Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
Exactly. As a Sys Admin - I constantly told people that I didn't care what kind of spam hit their email (and it is amazing what gets through filters) NOT to reply to it because it just perpetuated it and definately increased the amount of spam they were going to get. I also recently cleaned a client's system (cable modem - no firewall) - they had so much spyware and adware on it that it took 20 minutes after the OS started before you could get the system to repsond - among it were three redirected hosts - guess what they were doing, all unaware.
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.