Tweaking the CAN-SPAM Act

rbochan writes "The Register is reporting that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is consulting on proposed changes to the CAN-SPAM Act. Changes would include clarifying the definitions of the terms person and sender, and altering the time allowed for a sender to to honor an opt-out request. The FTC proposal is available as a PDF on the official FTC site." From the article: "Critics have accused the Act of being narrow and weak, accusations that may be hard to deny given that the US sends more spam than any other, according to a recent report by anti-virus firm Sophos."

Comments

Of course it doesn't stop spam

[Doktor Memory]

The purpose of the CAN-SPAM act wasn't to stop spam, it was to legitimize spam sent by the DMA and its members.

Whoohooo!

[JoaoPinheiro]

"It is also proposing to shorten from 10 days to three the time a sender may take before honouring a recipient's opt-out request;"

Yeah, so now they only have 3 days to sell my address to 100 other spam lists.

Re:Whoohooo!

[mazarin5]

Oh, they have all the time in the world to whore out your inbox. They are only restricted in how long they can fill it with shit themselves.

Libertarians

[joeljkp]

I'm curious: what do the libertarian-minded say about CAN-SPAM? That the Internet can handle its own problems, perhaps?

Re:Libertarians

[billstewart]

Libertarians think that free-ipod signature lines are generally fraudulent, but sometimes they think it's fun to feed trolls....

• Libertarians don't think that governments are competent enough to solve most difficult problems, so when a bill named YOU-CAN-SPAM doesn't stop spammers, we're not surprised. Some of us care enough to actually read the bill, and we're even less surprised.
• Libertarians like market-based solutions, and would like someone out there in the market to develop them. And lots of people have been working on the problem, but so far the economics make spamming enormously attractive, and proposals to artificially distort the economics (e.g. postage/taxes on sending email) are either doomed to failure, or if they did succeed in distorting price structures enough to affect spam significantly, they'd cause far more havoc than they're worth. Soviet Five-Year Plans didn't work.

  Market-based solutions that look like "I'll accept your email if you attach a micropayment of X cents on it" can work quite well, because they capture the fundamental economic value, which is the recipient's time, and let the recipient charge whatever price the market will bear for it. Unfortunately, they also attract the usual checkbox-responses of "Users hate these things and will never accept them", and there aren't any really good anonymity-preserving micropayment systems out there, partly because it's a difficult problem and partly because of government interference.

• Libertarians think that in a world-wide network where it's extremely inexpensive to communicate with anybody else, it's difficult to interfere with spam without far more dangerous interference with free speech. We would normally suspect government proposals to do anything effective about spam to be really motivated by a desire to interfere with free speech, except that any of us who've run for office know that politicians are more strongly motivated by a desire to Look Good, and Look Like They're Leaders, so just it's incompetence (malice is the Executive Branch's job), and even the Great Firewall of China which is designed to interfere with free speech doesn't bother blocking spam.
  
• "Guns. Lots of Guns." Libertarians believe that "Gun Control is Hitting Your Target". We don't think the authors of CAN-SPAM had very good aim, and we don't think the FTC's tweaking their work will improve it much.
  
• Anonymous Free Speech is really important - and it's hard to reconcile that with stopping spam.
  

Captalism as its finest

[aussersterne]

It all speaks to our fondest value in the us, evident in places as diverse as SPAM, excessive plastic surgery, and corporate welfare/rights: so long is someone can believably assert that they are "just trying to make a buck," our national consciousness and our lawmaking machinery are \\absolutley loath\\ to do anything to slow them down, whether the argument is ethnical, environmental, logistical, criminal...

Re:CAN CONGRESS

[J Barnes]

Because it doesn't matter to them if the action they take actually works, they just want to be able to take credit for taking action.

You have to judge by what sounds better in a campaign stump speech:

"I facilitated the allocation of grant money to a series of projects that resulted in technological improvements that ware eventually incorporated into many software packages, eventually having a slight reduction on the amount of spam that reaches your email inbox"

or

"I passed legislation to curb the tide of spam."

With the second option, you don't have to make any claims of how well your legislation worked. You just have to say that you voted (for/against) the legislation on the (personal rights/social issue/crime prevention or punishment) your constituents (do/do not) approve of.

I'd make one change

[Anita Coney]

I'd call it the Can't Spam Act.

Give me the tools to defend my network!!

[DaGoodBoy]

All I want is the right for a simple small claims mediation. Let me shoulder the burden of prosecution! These guys are absolutely punishing my email servers and bandwidth. Let me hit them back! Here is how it would go:

Me: I didn't ask for this email and I have no relationship with the vendor. Here is the proof that I got spam for their product, directing me to the following websites they control...

Mediator: Do you have proof that DaGoodBoy agreed to be solicited?

Spammer: Uh...

Mediator: That will be $500 bucks. Next!

If I lose, I'll agree to pay $500 for the trouble. Hell, let this happen on a teleconference with a mediation company sanctioned by the government instead of court. I bet I could make a living just from persuing my spammers!

Either this or just look the other way while I set up an anonymous payout deadpool for the members of the ROKSO list... :)

Re:Give me the tools to defend my network!!

