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Still No Federal Spam Law
jdedman4 writes "Declan McCullagh writes in c|net that the Congressional Republicans and Democrats are quibbling over proposed federal anti-spam legislation. The root of the disagreement is the class action, a specialized joinder rule in lawsuits which needs little or no introduction, and which is prohibited in one version of the legislation. The new anti-spam legislation in Texas, which is to take effect September 1, has a similar prohibition. (See here for an analysis of the new Texas anti-spam law.) It is certainly true that the class action joinder rule can take a relatively frivolous individual claim that an attorney would not pursue and transform it into a lucrative and dangerous claim with a potential for high recovery. However, the measure can be appropriate when large number of individuals' rights are violated by a defendant's course of conduct but the cost of vindicating those rights is too great. With spam, the latter situation seems to be the most logical, as recipients of unsolicited commercial email are harmed, but their economic damages are not severe enough to merit an individual lawsuit on their behalf. Even with relatively high statutory penalties against spammers, the cost of locating the offender and investigating its corporate structure, if any, might dissuade a plaintiff's attorney from pursuing the claim. Plus, it seems the problem with class actions in this context would be practical, not philosophical, as most spammers would be either judgment proof or out of the jurisdiction."
It's not a bad thing that there is no federal anti-spam law. I would rather see some thought and consideration put into this than a law that is badly written and allows spammers to get around it. Or worse, a law that allows Ashcroft and Poindexter to get even further into my computer. No, Congress, take your time and do it right.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
Lets forward it to all our friends, and tell them they have to forward it all their friends.......
Omnis amans amens
...than a half-assed attempt (see DCMA, Patriot Act, etc).
We just need to connect the word "spammer" with "terrorist" a little more firmly in the Congressional mind.
No more spam? what will I eat in college?!
Think about it, we have laws against the following things, and they still go on:
Murder
Rape
Speeding
What makes them think that this will even make a dent in the spam load? Speeding and murder are easy to prosecute! Spamming, OTOH, is really hard!
Despite popular opinion, a US law will only stop domestic spam, and the weaknesses of punishing the actual company hiring the spammer have been made clear before e.g. Hiring someone to spam your competitors product.
Why not continue working on more effective spam traps and stop legislating morality.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Fat chance I know, but they could model it after Germany's (or was it Denmark's) law banning companies from soliciting to you directly unless you have requested their service or purchased from them recently
What I would not mind seeing, however, is a system of torts that would allow users to take on spammers the same way that people get to take on telemarketers and junk mailers who do the same things. There are all sorts of scams, frauds, blackmails, etc... that come over the phone and through our postal system. Currently, US law provides for people to be able to sue up to $5,000 for teleblackmail and telefraud scams. Although this number is pitifully small, there does seem to be some interest in raising the bar a little.
We don't need a law banning spam. It would just be circumvented somehow anyway. What we need is a weapon for the people to fight back against the spammers with, a law that allows us to take them to court for practices already illegal that they have carried over into the digital domain.
IAALS.
In any event, I find it feasible enough to write up very simple litigation concerning spam that pretty much models the anti-telemarketer bill/law/whatever. That is, make a national registry on the state level. If you sign it, you don't want spam. If someone spams you, you report it, and the people are punsihed (I would prefer shot and killed, but simply "punished" is enough).
Educate the sysadmins who are presumably inadvertently allowing spammers to use their SMTP servers. Educate the users about spam filters. The last thing we need is the incompetent government getting their grubby hands on yet another piece of technology they don't understand.
Spam should be protected as Freedom of Speech (Freedom of Expression in Canada). How else would I have learned about how unsatisfying I am with my small penis? Oh, let me also tell you about the great deal I got on herbal Viagra! And I'm not "seek of spam", thankyouverymuch! If people would quit bitching and actually responded to some of this informative mail they'd be MAKING MONEY FAST! In fact my contact in Nigeria, DR. FRED MBOGO assures me that I'll have millions more in just a few days as I sent my banking details to him!
Laugh away, cretins, spam made me what I am today!
Trolling is a art,
People complain about government intruding in our lives, restricting what we do, not protecting our rights when the RIAA attacks, but that all goes away the minute the same stuff happens to people you don't like.
Spam is a problem that should be taken care of by the free market, not government. Just because it's easier to pass a law than deal with the actual issues doesn't mean that's the better choice.
This space intentionally left blank.
I think the key is "out of the jurisdiction". How much spam do you get from US IPs? When I was actually attempting to figure out where my spam came from, it went back to chello.nl and their sister domains. If it really is a domain that is out of the US, US law can't really do much about it. Luckily, within the US, major ISPs don't allow spam and have methods to prevent it (earthlink makes you send outgoing mail through it's servers, for example, so it can monitor for potential spamers accounts).
I think, perhaps, the best way to get rid of spam is to find out what ISP has the account that the spam is being sent from, then tell them how much you hate that they let that happen (one letter for every spam may add up). Maybe one day they will take precautions to prevent spam if consumer demand really means anything any more (and, yes, I think there are more people that dislike getting spam than people that want to send it).
.
We don't WANT the government to get involved with the internet, EVER!
