Accused Spammer to Debate SpamCop Founder

Weezle writes "Wired News is reporting that OptInRealBig's Scott Richter is going to debate SpamCop's Julian Haight in public next month. Richter had the nerve to file a lawsuit against SpamCop recently claiming that the blacklist keeps his company from sending out 'marketing messages.' (in lay terms, spam) Not surprisingly, Richter himself is being sued for $20 million by NY Att. General Eliot Spitzer. Sounds like it's going to be a real nasty fight."

Comments

Proof of Opt-In

[fembots]

I believe it is still legal to send marketing spams as long as the recepients have given consent, no?

How can we, the spam victims, prove that we NEVER gave consent to such-and-such website?

Regulation of Blacklists?

[vyrus128]

Blacklist operators like to say they just provide a service to the sysadmins; it's the owners of the recipient servers who do the blocking. But by the same logic, credit reporting agencies just provide a service to merchants and lenders; it's those lenders who refuse your application. Yet Congress has seen fit to pass the Fair Credit Reporting Act to stop abuses by the credit bureaus; despite the fact that they don't actually deny you a loan, it is obvious the power they have over individuals and the ways they can abuse it, EVEN IF that power is granted to them indirectly by lenders. I would argue that the same could be said of blacklists; arguably, they could (and perhaps should) be regulated for the same reasons that credit bureaus are.

Spitzer: Not someone to mess with

[Infonaut]

There's an excellent explanation in Legal Affairs of the legal powers Spitzer wields. His primary tool is the Martin Act, which gives him frighteningly wide-ranging authority to go after a wide range of targets.

Re:OK Fine

[LostCluster]

You most defnitely have the right to block what they're sending.

The problem is with over SpamCOP's public claim that Richter sends e-mails to people who have never opted-in.

Richter claims that any recipient claiming that they never opted-in is wrong. He'd refute SpamCOP's claim, but SpamCOP refuses to turn over the e-mail addresses of the people complaining to them, so he can't check his records to find out how the address got there.

You most definitely have a right to publish an opinion, but when you accuse somebody of something, it turns into a matter of fact. If you're publishing facts that aren't true, that's where libel starts...

Free Speech

[Tony]

Just as people have a right to speak, others have a right to not listen.

If the spammers were civil and provided a way to honestly opt-out, I don't think there'd be much debate. As it is, "opt-out" options are used to verify legitimate mail addresses to which more spam is sent.

The essence of fairness is respect. If spammers were to respect the wishes of email participants, these drastic blacklist measures would not be necessary.

Just as a person may not be allowed to speak at a public forum with no curtailment of free speech, so an ISP may filter spam with no curtailment of free speech. Plus, as SpamCop merely provides a service (the identification of spam black-hole lists), they are not themselves curtailing free speech. If I (as an individual) decide to pre-filter my email by using SpamCop, I have also not curtailed the free speech rights of spammers; I have merely invoked my right to not listen.

If SpamCop is inhibited in any way by first amendment arguments, justice has been subverted. Since SpamCop itself is opt-in, they are providing more free speech than the spammers themselves.

Granted, I am not a lawyer, one of the many things of which I am glad. (I don't see how many lawyers sleep at night, but then again, I fret when I realize I only left a 15% tip instead of a 20% tip.)

ROWAN v. U. S. POST OFFICE DEPT

[keraneuology]

Spam is not protected speech. One of the most relevant cases ever heard by the US Supreme Court (which is rarely, if ever, mentioned in spam debates) is Rowan v U.S. Post Office Dept, 397 U.S. 728 (1970)

Appellants challenge the constitutionality of Title III of the Postal Revenue and Federal Salary Act of 1967, 81 Stat. 645, 39 U.S.C. 4009 ( 1964 ed., Supp. IV), under which a person may require that a mailer remove his name from its mailing lists and stop all future mailings to the householder. The appellants are publishers, distributors, owners, and operators of mail order houses, mailing list brokers, and owners and operators of mail service organizations whose business activities are affected by the challenged statute.

A new law had recently been passed whereby people could demand that unsolicited pr0n no longer be mailed to their houses. The homeowners didn't want free samples mailed to their kids. The pr0n magazines wanted to show everybody what they were missing and claimed absolute right to do so under the guise of the First Amendment. (Sound like a familiar battle?) The Supreme Court found against the postal spammers.

Some very relevant passages from the decision:

"the right of every person 'to be let alone' must be placed in the scales with the right of others to communicate."

"In today's complex society we are inescapably captive audiences for many purposes, but a sufficient measure of individual autonomy must survive to permit every householder to exercise control over unwanted mail. To make the householder the exclusive and final judge of what will cross his threshold undoubtedly has the effect of impeding the flow of ideas, information, and arguments that, ideally, he should receive and consider. Today's merchandising methods, the plethora of mass mailings subsidized by low postal rates, and the growth of the sale of large mailing lists as an industry in itself have changed the mailman from a carrier of primarily private communications, as he was in a more leisurely day, and have made him an adjunct of the mass mailer who sends unsolicited and often unwanted mail into every home. It places no strain on the doctrine of judicial notice to observe that whether measured by pieces or pounds, Everyman's mail today is made up overwhelmingly of material he did not seek from persons he does not know. And all too often it is matter he finds offensive."

"Weighing the highly important right to communicate, but without trying to determine where it fits into constitutional imperatives, against the very basic right to be free from sights, sounds, and tangible matter we do not want, it seems to us that a mailer's [397 U.S. 728 , 737] right to communicate must stop at the mailbox of an unreceptive addressee.

The Court has traditionally respected the right of a householder to bar, by order or notice, solicitors, hawkers, and peddlers from his property. See Martin v. City of Struthers, supra; cf. Hall v. Commonwealth, 188 Va. 72, 49 S.E.2d 369, appeal dismissed, 335 U.S. 875 (1948). In this case the mailer's right to communicate is circumscribed only by an affirmative act of the addressee giving notice that he wishes no further mailings from that mailer.

To hold less would tend to license a form of trespass and would make hardly more sense than to say that a radio or television viewer may not twist the dial to cut off an offensive or boring communication and thus bar its entering his home. Nothing in the Constitution compels us to listen to or view any unwanted communication, whatever its merit; we see no basis for according the printed word or pictures a different or more preferred status because they are sent by mail. The ancient concept that 'a man's home is his castle' into which 'not even the king may enter' has lost none of its vitality, and none of the recognized exceptions includes any right to communicate offensively with another. See Camara v. Municipal Court, 387 U.S. 523 (1967)."

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?c ourt=US&vol=397&invol=728

Re:Like Manson debating Bugliosi, this is.

[Anonymous Coward]

When you put it like that, Slashdot must be like the motherfucking Holocaust.