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.

Comments

Has anyone actually tried to collect?

[buckminster]

I'd be interested in hearing resports from individuals who've succesfully sued after receiving unsolicited commercial faxes. If you won, were you able to collect?

not as hard to opt-out

[coke_dite]

I work in a government office, and we receive a LOT of unsolicited faxes. I've found that a simple phone call can get almost all the traffic to stop immediately. Granted, this is a pain in the ass and it's time-consuming, but with four phone calls, I've managed to completely get rid of all our unsolicited faxes! People are usually much more polite about no longer sending faxes, but (here, at least), the laws are stricter, since receiving a fax actually costs money (the paper it's printed on and the ink it uses up add up to a lot of money over a year).

The people I'm working with have been receiving these faxes for YEARS, but no one ever thought to call the company to get them to stop.

Reminds me of all the fax.com stories

[xintegerx]

First, a year ago (march 31), a federal court ruled that suing Fax.com under this law was unconstitutional.

Then, the FCC in August fined fax.com for doing what it was doing.

You'd think that was a lot of money? Next, later in August, Alert newsreporter Slashdot reported that Fax.com was being sued for 2.2 TRILLION dollars

Hillarity ensued!

So now, Fax.com owes 5.4 million + 2.2 Trillion (actually 2.2 billion) which is still 2.2 Billion USD.

However, since Fax.com is a business, all assets will just be seized of the business and the owners will lose nothing except the business.

Har har!

Re:Reminds me of all the fax.com stories

[bigbigbison]

IF I recall the details of that story, the judge that decided that fax.com could send jumk faxes did so under the reasoning that it was free speech. the judge? Limbaugh, the same one that declared that videogames WEREN"T deserving of first amendment free speach protection...

Fax-Unsubscribe-Blasting?

[telemonster]

I always wanted to use the 800 number on junk faxes, and setup a computer with a simple script that would sequentially "unsubscribe" every phone number in my exchange from their database.

Spam will never die =/

[Snowspinner]

There's no law against sending unsolicited postal mail, so far as I know. Why should there be against faxes and e-mails?

The only argument I can think of is that faxes and e-mails are transmitted at a loss to the carrier or recipient. E-mails take up bandwidth that the sender doesn't pay for. Faxes take up ink and paper, and also tie up the phone line and thus choke out signal in favor of noise.

The fax problem is pretty insurmountable, so this is probably a good law. But I wonder about the e-mail. How long before Yahoo or Microsoft decide, in light of the anti-spam laws, to open their pipelines to spam companies for a cost. i.e. you may spam to Yahoo addresses for $500 a mailing, or whatever. Especially since consumers can opt out?

In the end, that would be both a good and a bad thing, I suspect. On the bad side, it would pretty much permanantly entrench spam into the culture. But I suspect that's already happened. The good side would be that it would, assuming anyone ever figures out a way to enforce the laws, crack down on Nigerian money scandals, and at least promote spam offered by quasi-reputable companies.

Re:Spam will never die =/

[jmauro]

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.

Not as big as you think

[cyberlemoor]

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.