Do you really want to hand over all that power? Do you want TONS of crappy legislation? Do you want to conform to guidelines and regulations for all of your messages? Do you want the NET POLICE monitoring your communications and writing citations? Do you want a "War on Spam" that does nothing other than to suck up billions of dollars?
NO. Keep the Feds out of it! Stupid idea!!!
If nothing else, I wouldn't mind seeing some kind of ruling against header spoofing and taking over others' server bandwidth. Spammers have been going to great lengths to keep themselves anonymous and to steal bandwidth.
There's a move afoot to have telemarketers reveal their identities on caller-ID systems, so why can't there be a similar restriction regarding email headers? And, regarding stolen bandwidth and server space...stealing is stealing and should be pursued as such. If they have their own servers for that purpose, well, I suppose that's their right to use them that way, even if it's inconvenient for the rest of us.
This sig is offered AS-IS, with no warranty express or implied. Risk of using this sig rests entirely with the user.
You'd think that with all of the pork that is usually attached to legislation that taking care of Spam wouldn't be such a stretch.
Why don't we look into how well those laws are working, before we try to model after them. Just because a law is well written doesn't make it effective, just readable and logical. A good law is enforceable, and an anti-spam law isn't.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Laws probably won't do much good when the spammers are using hacked machines to send out their trash. This means that John Q. Neverpatches is going to be in a lot of trouble if this law gets written incorrectly!
Senator Hackenbush (E-HO) has sponsored SB433a: the Communications Despamification Act. Write your Senator now and tell him he needs to support the CDA!
Also in the Non News
Cancer not yet cured
Moon Colony not created
Linux not #1 on the desktop
Kent: With our utter annihilation imminent, our federal
government has snapped into action. We go live now via
satellite to the floor of the United States congress.
Speaker: Then it is unanimous, we are going to approve the bill to
evacuate the town of Springfield in the great state of --
Congressman: Wait a minute, I want to tack on a rider to that bill: $30
million of taxpayer money to support the perverted arts.
Speaker: All in favor of the amended Springfield-slash-pervert bill?
[everyone boos]
Speaker: Bill defeated. [bangs gavel]
Kent: I've said it before and I'll say it again: democracy simply
doesn't work.
Do not touch -Willie
Why don't they just go after the companies advertising via Spam? To get your money you haev to be able to contact them. Why don't the laws target the companies who use spammers to advertise thier products. Fine the companies, Stop The Spam! (Oh, and boycott the RIAA too!)
Why all the fuss about Spam?
I mean, have you ever tried it?
I've always found Spam to be a satisfying, tasty treat made of meat. Its wonderful!
I'll never forget those camping trips as a kid... waking up with dad at sunrise, gathering tinder from the forest for our morning fire, and frying up some good, yummy spam in our iron skillet. The wonderful smell would wake up mama and sis' from their slumber, and sleepy-eyed we'd all sit on logs, happily eating spam and eggs, with mama and dad drinking coffee as well.
How can all of you self-righteous techies want to take away such lovely childhood memories from all of the innocent, spam-loving children in the US? Are you all sadistic, or something?
I hope the Hormel Secret Police find you all, and punish you something awful... you... you... Anti Spam-ites!
What you are missing is the fact that laws themselves do not prevent you from doing ANYTHING. They discourage you from doing activities that your government has deemed unacceptible.
I would love to go to a spammer/joe-jobber and rip his throat out - but the penalties for doing such are quite high, in spite of the fact I have rid the world of a scumbag. So in lieu of being able to kill the SOB on sight, I am left to take alternative routes such as taking him to court and financially sodomizing him or pressing criminal charges.
If there were significant penalties for sending spam, some spammers will be discouraged from doing such activities. Those that do will risk thier financial well being and freedom(s).
There's nothing wrong with shooting, just as long as the right people get shot...
Making laws is equivalent to programming for an open environment, or to an attempt to make a rainforest a better place. Ridiculous on the face of it.
There are technological and social ways to handle SPAM. Pressure on the ISPs that produce it, lawsuits against spammers for damages (MS/Gates is pioneering here). These use mechanisms from age-old systems of justice. Their embodiment in modern law has probably decreased their effectiveness.
Lew
"The Constitution, the WHOLE Constitution, and nothing but the CONSTITUTION."
Burr, champion of the RID Spam Act, dismissed the idea Wednesday as thwarting legitimate transactions. "We'd like to get the discount hotel offers," Burr said.
I have nothing against getting discount hotel offers too, as long as they are sent by travel companies which I have signed up with. Companies like Hotwire, Travelocity, and even Airline companies like Delta provide an option to select receiving special travel deals, etc. I don't mind getting routine weekly updates about their webfares, etc...because I created an online account with them. So as such, as business agreement does exist between me and the company. Such mails, according to me, don't even fall into the unsolicited category.
What I do not want is unsolicited mails from companies or faked email ids when I never signed up for any of their services. An optin option would prove to be most effective in countering unsolicited mails, since the optout option defeats the very purpose by requiring to initiate spam before it can be prevented. Doesn't make much sense to me, but ofcourse the companies would love optout.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
After migrating to Mozilla Mail from Eudora and seeing its simple bayesian filter solve my spam problem in a week, I became a firm believer that we can solve this problem without laws, politicians, police or any other bureocracy. All we need is Math and a campaign for filter deployment akin to the innoculation campaigns that erradicated smallpox and polio.
