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California Anti-Spam Law Approved
Metroid72 writes "Zdnet reports that "A California anti-spam bill passed the Senate on Wednesday, a first step toward the passage of a law that would give people the right to sue spammers." I guess there's light at the end of the tunnel"
Yes but it's waaaay over there, very tiny. Just a speck.
Until something like this gets approved at the federal level, at least.
And I know that won't do much good for overseas spammers and so on, but perhaps it will increase the cost of doing business.
In those case, we can only hope that other countries will do the same. China and Korea, especially.
Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog it's too dark to read. - Groucho Marx
True, but as more and more people use customized spam filters spamers will have less incentive to continue.
This is totally off the cuff but...
It seems society may be taking the wrong approach to this whole spam thing. We keep focussing on the guy actually sending us the e-mail. We seem to be overlooking the fact that there is someone out there who is trying to sell something to us (or scam us). If it weren't for this seller/scammer the spammer would have no reason to send us anything. Instead of attacking the spammer why not attack the root of the problem: the guy who is paying the spammer to spam. The way I look at it the spammer isn't doing this out of the goodness of his heart. He's doing it on someone's behalf because they are paying him. The person doing the selling is likely much more accessable than the actual spammer because one would need to actually contact them to buy the product being advertised. In contrast to suing the spammer why has suing the company/person who has hired the spammer been cosidered?
Never disturb your enemy while he is busy making a mistake.
I don't think this is going to solve spaming. (You can fake your email, etc.) It will only add to the people who sue everything
Yeah, but don't forget that spammers usually want to sell you something and in order to do that they have to include some form of contact address or phone number in their spam.
Tracking down the people behind the products or services being promoted should be pretty straight forward -- proving that it wasn't a joe-job however could be a whole lot harder.
This doesn't do jack people for us people, just another open loophole law that was passed so the politicians have "busy work"
Most spam is sent out through a 3rd party, who usually hides behind all kinds of nifty little things like hijacked SMTP servers and spoofed IP addresses. My freinds dad was a spammer, so I'm quite aquainted with thier operations.
Let's say, I recieve a spam from penis enlargement corporation. I try to sue, PEC just points out that the spam wasn't sent by them, it was sent by "insert spam company here" and they're off the hook.
The law needs to include the customer of the spam house, otherwise it's going to be ineffective.