UK Spam Law Goes Live

loonix_gangsta writes "So, the UK has taken matters into its own hands and, as of today, is making it a criminal offence to send e-mails or text messages unless the recipient has agreed in advance to accept them. The law comes into force today. Unfortunately much spam originates from the US so the UK had previously asked the US to co-operate."

Comments

Problems already

[JamesD_UK]

The register is running an interesting article on the difficulty people have had so far reporting their spam. It appears that the paperwork and procedures for complaints are not yet available. How useful.

Appplies to the whole EU

[theolein]

This law is an EU wide law and therefore applies to all member countries, including from next year (2004) at least some of the Spammers favourite countries such as Poland, Estonia etc.

Re:Unfortunately much spam originates from the US.

[gorbachev]

The spam sent from China and Korea is overwhelmingly sent by US based spammers exploiting the widespread open proxy problem in the Far East.

The other major source of spam from the Far East are the "bulletproof" spamming facilities provided to US based career spammers by greedy Chinese administrators.

It is not that difficult at all to track who is responsible for the spam, just see who's being advertised.

In addition, most of these types of spam has a "fingerprint" that pinpoints the spam to some career spammer. The fingerprint can be a domain name, method of operandi, language in the spam, anything really. Resources like ROKSO at spamhaus.org are very good at identifying the real source of the spam.

Proletariat of the world, unite to kill spammers. The more painful and slower, the better.

Law excludes businesses

[JawFunk]

According to this link "But the regulations do not cover business e-mail addresses, despite some calls for a blanket ban on spam."

Interestingly enough, businesses suffer most from spam, not only in jamming traffic and exhausting space on mail servers, but also losing money on employees sorting through or reading spam mail.

Link to the actual Law

[twoshortplanks]

Rather than listening people spouting off all over the place, and getting my infomation second hand, I like to actually read::

The Law

as published by the government itself.

Just in denial!

[LuxFX]

But new research suggests most top UK websites are already breaking the new rules.
"Companies are either not aware of the legislation, or are ignoring it," said Ian Thomas from WebAbacus.

Perhaps in some cases, but it others I'm not so sure it's either. I think some companies are just in denial about sending spam. Sounds hard to believe, right? Well, I run a small web design company, and I specifically put a No Spam clause in my contracts. When I talk about this with clients, I get some pretty sad responses.

They are all shocked that I would suggest that they would spam -- because most of them think that 'spam' only refers to the pornography, penis/breast enlargement, Nigerian scam, fraudulent products, etc. emails. In their eyes, "we're just sending out a promotional email, it isn't spam!" When I ask them if they will only send emails to people who have requested it, the response is typically, "We have to send out to more people than that! We are planning on buying a list of email addresses from (fill-in-the-blank-"marketing"-operation) and using that. That's ok, right?"

Now I'm not talking about companies that knowingly hire spammers to do their marketing, I'm talking about the smaller companies that try to do it themselves, or maybe are convinced of the legality from a spammer wanting some more business, and end up becoming part of the spam problem with their purchased lists and "but we offer a legitimate service!" attitudes.

These people are just in denial.

Applies, but has not taken effect

[kaan]

The law does apply to the entire EU, but it has not taken effect EU-wide, as it is up to each member of the EU to follow through. The UK has moved forward, but most of the other members (list below) have not. It's also not clear that they ever will.

From The Register:

The directive obliged individual EC member states to introduce anti-spam laws by October 31. However nine member nations of the 15 country European Union have so far failed to adopt anti-spam legislation. France, Germany, Belgium, Finland, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden all face possible court action unless they provide an explanation on their lack of progress within the next two months. Austria, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Spain and the UK have already taken steps to adopt the EU law.

Re:This could help spammers.. ?

[IIH]

I've been job hunting recently and have sent several resumes to people with whom I've had no previous contact, generally having gotten their addresses from their friends who suggested I contact them. Including in the UK. Would I be eligible for prosecution under this law?

The law is for "unsolicited communications for the purposes of direct marketing", so the point you raise is moot.