I think that when most of the userbase has trainned filters installed, the spam problem will disappear into irrelevance. The half-a-dozen renitent spammers that will suffer the pains of creating the bland texts capable of fooling the filters can then be blacklisted. Even the Usenet can be retaken this way. And the beauty of it is that each person will have its own set of filters, trainned locally and directed at what that person considers spam.
If you think about it, even the shaddy and inneficient centralized web filters can be thrown away and replaced by this kind of filter, allowing each school and each library to filter only the content its local community considers harmful.
I don't know about the rest of you, but if this dream/wish happens, we (as in "we the people who care about it") will once again have a reason to be very proud, having proved this network is capable of taking care of itself like no previous human technical work could.
In my opinion, the probleme is not with the law but with the mail protocol :
:
;-)
The mail protocol is making the recievers pay (and not the senders as with phones, real mails,...). In fact, as anybody knows it, there is no real price in sending or recieving a mail beside the cost of the internet connexion. But, there is a price for the recieving mail server : disk space.
When a mail is sent, the incoming server has to store the incoming mail. That's why, when lots of users of a single mail server are spammed, the mail server is on the verge of exploding and has a heavy price to pay : lots of disk space lost (and lots of money too) for junk mails !
A solution could be to keep the mails on the outgoing mail server. The incoming mail server could only recieve for instance a header acknoledging the final recipient that he could download a mail from the expeditor. If and only if the final user chooses to download the message, will it be downloaded from the outgoing to the incoming mail server.
But, why ?
Because which such a system it will cost disk space (and money too) for the expeditor and not the recipient (like with phone, real mail,...)
So that, if you are spamming someone, you will have to pay for the spamming ! If nobody wants to read you're junk mail, your mail server will suffer from it !
There is still lots of problem
- with small tuning, the outgoing mail server could reduce the size of its ougoing spams (for instance, if it's always the same message, or...)
- you will still recieve lots of acknoledgment about spam (and lose a lot of time to sort it)
But, some problems generated by spam could be over with such a protocol:
- less traffic generated by spam (just the header of the mail is transmitted)
- less disk space generated by spam (at least for the incoming server)
Finally, I would just say that this idea is just stupid because we could never evolve from our current mail protocol to this knew one because of backward wompatibility problems.
PS : forgive my bad english
PPS : yes...it's a stupid idea, but interesting though
Joe Rubin, director of public and congressional affairs for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, disagreed. "I wouldn't be upset to see a cheap airfare e-mailed to me," he said. "If Sears sends me an e-mail regarding a discount on a lube job at Sears, that's something that most consumers probably won't be upset about."
Who the hell are they kidding? I don't want to hear about cheap airfare or a discount lube job, first because I don't need either of these things (Does anyone randomly decide to go on a trip just because they get a cheap rate on airfare? If you've got 2,500 miles before you need another oil change, would you bring your car into sears now anyway just because it's 30% off? No!) and also because I don't want Sears, Delta or Congress deciding what I'm interested in hearing about at any given time. If I'm interested in a cheap oil change, I'll look for one. If I'm interested in low-cost airfare, I'll look for it. And if I really want them to send me these offers in the mail 15 times an hour, I'll sign up for such a service.
I can't believe that these congressmen don't feel the same way as 99.9999999999999999% of the american public do about this. Maybe it's because they've been living under a rock for their entire term and they don't know that the rest of the country is under attack from these marketing monkeys. The fact that both proposed legislations allow opt-out mailings is insane. The fact that some idiot decides that there are 100,000 viagra buyers using email addresses under my 1 user domain, and so he's going to cost me lots of money sending gigabytes of mail traffic to them every day, but because he's piping his mail through thousands of open proxies I can't do a damn thing about it is insane. If I were to dump several tons of garbage in his living room every day, he'd call the cops and I'd be arrested.
Am I now going to be fined thousands of dollars because of ONE wrong e-mail?
Subject: You have been selected...
You have been selected as a recipient of spam. Go to this website to collect your damages. Make money fast.
Zapman
Not entirely impossible. All it takes will be a few Nigeria style mails from Iraq and Sudan. Should do the job.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
If the top 10 spam clients got 750 million hits their site would stop, they would stop paying spammers to send the email.
Mix SETI project with DDOS attack.
Set up a screen saver that pings the Spammer's clients, over and over again. If enough half the people in SETI signed up for this, the problem of spam would be solved. They could not filter out all the users that are on SETI and you can make the request long and well formed. Maybe even look for modems on the users machines and call all the 800-pay-me$$ numbers.
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
How about a process where we have a central authority (or more than one or a few per country) giving out signatures for a nominal fee after verification of basic identifiable information. The signatures follow a new RFC standard. All new mail server and client programs written to handle the new signature logic such that emails with verified signatures come to the inbox and rest go to the Bulk/Spam folder (or however you want to set up) and mail client program can be set up to just ignore/autodelete all emails missing signatures or not in 'allowed address list'. The free mail websites would have to follow this too. Some major ISPs like AOL/Comcast etc (maybe all ISPs) could provide Free signatures to their customers as a part of their signup bonus for the service.