[DavidD_CA]

What happens, then, when a company decides to send out spam promoting their competitor across the street?

You get an email for XYZ Pizza. You take them to court and they cannot prove you opted in. They get fined $500 and eventually go out of business.

Meanwhile, ABC Pizza snickers because they're the ones behind the email.

Re:Give me the tools to defend my network!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Should we get rid of laws against sending death threats and black mail letters, just because someone might try and do a Joe Job? Even letters to the editor can be used for Joe Jobs. How do I know it really was DavedD_CA who wrote your stupid comment? Maybe you are an imposter trying to make him look stupid.

Sponsor of Can Spam Act?

[SloWave]

Who is the Senate sponsor of the Can_Span act? I sure will give him/her a piece of my mind. It doesn't matter if it is my Senator or not. Whoever it is has to accept responsability for putting this piece of trash into law and needs to hear from everyone affected by it.

No such thing

[subl33t]

There is no such thing as anti-spam technology.

Spam filters, RBL lists, etc don't stop spam they just suppress it.

Spam begins with a desire for $$. Eliminate the payoff for soam and spam will die.

Is it still your email address?

[khasim]

I work for a small buisness. I don't Spam. But I do advertise via email.

The key is how do you get those addresses you send your ads to.

How is this not evil? Well I know that a customer is having problem with X and my previous solution was to expensive for them to fix. A week later I found a cheaper solution that stills works. So I email the customer saying Hey I found a better solution to the problem and it only costs $y

So you, personally, are sending an email to follow up on a contact that was initiated by the potential customer that that potential customer personally sent to you.

So far, so good.

Now if the CAN-SPAM act was to strick this honest buisness dealing could be considered Spam which it is not.

Dude, you have nothing to worry about as long as the DMA can pay lobbyists.

Ok you say that is fine because it is one on one comunication. So let me move it 1 step further. Say I know 5 clients that have the probem and I send them the email.

How did you get their addresses?

following this pattern there will be a point where I move from normal sales to spamming.

No. It isn't about quantity.

It's about unsolicitated commercial ads.

If 10,000 people have personally contacted you looking for Product X, and you personally reply to those 10,000 people saying that you have Product X in stock, that would be fine.

That is why we have a hard time making laws on excessive things because they will could become to a point where they hinder good intentional uses.

Nope. It's quite easy as a matter of fact.

The key is HOW the addresses you are sending to are obtained.

In a legitimate, non-spam business, they will be obtained by those people giving you their email addresses and expecting to receive emails from you.

In a spam business, emails are harvested and/or purchased in bulk.

All that the US needs to do is to define non-spam as email sent by a company that you have provided your info to and for that company to have a record of that (your IP address, your email address, the web page/domain you were at when you provided it).

Anything else is spam.

No "affiliates", no "partners", no one other than that one company you provided the information to.

Legitimate companies will not have a problem with this. Give them 6 months to update their mailing lists to meet the new criteria.

Spammers (and companies using them) are the only ones that will be affected by this.

This is very bad news for all those legitimate banks that purchase email leads from spammers, but I really don't give a rat's ass about whether they like it or not. I'm tired of getting mortgage spam and I'm tired of people saying that their email was flagged as spam just because they were discussing their mortgage options with their bank.

The laws WERE effective. So they had to be changed

[khasim]

Before "CAN-SPAM", the various states would pass their own anti-spam laws.

Some states had really good (anti-spammer) laws.

Some didn't.

So the DMA lobbied the government to deal with the "problem" of different states having different laws.

The end result ... one worthless Federal law that trumps all of the state laws.

Compare SPAM and telemarketing

[dpbsmith]

National Do Not Call list law is passed. I put my phone number on the list. Literally within weeks, the number of telemarketing calls plummets from a flood to a tiny trickle. (The trickle being charities and political campaigns).

CAN SPAM act is passed. Nothing happens.

And most of the SPAM has every appearance of being generated in the U. S. You gotta think the CAN SPAM act is ineffective, perhaps by design.

CAN-SPAM should be repealed immediately

[EvilStein]

... and the older (trumped) California or Washington laws should be put into place.

Spammers should be forced to provide absolute PROOF that you signed up (and verified) that you wanted marketing mail. No selling of email lists. Ever get spams that claim "You're getting this because you subscribed from 207.92.115.25 on $date" at all? they should be able to *prove* that *I* subscribed.

CAN-SPAM has done nothing but open the floodgates for spammers. I have seen it in action, seeing as how I worked for a company that's now on the ROKSO list. I got to deal with it every single day.

CAN-SPAM is a *total failure* and the only right thing to do is repeal it and send it back to the drawing board, allowing the states to come up with their own laws.

Re:The laws WERE effective. So they had to be chan

[espo812]

The end result ... one worthless Federal law that trumps all of the state laws.

Federalism: A system of government that creates a central government and local state governments. The powers of the national and state governments are divided and balanced.

Re:One treak, label all spam with ADV: in the subj

[dodobh]

Spam is about consent, not content. What about spam which does not ask for money? Phishing?