to be heard.
---- Booth was a patriot ----