Also, the signatures can have certain bits to categorize them into Personal signatures, Business signatures (sub categories - unsolicitated, etc) and you can pick and choose which signature to use per email. The mail client programs could just look at the signatures and split the emails into separate folders based on category/subcategory).
Oh well, it's all so vague, it probably won't work and spammers will find a way to beat it anyway. The only option I see is that ISPs have to make sure that there is no outgoing spam from their systems. If ISP allows unsolicitated spam to go out, warn the ISP and if they still let that happen, revoke their ISP license.
...than a federal law.
The solution would be to send few CEOs to jail because their companies' products were in spam. We should go after people who earn money thanks to spam, since they are easy to track down, not the spammers themselves, as they often try to hide their identity. I'm sure other CEOs would at the very least stop to think about it. It is actually quite simple. As I am sure you all know, I have said it many times before. I have no idea why no one is listening though.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect)
The Spam Lobby has spoken. Now that this has been in the headlines for a few weeks, the spam community has gotten it's act together and is gumming up the works.
I fear that in the end, not much is going to change.
What is with all this "opt-out" crap anyway, what it needs to be is an "Opt-in" list. It should be assumed by default that consumers do not want spam. If they want to receive exciting information about a penis enlarger that gives you a larger bust size and a fixed 2.8% intrest rate they could send an e-mail to the spammer giving them permission to mail to them.
A salesman can not enter your home without your permission, why should I be forced to endure advertising that I am not interested in?
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
- You are no allowed to collect personal data (including e-mail adresses) without prior written consent by the person itself
- You are not allowed to sell personal data (e.g. CDs containig millions of adresses)
- You are not allowed to send UCE to people you have no business relation with, or which do not have explicitly requested for it (opt-in)
And yes, it works. There are virtually no spammers in Europe. Well, there are some who try once in a while, but at least they get sued and put out of business real fast.You may argue, you got a lot of spam from EU countries, but did you look at those originating IPs? It's 99% open relays/proxies, which unfortuntely cannot be eliminated by law, beeing the result of amins' ignorance/stupidity.
Spam usually originates in the USA and is targeted to US-citizens. Europeans have no way to benefit from all these penis-enlargements, cheap viagra, breast-increasements, ...
That's a good idea in theory, but in reality I doubt it would work.
The header would have to have at least enough information for the receiver to make an intelligent decision on whether or not to download the message. Probably that means at least a Date/Time, Subject, From, and To header. All you would see is the spammers putting their spam message, in condensed form, in the subject. Sure, you might reduce the bandwidth consumed by spam a bit, but you're not going to reduce spam itself.
Plus this gives users less information on which to perform Bayesian filtering which, for me, has caught 1024 of the last 1025 spam I've recieved.
It's not a bad thing that there is no federal anti-spam law. [...] Or worse, a law that allows Ashcroft and Poindexter to get even further into my computer.
Indeed, and there's another argument that supports your position. We now have really reliable spam blocking mechanisms available to us, for all platforms, very easy to use, and they reduce the spam that reaches us by 98% without any effort at all. And they can be deployed on servers too where appropriate, not just on end-user machines. Spam need no longer be a headache, and it is under *OUR* control.
In contrast, getting the non-technical powers of society involved in this is a recipe for much mourning and gnashing of teeth for the future. We *will* regret it, there's not the slightest shadow of doubt. And they won't even thank us for giving away our control and giving them yet more power over us.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
why don't we pass a law against trolling Slashdot?
I'd say that Europeans could definitely benefit from penis-enlargement. Especially the French!
I am truly shocked at the level of clulessness that lawmakers show with regard to spam. Or maybe it's not so much cluelessness, but rather shrewd cunning in being able to pass what amount to pro-spam bills under the guise of anti-spam measures.
First of all, the "opt-in" vs "opt-out" debate was cute and everything in 1997 when we didn't get more than a handful of spam, but it's embarrassing that anyone is seriously maintaining that there's a need for debate on this issue. Opt-out roughly translates to "anyone can spam the living hell out of you and get off scott-free." The notion that it should be OK to send ANYTHING unsolicited, regardless of its advertised removal procedure is simply ridiculous. Imagine if just a fraction of every business (in the US alone) that wanted your attention sent you an email - email would instantly become useless. But on top of that, rule 1 of spammers is that spammers lie, and hence the burden of trust must NOT be on the end user to trust that the spammer will do what they're supposed to with those removal requests. Sure he'll remove you, from list 12499-B, but add you to lists 12499-C through -Q. Hey, it's a "functioning opt-out procedure", whaddya whining about? Only someone that is either clueless or is backed by advertising money would advocate something as idiotic as "opt out" as federal policy.
