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Stronger Anti-Spam Law Proposed
NumberField writes "The fight against Spam is making for some strange bedfellows. A new bill sponsored by Senator
Charles Schumer (D-NY)
and the right-wing Christian Coalition
that would let individuals sue spammers for $1000 per message. What isn't clear is how they will define spam broadly enough to outlaw it, but narrowly enough to avoid making it a bonanza for lawyers. For more information, see Schumer's
fact sheet (PDF), or his
press release." Update: 06/13 14:20 GMT by M : The draft bill (pdf) is available.
Recently there was an article posted here about taxes on cable modems here, but it occurs to me that spam, like postal junk mail, could help pay for infrastructure just as easily.
Not an original idea, but like a state sales tax (or one of several European VATs), the onus would be on the merchants, or in this case those relaying spam, to collect and pay up.
Now, since American companies are being required to collect and disperse VAT for sales made in Europe, surely there will be some sort of reciprocity there, and in general America (or the states therein) would impose sanctions on countries that did not abide by these new spam tax laws.
With spam in the news as much as it has been lately, surely some government types will take notice, that there is cash sitting in their inbox (or in their filtered spam folder if they're smart). And SpamAssassin catches a huge percentage of the spam I get lately, so if my mail machine has to do a little bit of filtering so that middle America can get cable modems and dsl, and so that maybe the last mile can be fiber someday, well, I'll bite the bullet, as long as I don't have to pay cable modem taxes or any other such things and get this spam.
How many of my email addresses will I be allowed to register? Let me see, assuming a maximum of 64 characters per username (it's probably more), and 36 different characters (actually there's more there, too), that would be potentially 40119919145476304800650533877024438126904024877418 12225955731622655455723258857248542161222254985216 addresses. Of course no one would have that many and no database could store them all. But spammers could dynamically generate random ones. As more and more mail services support tagged addresses, spammers will likely start adding random tags to make sure they have a defense of "no match in the do-not-spam database".
I use a different email address for every mailing list I subscribe to. Should I register every one of them with the database? Most of them have already been spammed (probably harvested from online archives of those mailing lists).
One possibility is requiring that tagged format address be matched with respect to the base address (tag characters usually being "-" and "+"). Another is registering a whole vanity domain making it applicable to every username possibility. I'm sure aol.com will get registered like that, as will just about every domain out there. Mine will be.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
We have a law to deal with this kind of organized criminal activity, it's called RICO. I fail to see any legal reason that the federal government can not apply RICO laws to spam. It's an organized illegal activity, and the people who pay spammers to send it are just as guilty and in my view just and culpable as the spammer who sends it.
...Tell him most spam is pronographic in nature, he spent most of his career in Missouri hassling libraries and adult film/book stores.
RICO is not intended to be used this way. It was created to allow vertical destruction of a criminal organization, where the people at top insulated themselves from the crimes committed by the rank-and-file. This isn't quite the same. It's also rather hard to compare spammers to the Mafia- Alan Ralsky and Ronnie Scelson are shitbags, but until we find the RBL creators dismembered in the trunk of a Cadillac, spammers are still just petty crooks.
Just draft a basis antispam law at the federal level -- make Ashcroft earn his money enforcing it. Tip
We have this troubling little thing called "The Constitution", which makes it difficult to pass a sweeping federal law like that. Ashcroft is currently busy trying to destroy the Constitution, but I see no reason to assist him.
Get it through your head - the government can not help you here. Besides, do you really want our Congress micromanaging the way the Internet or technology in general is uses? That sort of mentality is what led to obscenities like the DMCA and the library filtering act. I'd rather keep bombing the spammers with catalogs.