Congress Sends Anti-Spam Bill To White House

sunbird writes "At just after 5 o'clock EST, the House concurred to the Senate's amendments to the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003 (or "CAN-SPAM") (bill in PDF format: here or here). Although the bill will prohibit certain tactics (such as hiding return addresses), critics state that the bill does not go far enough (see this press release). The bill will provide criminal penalties for violations of its provisions (up to five years behind bars), but will not allow private parties to sue spammers. News reports indicate (SF Gate or Forbes) that Bush intends to sign the bill. Prior Slashdot articles are here: 1 2 3."

Comments

So that's how you get the Repbulicans to go along!

[wrinkledshirt]

Phrase the bill in a way to let them think they're banning pornography! Genius!

damn lame bill

[frovingslosh]

This bill will do absolutely nothing to help. It promotes opt-out, as if spam was only a U.S. problem. Put your e-mail address on the list and expect tons of spam from outside the US. Keep it off and the damn spammers will claim that as an excuse why they should spam you. And when this doomed-to-fail bill has no positive effect, the government will not admit they screwed up in the structure of the bill, rather they will use the failure to say you can't fight spam with bills.

The only hope I see now is that maybe the E.U. will get their act together and show up the corrupt U.S. idiots.

Re:Spam them - if you want to waste your time

[silentbozo]

You honestly think that they would have voted for this bill if they actually used their e-mail?

Devote your resources to bringing them bad press in their home district. Remember, all politics is local. Getting e-mails that their staffers will just toss won't bother them a bit. Getting embarassing questions during fundraisers about how they legalized spam will. Remember, this is an election year. Make spam an issue, and they'll HAVE to defend (or reverse) their position.

"...Bush intends to sign the bill."

[IvyMike]

Bush hasn't vetoed anything yet...he's sure not going to make waves on something as insignificant as this.

Grover Clevland...now there's a guy who knew how to veto.

Re:Another Law

[the_mad_poster]

Why is this modded Insightful and not Troll or Offtopic?

They're legislating the same bullshit any legislator of any party legislates - something that looks good to the ignorant public but really satisfies the desires of big shot campaign contributors.

They know damn well that the general public isn't going to take a closer look at this legislation. It will go into the paper and people will think "oh good, my elected officials are finally doing something". When spam doesn't die down, they'll just forget about it. Re-election material for the morons in Congress and a nod that legitamizes spamming for big business interests in the marketing sector. It's just a typical day on Capitol Hill. Doesn't matter which party's in charge.

Silver lining

[mark_space2001]

I don't if this will work or not, but remember how lawmakers fell all over themselves promoting the do-not-call list after 50 million Americans registered on it?

That's what might get Congress's attention. Put 50 million email addresses on their do-not-spam list. Put the fear of losing an election in your Congressman.

I wouldn't register my REAL email address on that list, of course. Heaven forbid that the spammers get ahold of it. But I have a couple of Hotmail addresses that I use for all dubious lists, postings, and web sign-in forms. (Hotmail because it amuses me to send the spam to Microsoft and make them pay for the bandwidth.) If we could all register 50 million addresses of ANY sort on that list I think there might be a chance to get real legislation passed.

Maybe it's not a fool proof plan (this is the US Congress we are talking about here) but it can't hurt. So sign up and sign your immaginary friends up too. I know I'll be making email accounts just to add to this list, in case I like suddenly need a new spam free email account.

Re:BZZZT! WRONG!

[jhylkema]

Quoth the poster:

So now they will send spam to you with a subject line of "Hi" about Mini RC Cars and Viagra and you can't do a thing about it under Federal or WA law.

Why not? Washington law specifically forbids "false or misleading information in the subject line." The Federal law specifically does not pre-empt any law dealing with falsity. The primary reason that spammers had in falsifying information in their headers was that many states had prohibitions on spam. WA (and MD, etc) put laws on their books prohibiting emails with such falsehoods which nicely side-stepped the problem of being content related.

And they still do. Friend, if you think the spammers are going to start putting their real IP addresses in the headers, you're smoking weed. If you think Washington's law has made a difference in this regard, you're on crack. No, I suspect that there will be plenty of grist for my mill for the foreseeable future.

So, tell me again what the problem is?

Re:This legalizes spam

[Tony Hoyle]

The biggest problem with spam is the deception and confusion.

Absolutely untrue.

The biggest problem with spam is that it's theft of bandwidth, resources and time.

Even at home I get ~10,000 spams a month. You don't want to *know* what the figures are at work. Suffice to say we just upgraded the disk on the exchange servers to cope with it (and will the spammers be paying for that? Will they heck).

There is no 'acceptable' spam. If I didn't ask for it, I don't want it. I tolerate advertising on billboards and on TV because it (allegedly) keeps prices down and pays for other things. Spam has none of these benefits.