Next is the notion that it's okay as long as you put some token in the subject or promise not to fake headers. Here's where I make some bad joke that ends with "...and which one picks up the $100 bill first? The man-hating dyke, because Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and Spammers That Give A Shit About Not Forging Headers are all FIGMENTS OF YOUR IMAGINATION." But seriously, this [Adv] subject line stuff is a joke. First of all, it's a bad way to filter spam because you have to accept the entire message in the DATA section before you can reject it, as opposed to rejecting it based on blacklists or other details of the "RCPT TO " phase. In other words it still costs your mail server bandwidth, time, and space. Additionally, this whole "put a tag so we can block it" makes the implicit statement that EVERYONE wants to block this unsolicited swill... which pretty much means that no marketer that wants to play by the rules is ever going to spend the time, effort, or money to send out email that's been self-immolated in such a way, and no spammer is going to give two shits about what he is or isn't supposed to be doing, otherise he wouldn't be a spammer. Therefore, adding "[Adv]" is a completely worthless idea, a conclusion that most clueful people made, about, oh, 5 years ago.
On top of that, I would really like to see any of these US lawmakers do something about the anonymous proxies strewn about Korea, China, Argentina, Brazil, Nigeria, and a handfull of other third world places. "Forcing" spammers to not forge headers is like "forcing" a mugger not to stick a knife in your gut and rob you when you stroll down a dark back-alley street with a huge wad of cash bulging out of your pocket.
What other inane things have congress-critters proposed? A national do-not-email list? Oh that's rich. Did the idea that it could be abused ever once cross their mind? Don't even get me started on this "prior business relationship" loophole either. It's not so much a loophole as a gigantic gaping gash. They've been playing that game for years already: "At some point in time you visited some web site of some affiliate of ours, and therefore this is a previous business relationship." Uh-huh. Riiiight.
Here's the point of this rant. I'm glad they can at least recognise the need for action but their attempts to do anything about it are so pathetically awful that I'm GLAD no such laws have passed. In my opinion, the best way to effectively combat spam is to force ISPs to enforce their own AUP's/TOS's. Spammers pay good money for so-called
"Still no " is usually timothy's trademark.
We are the #1 MALE ORGAN ENLARGEMENT supplement on the web. We guarantee the success of our program or we will refund every penny. Come find out why more men AND WOMEN come to us than any other site. Click Here to enlarge your member 1-3 inches in a matter of days!
...
Do you have any idea how odd it is to explain to mom why people are trying to enlarge her "member"?
yeah and how do you put pressure on the ISPs? write a nasty letter? idiot.
Spam is a pain in the ass, but having the US Fed Gov't trying fix it, or "relieve the pain" is an absofuckinglutely bad idea.
the morons should be spending their time impeaching the fuhrer wannabe.
Is it unsolicited? y/n
Is it bulk? y/n
if both = y IT IS SPAM!
Simple, no legaleze type crapola.
Someday common sense will return. Maye even responsibility for ones own actions. In spite of the liberals.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Oh yes. Here's an excerpt of an actual HTML mail that I received just a few seconds ago (no kidding!)
s t o<!--69mmaa1pexd-->ne <br>d he<!--6lmv9k1zkj17sx-->lp achie<!--5my15e3y59yvl-->ve
W<!--46jq8c1th8zav-->e c<!--aj9ljc101w7w3-->an conso<!--da7zq11y1s-->lidate
yo<!--fvuygn1ybyh0e3-->ur bi<!--fadm0927fjcz-->lls in<!--7c04qy2madz6k-->to
ju<!--c6vh5j2rrxgn41-->
mon<!--8abwm21wqapw-->thly pa<!--trnntizw6rn72-->yment
a<!--592r8h3ym1u-->n
t<!--eoor4v63f2-->he foll<!--m74b39gb19df-->owing:
When viewed with an email program that understand HTML, the above fragment is displayed as "We can consolidate your bills into just one monthly payment and help achieve the following:". However, notice the random characters inside the comments -- what if they were encrypted orders to detonate a bomb at some specific location?
And I'm only half kidding...
Follow your Euro bills at EBT
A lot of people suggest filtering, but it is not a complete solution.
If you are using your Internet connection for a variety of purposes, then some of that bandwidth is tied up by spammers. Even if your filters are perfect, you are still losing that bandwidth.
For individuals the BW loss may not be significant, but on a large corporate scale it could very well be. We need solutions that prevent the spam from getting sent in the first place.
(And no, laws won't work.)
I like your idea(everything but the last comment about it being stupid) and would like to add one more benefit I don't think you pointed out, We would know who the spammers are! If we have to go to thier mail server to get the mail then we can grab them at the source. I like this idea alot.
Not allowing class action lawsuits are not going to stop frivolous lawsuits. Most of the frivolous lawsuits and appeals that waste the courts time, such as the patents suits, the RIAA suits, SLAPP suites, among many others, are filed by firms who wish to use the court system to defend bad business models or for profit. They have money to spend, they are suing for large amounts of money, and the have a business motivation to peruse the suit. What makes it even more egregious is that the merits of the case are often irrelevant to the firm. The sole intention is to waste the time of the defendant and court.
On the other hand, class action suits are relatively self regulating due to three factors. First, the damage has to have effected many people. This means that it unlikely that some bigwig CEO got his feeling hurt, or some silly patent just came in. Second, the case must make it through the review of paralegals, attorneys and other professionals to prove it has merits. Third, the law firm must make a profit, or at least not too much of a loss on a case. This means that even if the case has merits, it still may not be a good case because it will cost too much to win.
