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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."
The laws make it a criminal offence to send e-mails or text messages unless the recipient has agreed in advance to accept them.
IANAL the article is not clear on whether they're going to prosecute the companies or the spammers working for a company?
If they are going to prosecute the companies then i would imagine someone's going to do a fake spam to frame their competitor.
with the current way of distributing spam via viruses and zombies this seems like a great law to use to annoy your competitor.
BOSS: "I'm going to call you about the meeting to accept messages about the meeting. Is that okay with you?"
EMPLOYEE: "I didn't agree to receive this e-mail!"
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
Personally, I see a lot more spam from China or Korea than the US. Sure, we get a fair bit from worm infected machines these days, but China and Korea are still the heavy hitters. Perhaps it would be more positive to amend the article, "Unfortunately, the UK is responsible for a very small segment of spam in the wild, so this is law is not likely to make a major difference to Internet users." Having said that, there are lots of people *responsible* for spam in the US, but it's next to impossible to tie most common spam to these respective (can I even use that word in this context?) people. Andypoo.
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.
2. Most spam is from US/Far east
3. Spam gets sent because really stupid ppl respond to it
The impact of spam will only be lessoned when people are educated to take care of the problem. I.e Not responding to spam and taking responsibilty for their internet connection rather than just calling for legislation.
The UK always has this "Something must be done" mentality without people ever thinking perhaps *they* could do something.
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.
This both worries me and pleases me at the same time.
Whilst innocent users could get caught up in horrendous legal battles, it also means that class actions against certain companies making horribly bug-riddled mail clients may also be forced to take place.
Of course, I shouldn't really wish legal battles on anybody, but in the view of means to an end..
Andypoo.
(Yes, this time I will use Plain Old Text)
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.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
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.
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The Law
as published by the government itself.
-- Sorry, I can't think of anything funny to say here.
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.
Punctanym: alternate spelling of words using punctuation or numerals in place of some or all of its letters; see 'leet'
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.
Most spam is intended to make the recipient visit some destination and do business of some kind. Perhaps anti-spam laws needs to target the businesses that use spam to create business - the destinations of all those links in all those spams. Any company that sells viagra, ink jet cartridges, cell phone plans, or mortgages will have a more vulnerable point of presense than a spammer does. Even porn and gambling sites could be vulnerable because they require more permaneance than does a spam operation. If those companies where held accountable for their marketing affiliate's spams, then they might not engage the services of spammers.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Spam is no more free speech than your local bookie painting his ad on the side of your house or car is free speech. In fact, to come close, he would have to bill you for the paint.
I tried to email my complaint to them, but they didn't agree to accept my email first, and now I'm looking at 2-5 :(
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.