UK Makes Spamming a Fineable Offense

woodhouse writes "The BBC has an article about the new UK anti-spamming law which comes into force later this year. Under the new law, spammers can be fined up to 5000 pounds in a magistrates court, or an unlimited amount in the crown court. Sadly, prison terms won't be used to enforce of the new law."

Comments

could be worse

[Anonymous Coward]

Better to be fined up to 5000 pounds in a magistrates court...

...than to be pounded by 5000 magistrates.

...or courted by a 5000 pound magistrate.

Oh no!

[Prince_Ali]

Sadly, prison terms won't be used to enforce of the new law.

Oh no, we need to get these violent people off the streets before they e-mail again!

Jail time?

[C_Kode]

Sadly, prison terms won't be used to enforce of the new law.

Jail time? How about death sentence.

skip prison...

[ejbst25]

...straight to death sentence!

Seriously...while we all hate spam...someone *really* wants spammers in jail? On the right is the rapist, then murderer, then child molester, then spammer.

Re:skip prison...

[Our Man In Redmond]

So the biggest one . . . the biggest, meanest nastiest father-raper . . . he comes over to me and says, "Kid, what'd you get?"

"I didn't get nothin'," I said, "I had to pay $100,000 and help secure a couple dozen open relays."

"What were you in for?"

"Spamming"

. . . and they all moved away from me on the Group W bench and gave me the hairy eyeball and all sorts of mean nasty stuff, until I said "and promoting Viagra and free pr0n" and they all shook my hand and we had a great time playing with the pencils and using the computers on the shelf by the window to strip a couple of mailing lists for addresses.

Billy Tauzin's Opt-Out spam bill

[bs_02_06_02]

Billy Tauzin continues to promote Opt-out... which means anyone can spam you as much as possible until you complain. Then, they have someone else spam you, and then you complain, and then someone else spams you, and this continues until someone gets killed. Opt-out. What a terrible idea! But, no one in politics knows anything about technology. Most politicians are puppets. Democrats and Republicans both.

Bullshit

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really think the BBC will suffer the Slashdot effect? They won't even notice the extra traffic. They are the biggest and most visited content site (i.e. not Google) on the net and have bandwidth to spare. They have servers on at least two continents and publish their news in 43 languages. Now if the BBC posted a link to Slashdot on it's front page, then we might see the 'BBC effect'.

Re:Huh?

[spuke4000]

let's stop with the juvenille, knee-jerk reactions

You must be new here.

Re:Prison should be reserved for violent criminals

[CausticWindow]

I just love the way Americans always equate prison with forced anal intercourse. It's an everyday thing, just like going to McDonalds.

Never once heard any of you outraged over this matter. It's just a fact of life, and something you most probably deserve when you go to prison. A good hard pounding in the ass.

It's a good thing that the US legal system is infallible, and that your judges probably take this into account when they pass sentences. Five years imprisonment in most other developed countries probably equates to two years with three brutal ass poundings per day in an American one.

Mighty fine country you're running over there.

"new UK anti-spamming law "

[kclittle]

Does this mean some of the Monty Python skits are now illegal in their country of origin? Jus'wunnering...