So what does this mean with respect to the Texas spam law. The individual may request a judgment on the order of $10 per spam. In a month the user may receive enough spam for it to be worth requesting a judgment. On the other hand, a large firm may be inundated with enough spam in a day to file for the $10k maximum, but that is still small enough change that they will probably have to pay all costs up front. Again, they may or may not file. In both cases, there is no guarantee that the spammer will pay, and it is likely that they will not.
Class action on the other hand would be powerful. If a spammer sends 1 million messages, with a few percent getting through, over a week, we are talking real money, around $10 million. This will get the lawyers interested. This is enough money to make collection worthwhile. The spammer will go down.
Would class action result in a some bad lawsuits. Sure it will, like for instance the people stupid enough to buy SUVs and then complain that tip over or are not stable at high speeds, or the people who are stupid enough to think a diet or bulking pill will safely work. However, for each of these high profile cases many lives have been saved and many business grievances have been fairly addressed.
Class action help reduce the court load by consolidating cases into a manageable load. Class action helps insure that those harmed can get help regardless of financial resources. The exemption of spammer from class action is there to save the spammer industry, not help the legal system.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
.. To fix a broken and easily exploitable protocol? Fixing SMTP seems like the most logical way to keep the spammers at bay. How is fixing SPAM through legislation any different than the RIAA ignoring their own problems? It seems to me that the community seems to be turning a blind eye toward the SMTP problem..
This is an arms race, in the technology sense, I certainly don't believe the battle will be won whinning in your local/state/federal court room. The IT community needs to rise above the fray with an open solution. (IPv6?). I'm not saying this is easy.. I'm merely saying the courts just doesn't strike me as the proper battle ground.
I heard on The Screensavers last night that she said that she didn't know what spam was. That didn't surprise me; I'd be surprised to find out she could read. My bet is that she has no idea about how to use a computer or send email.
If this is typical of CongressVermin, I'd rather they not make an anti-spam law.
Though it would be nice to send some of the spammers down to Guantanamo for a while...
Instead of sending individual messages to lots of peole, spammers will send one message that has a huge audience. The will also sucker you into reading somthing by making it interesting - MAKE MONEY FAST www.monetfast2002.org!
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
You're totally missing the point, which is probably what the Democrats and Republicans want. The issue isn't how spammer should be sued. Sheesh, is anybody ever going to really collect money from a spammer in Korea? Or from one who works out of a mobile home soemwhere in Arkansas?
The anti-spam legislation should aim to prevent spam. Is that too controversial? Unfortunately, lawsuits, no matter how structured, are only a disincentive for people who have money. But I don't get offensive sexually oriented spam from major corporations, I get it from sexygirlxxxwhatever. Far more effective would be a law that forbade mass mailings with an invalid bounce address, forged headers, etc., which would be enforced under criminal law. I don't even know if there are any such provisions in the pending bill, but I sure don't turn to my my congressperson when I need to learn about RFC compliance. I do know that if you want to stop McDonald's from sending spam, you shouldn't need a class-action lawsuit; any lawmaker worth his salt ought to be able to think of an easier way than that. But the trial lawyers are showering money on the Dems, drooling over the possibilities; meanwhile, the potential defendants are sending money to the Repubs to stop them. What a racket.
Anybody who spams in Texas may be shot under the "he needed killin'" clause.
This sig no verb.
And of course, I'll get modded as a troll
Thats right you will, BITCH!
- to correctly identify spammers
- to make them pay for the damage they do
- to be compensated for the hassles they cause me and everyone else
- to take away the financial advantage of spamming
- to make an impression on them, preferably with some sort of heavy object
I had advocated spammer licensing in the past, complete with bright orange eartags. I'd probably even volunteer to work as a tagger.;)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
is my ISP going to "protect" me from evil spammers by pre-filtering my email for me?
I use RoadRunner in Texas and they filter my email now for viruses. They say it's for my own good and the common good of the RR community.
I get several messages a day from RR trumpting the fact that I was protected from an evil virus and that the offending attachment was deleted.
Whoopty-doo.. I use Linux. I don't need a baby sitter or a Big Brother to protect me from the big, scary world out there. I can do it myself, thank you very much.
As a matter of fact I intentionally troll for spam so that I can "teach" my system to deal with it. I *WANT* the viruses to come through too so that I can "teach" my system to filter viruses on it's own.
I need to design and test filtering systems that I can install for my customers (that use other non-filtering ISP's) but it's damn hard to do now because they are looking out for my best interests and the common good of the RR community..
I'm for outlawing spam but I'm not for the ever protective hand of a caring Big Brother to watch over me..
No, what you really need to do is to trick spammers into sending snippets of music along with their messages rather than porn.
Then we just unleash the RIAA on them and the spammers will be sued for $18,000,000,000,000.39 and all their machines will be hacked into and rendered inoperable. After all we all know that spammy pirates (not the pork-eating swashbuckling variety) are way more dangerous to the world than any sort of hate-filled terrorist or unethical bulk advertiser (that's what the **AA tells Congress anyway).
