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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."
Just some extra time for thought and consideration isn't enough, though. What is needed is time for the "laboratories of democracy," the states, to work through the various laws that have recently been passed, and see how they work out. Does the Texas model work better or worse than what's being done in Virginia, for example? Only time and a few high-profile cases will tell, and we should wait until then before enacting something at the federal level...
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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
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.
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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).
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.
By following in the footsteps of the PATRIOT Act, and removing certain due process restrictions, like obtaining a warrant from a judge. Then they would be allowed to just hack in because they 'suspect' your a .
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
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
The truth is that none of them work well.
Laws against spammers just makes the problem more complicated. Sure, it looks like you are doing something. Maybe you even collect a few settlements.
But the people making spam just change their methods. Maybe they start hijacking machines overseas, or using Trojans to spam from others machines.
The spam problem is huge no doubt, but the answer is not some silly anti-spam law.
The answer is a technical one. The systems we use for email were designed without any regard for trust. We live in a different world today.
Don't invest your time in trying to get laws passed to deal with a problem we ourselves created.
Lets instead try and move to trust based systems for communication. I don't have the technical expertise to provide the systems, but a lot of people who do are working on such systems right now. Let's direct our efforts to getting those systems implemented.
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.
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, ...
Not a complete solution by any means, but it would help. Call it "maintaining an attractive nuisance" and we might not even need new laws.
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