Even if we get a national spam law, this would not stop the spam coming from other countries. They will start originating from countries where it is not illegal
I don't really wan't my 0.7 cents back, I just want to make spamming expensive.
.sig
Instead of a class action, how about a class punishment?
I.e. Allow laywers to sue for reasonable fees,
plus 5% of the punitive damage award that is paid to the the general fund.
I'm sure congress would get behind that.
-- this is not a
When something becomes a federal jobs/vote-buying program, it'll never get fixed. The key to knowing when something has arrived at that point is: when the feds decide to do something about it.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Spam doesn't bother me, I never see it unless I want to. I use popfile
If you dont use popfile or some other 99%+ spam filter then you are missing the boat
I dont want any more laws. We've already got enough bad ones, and they aren't helping me out.
Why techno-savvy Internet dwellers would WANT the Federal government OR the state governments making laws to govern ANY conduct on the Internet is beyond me!
Please people, take responsibility for your actions, don't buy the crap they're pusing, EVER!
That's the *only* thing that will ever stop SPAM.
Wake up, America, we're loosing all our Freedoms. Politicians don't need any encouragement. Stop whining about spam.. Harvest my email it's kgb@submarinefund.com want it in a link HERE I ain't afraid a you and yer spam!
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
Sadly, it tends to result in another idiot taking the incumbant idiot's spot. What we really need is something like Bell's Assassination Politics.
/*- Mohammed -*/
That could make trying to recover damages from several spammers a pretty expensive proposition. I wonder how many people who haven't read the law will be sucked into this? Rest assured, the spammers will be on the lookout.
Hey, let's everyone kill the internet with regulation! Let's make bandwith more expensive because ISPs are getting hounded by lawyers. Let's get rid of some of the freedom of speech and the ability to communicate without borders and lawsuits.
Antispam laws are a waste of time. They won't stop spam, and at the end of the day, they will succeed in:
Making the internet more expensive
-and-
Making the internet less usefull for communication.
-- $G
People don't like spam. That's a given. But that in and of itself is not a valid reason to ban it. If network owners don't want spam then by all means they should be able to sue the spammer for unauthorized use of their networks. But a law banning spam outright would prevent network owners who don't mind having spam travel over their networks from allowing their network to be used for whatever purposes they desire.
"Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
It's much, much worse for Spam victims then most state laws. In particular, it's all opt-out, which means in practice that spammers can simply setup shell corp. after shell corp. and Spam the fuck out of you.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The only people who ever collect anything meaningful under a class action lawsuit are the lawyers. A meaningful federal anti-spam law will have to allow for private action to be brought by individuals. With a $1000 per unsolicited email penalty, I (and many others) am prepared to march into court to collect. If I receive notice that Big Company A has engaged in spamming and I am entitled to join a class action, I'm likely to forget about it. What, I want a coupon for $0.50 off the next BigCo A penis enlarger I buy? While the lawyers take 1/3 of the $10 million off the top? No thanks. I'd rather sue them myself.
Some are saying the spammer will be impossible to find, or out of your local jurisdiction. I point out that most of these proposed laws require the spammer to use verifiable addresses. Sure, not all of them will comply, but the ones that do will be the more legitimate companies that are chomping at the bit to get into spamming once it becomes "legal". These companies are referred to as "mainsleaze".
As soon as the cost to spam drops just a little bit more folks will wake up.
..."
It costs $100 to send a spam today. What if the cost drops to ten cents? Imagine a future where sending a spam is so cheap that a site could offer a web-form to span the entire globe and support that operation with a few banner ads.
The spam we get now is nothing compared to what we'll see when we get universal access to spam too cheap to meter:
"Timmy Smith (Madison Wisc. USA), come home now. Your mother would like to talk to you!"
"You: on the M14 bus, 7pm, last Thursday. Red hair, red dress. Me: wearing Diesel khakis. Our eyes met, but you got off the bus. Page me at
"Who ate the last banana in the fridge!?! I was saving it for dinner! Was it you, Larry (Smith, Detroit Mich. USA)?"
"Pedara Ulan (Kelabit highlands, Borneo Indon.), come home now! Your mother would like to talk to you."
Country wide laws won't stop spam on a global network.
Warez are illegal, you still see them on the internet. People still rip CD's and put them on peer to peer networks.
Something else is needed to stop this, laws won't work.
...because the First Amendment protects your right to say what you want. It does not create a right to have anyone pay attention.
My blog can kick your blog's ass
The theory, I guess, is that really effective filtering will so reduce the efficacy of spamming as to make it economically pointless. Eventually, then, the volume should drop off.
I'm not sure that will ever happen completely, but I give a combination of technological solutions (open relay blacklisting; Bayesian filtering built seamlessly into clients) much better odds of success than a "legal" solution. I live in a state that's had anti-spam legislation since 1998 -- to no perceptible effect.
The point of efficient filtering is making spamming useless. Today a spammer sends a message to 5 million addresses in order to receive 100 answers. Only the absurdly low cost of sending the 5 million messages makes the ridiculously low response rate economically acceptable. And barely so, I bet, in most cases.
If we manage to filter these messages out of those 100 idiots Inboxes, the very act of spamming will be rendered economically senseless, since the response rate will go bellow the cost/benefit threshold. As a side-effect, the bandwidth is claimed back.
I concede some kind of blacklist may be useful here, but as a aditional measure, not as the main spam fighting tool.
If everyone uses them--sure, for awhile it will still waste all the bandwidth but the response rates that are currently high enough to justify it will be so low no company would pay the money to spam and the bandwidth issue will go away.
The vast majority of the users still run unpatched versions of Windows 95 and Windows 98. The chance of them configuring and using Bayesian filtering on a new mail client are about as great their chances for discovering a cure for cancer. Spammers don't care about the 1% that effectively use filtering. They want the other 99% that don't and that actually believe some herbal concoction will fix their limp dicks.
I just think that this approach will be more effective than trying to get a bunch of non-technical politicians to craft effective legislation which can't really touch the offshore companies anyway.
I don't see a lot of spam that's trying to get me to send money to some overseas firm. What I do see is a lot of spam that's commissioned by U.S. spammers and is sent through overseas mail servers. Make it a crime to send, or cause the sending of, unsolicited commercial e-mail and you can arrest the spammers rather than some third-word dupe who is sending the stuff for them. If Alan Ralsky contracts with some Brazillian ISP to send 1,000,0000 e-mails, then put him in prison and let him be some guy's bitch. End of the spam problem.
These 2% are certainly Outlook/Outlook Express users. Let the next version of Outlook and all patches to older versions include filters pre-trainned to filter out to the Junk folder all ordinary spam (Viagra, Nigeria, Mortgage etc). Scare these people into upgrading (virus scare, license expiration, goat from outer space, whatever). Suckers covered, spammers in the red, mission accomplished.
I have an easy answer to eliminate spam. Delete them. Don't buy from them. Don't click on any links in them. Beat it into your friends and relatives to do likewise. If there is no money in it, it will stop.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
Yes, and, instead of murder laws, we should all wear bullet-proof vests.
But bullet-proof vests are not as effective as bayesian filtering.
"It is certainly true that the class action joinder rule can take a relatively frivolous individual claim that an attorney would not pursue and transform it into a lucrative and dangerous claim with a potential for high recovery"
The difference between 1,000 small claims and a class action?
Potloads of money, a class action protects the one sued.
Sure in some cases lots of money is won but usually the sued party gets off much lighter and the people in the 'class' get screwed.
Personally I want a spammer to suffer the 1,000 claims, the paperwork and legal nightmare of it all rather than some tidy little 'class action'.
Which would cost the spammer more, 1,000 seperate small claims with or without an attorney or 1 case with 1 distributable claim with an attorney?
This happenened in California with the warranty centers for some consumer products. The manufacturers were pushing for a class action to settle some dispute over warranty claim amounts.
Instead they had to do 400 (times every consumer manufacturer) seperate actions negotiating with each individual servicer. The servicers came out far ahead on this.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
I have a technical solution that would completely stop spam. Basically my line of reasoning was very similar to yours: the current protocols were designed without any trust component built in.
I have designed new protocols that would fix this.
Unfortunately, my partners and I could not get funding and I don't have time to build this system while working two (programming) jobs. At the end of the day, I'm just too tired.
So when is the federal government going to get around to confiscating your computer, michael? Do you want a federal law that basically makes email illegal ... or ... do you want a federal law that's effectively unenforceable ... or do you want a law that will crowd up the federal courts with civil suits so that it takes several years to try people for violent felonies? It's bad enough that peer to peer networking is threatened. Don't be so quick to hand over the job of regulating the internet over to your congressman, particularly if he was more likely to be a ringmaster, used car salesman, or lawyer in his former life than a computer programmer.
And bayesian filters false negatives usually won't kill, just annoy.
Come on now people, let's get real.
Sure, Spam is as annoying as hell. I hate getting spammed, but it's no more annoying than the coupons that I get in the mail every thursday. In all honesty, if I were given the choice I'd rather eliminate those damned coupons from my life than spam.
There's no way that anyone can justify to me that someone should be looking at time in federal (ie buttraping) prison just for sending some unsolicitated emails.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
They are Html comment tags and as you just discovered they do not show up in the browser, however in this case they still have a function.
thy function to bypass filters . for example I have my filter set so that any email that has any of the following words goes into a folder (because nobody I know uses these words). Consolodate, payment, beastiality, subscribe, opt and about a dozen other words.
by placing the coment tags in there the word consolodate no longer triggers the filter. its clever and it works on old filters, but now I have it set so that html comments (or any html period) goes into my probible spam folder
I hope this hepls
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
All that needs to be done, as near as I can see, is:
(1) Recognize the fact that the Internet is NOT public property; that it is, in fact, made up of a vast array of PRIVATELY-OWNED equipment. Doesn't matter if said equipment is owned by a mega-corporation, telco, or a self-hosted individual on a DSL or cable DSU circuit. It's still private property.
(2) Given that much, simply extend 47 USC 227(b) to cover junk E-mail as well. The prohibition against junk FAXes has already withstood the constitutionality test more than once, and I don't see why junk E-mail should be any different.
Perhaps these concepts are just too simple for politicians to figure out...?
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies