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Virgina Criminalizes spam, ACLU against it
ibis writes "In ZDNN's article about Virginia's new anti-spam law, it is stated that the American Civil Liberties Union intends to challenge the new law on constitutional grounds. We should all let the ACLU know what we think about this on the ACLU Freedom Network Feedback form. " A little background: Virgina, where AOL is based, has made it so that they will be the first state to be able to *criminally prosecute* "malicious spammers". Not just like the Washington law, which has a fine, this will allow jail times and other such fineries. Bring it on, I say.
Maybe not the proper way to respond to the idiocy, but they obviously are clue resistant when it comes to dealing with spam.
Proofread, anyone?
that's why the aclu sucks. they don't use common sense
I used to get a high volume of spam...
:^)
until I started being a real dick.
Viola, no more spam.
I think the ACLU's suit may be more of a preventive action to keep the CDA advocates from using it as a precedent or loophole to wedge in any similar legislation. Nobody likes spam, but what's next?
Its not that the ACLU is pro or anti-spam. They're all about the rights and freedom of individuals. Granted, we all *hate* spam, but I think its utterly ridiculous to impose jail sentences for people who spam. Just my stupid opinion
Before I complain to the ACLU I'd like to know what exactly they think is unconstitutional about this law.
It ain't the First Amendment, that's for sure.
If you get unwanted e-mail, delete it or filter it!
I'm sure that businesses receive thousands of pieces of mail that they don't want. What do they do? THROW THEM OUT!
I agree that it is an annoyance, but when we start talking about JAIL TIME...we've gone too far.
ISP's should just cut these people off from their internet connections after they recieve many complaints about the spamming account. These laws won't work..just TRY to legally regulate this stuff and you will be VERY very disappointed.
jce2@po.cwru.edu
They can make the fines pretty stiff, that's fine - repay the people whose time was wasted, but jail time is ludicrous.
We need to keep prison space available for peaceful marijuana users.
shackle one, shackle all.
Spam is no different than radio, flyers, etc. who cares? why send people to jail? I am not offended when I recieve snail mail that is just an ad, or junk mail, so why would I be offended by Spam? I mean, hit the key, and move on
While it is true that the main problem with spam (and junk mail) is the commercial people who want to sell us stuff, I can imagine a need for it: say the media are completely owned by large corporate interests which block out what environmental whistle blowers have to say. The only recourse the environmental people might be spamming.
I think *COMMERCIAL* Spamming should be banned. But not all of it.
There's a fine line between spam and freedom of speech.
/. story earlier) would be a better alternative than random laws with arbitrary guidelines as to what constitutes a misdemeanor and what is a felony and what is something that is sent to a user after knowingly submitting an e-mail address to a company (i.e. receiving e-mail from THAT company only).
Perhaps the concept of treating an e-mail address as a piece of Valuable Personal Information (per another
I want to see what the ACLU's case is before I jump on the fanatical bandwagon.
I hate spam as much as the next guy. I also don't like neo-Nazis, but I'll still stand up for their right to broadcast their ideas. Sure, spam is commercial and annoying, but the first amendment is too valuable to degrade merely because anti-spam laws happen to provide a desired result. The methods employed here aren't the best approach.
Hey Rob, I think we need a new poll.
How much does spam hurt you?
1) not at all
2) minor annoyance
3) pretty serious
4) severe problem
5) put me out of business
I would vote 2, and I think that criminalization is not apropriate. But I'm only one person, how does everyone else see spam?
have all of you people forgotten the cda?
it doesn't matter whether the law prohibits transmission of 'obscene' material or 'spamming' material - any law that censors speech based on its contents sounds like first amendment infringment!
it'd be a completely different story if the law limited spam based on the cost incurred by recipients and the isp's that this stuff goes through, but laws limiting free speech based on the message itself must be challenged to make sure they don't contradict the constitution.
I say right on! Junk mail isn't illegal. Unsolicited phone calls aren't illegal. Neither the Hari Krishnas nor the Girl Scouts are violating the law when they knock on your door. Spamming is annoying -- but it is no different, fundamentally, than any of the previous examples. Keep Spamming legal, or make Thin Mints a cookie of the 1900s!
Defend any form of "free speech"--no matter how annoying or even repulsive to you--or someday there will be no one able to defend yours. Who defines malicious? You may like the definition today, but what happens when what YOU do is suddenly considered "malicious" by the "authorities." That is a prospect that frightens me to death.
I hate spam, too. Of course, I also hate junk mail and telemarketers. Junk mail is really much more of an environmental crime than spam, so should we put those people in jail too? AOL can get bigger mail servers and fatter pipes--trees and landfills are a bit harder to come by. And the precious time a telemarketer "steals" from me--lock them up as well? That's why caller id was invented.
Everyone grow up and look at the real problems in the world--spam is not one of them.
When I lived in Coeur d'Alene (yes, that's how you spell it) in 1991-1992, the freaks from the Hayden Lake, ID area (the so-called "Church of Jesus Christ of Aryan Nation" - I just called them inbred retards), placed a bunch of flyers on cars in Spokane, WA (45 mins away), which were, at the least, offensive, at the most, threatening, to anyone "non-aryan". More than 10 of them wound up going to jail.
For me, I'm more concerned about hate sites sprouting up on the Internet. I'd gleefully delete 50 pieces of SPAM a day, if I could be guaranteed that crap like the "Nuremburg files" anti-abortion site, and sites that inspire bigots like this mental dwarf William King (TX dragging case) to think that racism and killing/threatening people over their beliefs, color, religion, occupation... is right.
Hate is wrong, spam is bad... VA has it all wrong, IMHO.
Here's why.
This law, even though it might solve a problem and be widely popular, might violate our sacred First Amendment rights to completely unrestricted free speech, so of course the ACLU is there rabidly denouncing it and defending our freedom. After all, who else is going to defend our sacred freedoms from government encroachment, right?
So where are they when politicians want to throw the second amendment right out the window "for our own good"?
Oh, I forgot. The ACLU only believes that certain freedoms should defended.
If you're not part of the solution, you're not part of the problem. The ACLU might do some really good things every once and a while like smacking down the latest instance of the CDA, but I can't help but be disgusted with them for their hypocrisy.
I hate spam.
I think that my ISP must have been one of the first sites to become popular with the mail relay spammers. Before we learned how to block relaying, spammers sank our mail servers on a regular basis. And before the anti-spam rulesets were introduced into Sendmail, fixing the problem was unpleasant enough to make me take spamming personally.
And even now, we get calls and letters almost every day from customers who are angry about the spam they recieve.
Spammers have cost me money and aggravation. I have no love for them.
But I think the ACLU is right on this issue. We don't want to open up the government's ability to put people in jail for sending email. If the law was applied only to the people it seems to be aimed at, it might be acceptable. But there is a long history of laws taking on a life of their own in the hands of creative prosecutors. The RICO statutes, for example, are almost always applied to people few of us would describe as "racketeers".
The Internet makes it possible for almost anyone to get a message out to a lot of people at a very low cost. The political consequences of this haven't bceome apparent yet, but I think they'll be significant.
Criminal anti-spam laws will have a chilling effect on privacy and on the ability of service providers to give their customers anonymity.
Suppose someone like Matt Drudge sends out a bulk email to a list of people who have, for the most part requested it. If the list is large enough, there will be a certain percentage of people who won't remember signing up, or who got signed up by soemone else, etc. If the government could get 50 people or so to complain, who's to say that they couldn't prosecute Drudge? Maybe they wouldn't win, but they could sure harass him pretty effectively.
I think it's naive to think that this law will be applied only in the way it's advocates claim. Spam is annoying, but there are lots of annoying things about free speech. It's still better than the alternatives.
The law is against spammers who use fake addresses, or who crash peoples computers.
And here's why
Check it out
It doesn't say 'UCE', it says 'false headers'. Yes, spammers do that in a bad way, but what about anonymizers? Isn't that also creating 'false email'?
I hope the ACLU challenge inspires them to target UCE (spam), not just mail with bogus headers.
BTW, I'm NOT a fan of the ACLU, but this law is too vague and could be spun to step on anonymizers, which I think are valuable (though I've never used one myself; whoops, am I using one now?).
Maybe it's OK to advertise through email, but these damn spammers give you shit with no way to talk back to them or anything. You can't be taken off their lists or confront them in any way. Some spam is so bad I say it borders on harassment. If they start sending huge attachments or something that offends me I want to take action.
Now you have a justification to hate spam.
Take a look at what is happening in New York City. Drunk drivers are losing thier cars. This was first tested on drug dealers, east meat. Now it's being done to others, to late to complain. Today spammers get jail time, who will they go after next? What if you send the "wrong kind of email" to a friend, you want to go to jail for it? It's just easy meat people, wake up.
For a moment there I thought you were refering to him being a 'dick'. It was kind of funny.
And the 14th says....?
they're not thinking of my right to be left alone by the spammers
they have an agenda. Don't be fooled by their claim that they want to defend the constitution
You forget something: spam is not a speech crime.
It's an unlawful taking of valuable property without permission. Storage space costs money.
Bandwidth costs money. Increased requirements for
both due to spam is, literally, theft of services by the individual spammers. . . .
Some people have to pay for spam. Not everyone has unlimited internet connections. Some pay by the hour-even by the minute.
For anyone that cares, the ACLU will probably use this argument to challenge the VA law:
" Plaintiffs contend that the Act is unconstitutional both because it unduly burdens free speech in violation of the First Amendment and because it unduly burdens interstate commerce in violation of the Commerce Clause. "
This is quoted from ALA v. Pataki, which was a case in New York that dealt with a state law censoring Internet content in public libraries (ACLU won, see http://www.aclu.org/court/nycdadec.html for the full decision).
The First Amendment does not have a clause that says it only applies to nice people. For all the times that the Constitution has protected your rights, it's protected some asshole's rights, too.
I can't stand spammers, but I have to agree with the ACLU here.
Unfortunately, I think this is a matter of, "It annoys me, save me from this hassle, Big Brother! I don't want to take any responsibility myself, because that might mean I have to do something on my own!"
/dev/null. Which makes me wonder, are they actually getting responses from people? Otherwise, why do it?
We suffer tremendously in this country from the opinion that only an "official" response to a problem is the correct response. Frankly, our government's track record of providing the correct response to anything in general is rather abysmal. They're already telling us what we can ingest (without Constitutional authority to do so) and they've been trying for some time now to tell us what we can say. Pretty soon it'll be what we can think. I for one don't take my rights lightly and I don't like seeing them eroded no matter how benign the reasoning appears to be.
It's called "the slippery slope". Those who don't understand this principal would do well to take a look at the War on People, er, Drugs, and the constant chipping away of the 2nd Amendment. These are signs as to how the rest of the Bill of Rights will disappear.
Making an annoyance into a crime is just plain dangerous! A crime is when someone violates the rights of another, which I don't think is the description of e-mail spam. If you feel like your net resources have been stolen, that you're being harrassed - take action along those lines and file suit against the spammer. If you can't afford it alone, get a bunch of pissed off people together and start a class action suit.
Personally, typing 'rmm' doesn't waste that much of my time, and I'm not going to dignify the spammer to waste any more of my time in any response to them. If everyone had this attitude it would eventually stop it. They're paying someone to send that crap out, so they're just wasting money when their message goes to a collective
Xiombarg - Who can't remember his *#@$%! password.
1) When the PO finds it has to hire more people to handle the amounts of bulk email, it raises the prices that it charges to bulk mailers.
2) Even if the above were not true, the PO is a public service that is not allowed to discriminate based solely on the number of items you want to process. Email, OTOH, is semi-private.
Even though I do get flooded w/ unsolicited mail every day, there is more to this law than meets the eye. It is unbelievable to read so many responses from people in pro of this law.
There is no doubt that laws should be placed to limit the use of email when advertising, but jail time! That's is too much. Heavy fines should be the way to go.
Does anyone know that there is a law that limits the frequency of phone call-based advertisement? If you get a call from AT&T advertising a new service, and you say "I'm not interested, and don't call back again", AT&T by law cannot call you for around a year or more. Something like that is what should be implemented instead.
Every time that a law like the one proposed in VA is implemented every citizen looses some rights. This has been proven in history time and time again! It is ironic that they same people that are against MS are in pro of this. This is a very right-wing kind of thing. And the point is not to be on the right or the left, but right in the middle.
... when is some state going to pass a law that says you can't have those irritating little popup ads?
So if I give out my home address that gives business the right to erect a billboard in my living room?
... got a URL for the text of the bill?
I would be interested in reading the whole thing.
The summary of the bill along with links to the full text is available at http://leg1.state.va.us/ cgi-bin/legp504.exe?991+sum+SB881E. The summary is quite short. In fact the text of the bill is quite short (it's actually an amendment to an existing law so it's the stuff in italics).
Here is what is made illegal:
authority granted by or in violation of the policies set by the electronic mail service provider;
connection with the transmission of unsolicited bulk e-mail;
false e-mail with the intent to facilitate the transmission of false e-mail.
That's it! So no Netscape Mail is not illegal because you type in your email address yourself. No it isn't an issue what qualifies as spam or not. The crux of the law is the falsification of email headers. This law forces people sending bulk messages to use legitimate reply addresses.
It is ludicrous that falsifying documents should be protected speech. The ACLU will fail and I don't know why they're trying.
It it obvious that most of you have not read the actual text. It's bad enough that people who are out for vengence can sue anybody for anything, but this legalizes it! The document defines "misuse" way too broadly and anyone making an honest mistake (newbie) can get unfairly screwed.
This is a law that can be grossly misused and misinterpreted. It is dangerous. Support the ACLU on this one, not some buerocrat who doesn't understand the technology yet feels inclined to make these poorly worded laws.
If you have to pay per-bit, you should be asked if you would like to accept the charges, just like collect calls. If you aren't asked, that's a problem between you and your ISP, not spammers.
;)
To honor the first amendment, you have to allow for spam. If you don't like spam, use your first amendment rights and fight back. If every person that got an unwanted spam told the spammer that they would never buy product from said company again, there wouldn't be a problem, and said company would go out of business.
Even messing with the routing information should be ok. You don't have to put a return address on an envelope do you?
And if all else fails, man procmail
Try posting something on a newsgroup sometime, using your address in the header of your post (most people DON'T do this now, and you'll quickly see why).
Are you explicitly GIVING spammers permission to spam you, through something like this? I think not. That's more like saying you're giving permission to a burglar to steal your furniture just because you accidentally left your front door unlocked.
The right to anonymous communication is gaurenteed by the first ammendment . See McIntyre v. Ohio Election Commission(1995) and Talley v. California, 362 U.S. 60, 65 (1960).
--Dante (who is afraid of cookies)
However, there are differences between the two. Phone solicitors are supposed to call you up personally. You get the convenience of venting at a real live person. Spammers usually forge their headers, and other innocents get to suffer from the venting (anyone remember localhost.com?). Also, you can tell a phone soliciter that calling again would constitute a form of harassment, and you don't want them to call. Then they can't call again for a year (at least in Canada). You get no such mercy from those spam bastards.
;-).
It would be kind of fun though, if rules were slapped on spammers saying they had to reply individually to each and every letter sent back, and the original email had to have been written from one person to another. That way you could vent, and they'd have to sit there and take it
They do have some sort of agenda. For example, you never see them get involved in cases where Christians feel their right to free speech is being discriminated against. There's other examples too. I wonder if it's because internally they have an official agenda or if it's just the nature of the people they attract to work for them.
Just curious, but couldn't a law like what has been proposed be subverted to go after, say, Slashdot? Particularly when a slashdot article such as the previous one about Toshiba encourages 'slashdotting' the toshiba mailbox??
I side with the ACLU on this.. Another stupid law is not what we need.
"The price of liberty is eternal vigilence" --Someone I don't remember
That's not true.. snail-mail spam is paid for by the advertisers who send it out. The more they send, the more they pay to the post office.. Who in turn has more resources to spend on hiring new workers, who can process more mail, who get paid better... etc, it's a cycle.
Spam email has no such cycle. Spammers send out mail, YOU pay for it. If you're an admin of a (semi) large ISP mailserver, the amount paid gets quite significant. It's more of an annoyance for the end user, but think about all the money each ISP has to shell out for multiple copies of the same message to all their users.
And in other parts of the world, where people pay online time by the second, it gets expensive as well.
"Though the Post Office showed a profit for the
last two years with rates for sending normal
first-class mail at $.32 (the cost of a stamp),
they have raised rates by a penny a stamp to
take care of what they call 'future expenses'."
-- paraphrase from a news story about the rate hike.
-- AC
Great point. But even if you are wrong about what the bill says, the ACLU is still full of it. They are trying to trivialize the First Amendment.
Suppose someone pulled up to your home at 3:00 a.m. and started shouting advertisements through a bull horn. Would that be free speech? Obviously not. Why not? Because it is unnecesarily annoying and you cannot turn it off (like a TV), that's why not. Wake up, folks, and quit letting the ACLU hoodwink you with its specious arguments!
Anonymous hero
I dunno, around here the Girl Scouts don't cost me money for the privilege of answering my door before I can tell them to shove off. Maybe you should move somewhere else.
So if I write "do not under any circumstances send me commercial advertisments at this address" on each and every form I fill out, I will receive no spam?
(I do that BTW, and I still get spam. Since they are no VIOLATING the agreement I sent to them, can I get them in jail for breech of contract? That's what you're saying here)
So if I write "do not under any circumstances send me commercial advertisments at this address" on each and every form I fill out, I will receive no spam?
(I do that BTW, and I still get spam. Since they are now VIOLATING the agreement I sent to them, can I get them in jail for breech of contract? That's what you're saying here)
and you must sink so low to support those racist pigheads, they'll support any fool off the street who wants to say something, inclusive of "fuck you" to your mother. I hope your happy. If you are, give me your mother's number, and I'll be happy to phone her and say fuck you, your son told me to tell you that.
> would you say that you were forced to read it?
No, but I am forced to pay for it every day and so are you.
"one might as well criminalize unsolicited phone calls, unsolicited postal mail, unsolicited
pages,:
No, the sender of snail spam pays the cost of delivery. The phone solicitors pay for the phone call (and pay again if I can get them to provide their 800 number). I don't a pager so I'll leave that one to someone else.
When someone sends spam however, the majority of the cost is born by YOUR ISP and is passed on to you. Sure it takes a lot of e-mail to bring a decent mail system down but since it costs the sender virtually nothing there is no reason for a spammer not to send a lot of spam.
I liken spamming to litering. Sure dumping a single Coke can on the side of the road is small potatoes to the world at large but if everyone does it we have problems. When busineses do it we have even bigger problems because their garbage stinks even worse and there is more of it.
"as well as the communication of any other content that someone might not want
to receive."
No, I may not want to read e-mail from you but, by itself the cost to me is miniscule(sp). More importantly, my response to you will cost you just as much as your mail cost me so at least we are even.
--
Ray
cmos@sonictech.net
Slashdot isn't forced at you like e-mail, you get it because you want it. If you don't like paying to read what's here, don't look at it anymore.
The first amendment is just about the most important part of the Constitution, IMHO. You fuck with it, you fuck with the backbone of what makes this country great.
Were it not for the mindset behind the first amendment, it is flamers and lamers like yourself who would be the first to be shot.
See this URL:
http://members.aol.com/acluva/freespeech.htm
(pulled from my "location" window in Netscape, so probably accurate).
See HB 1668, HB 1714, SB 881.
ws23
and by maintaing a valid phone number, you have implicitly agreed to receive phone calls, from anyone. There's no theft of service here. If you can't handle all the calls I want to make to you, its *your* fault that you answered my phone call and missed your mother's plea for ransom money. So, what is your phone number so I can call you 24/7.
I don't think it would be proper to spam the ACLU.
They will, however, need _many_ examples of spam in order to pursue their case. These examples might be sent to the ACLU boss lady, Nadine Strosser, nstrosse@counsel.com
All right, lets do it peoplez, we need to send a message, so lets make march 1, spam the aclu day. Write your scripts and let them unleash for a whole 24 hours sending non-stop junk mail to the aclu. Let them get a taste of what they want to defend!!!
There is no 1st Amendment protection for spamming, and whether or not you have to pay for your email and/or connect time has NOTHING to do with it!
As far as the First Amendment argument goes, a major difference between this law and ALA v Pataki is that Pataki would prevent *ACCESS* to information - if I went to the library, the government would prevent me from accessing information that I was actively seeking. The Virginia law prevents certain methods of marketing.
Spammers do not have a First Amendment protection for their activities. The Supreme Court said as much in a 1970 appeal of a junkmail restriction law. The Court said:
>> We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even ``good'' ideas on an unwilling recipient. http://www.junkbusters.com/ht/en/dmlaw s.html.
However, if the ACLU chooses to use the arguments you presented, the law might well be ruled unconsitutional because of the interstate commerce argument. If so, that would mean that only the US Congress could pass a law of this nature.
Christians? Persecuted? In America?
Generally, it's the Christian groups that are doing the persecution, most often against groups and individuals who fail to stand up to their high-and-mighty lofty moral standards.
The opposite would indeed be entertaining to see.
There is no 1st Amendment protection for spamming, and whether or not you have to pay for your email and/or connect time has NOTHING to do with it!
As far as the First Amendment argument goes, a major difference between this law and ALA v Pataki is that Pataki would prevent *ACCESS* to information - if I went to the library, the government would prevent me from accessing information that I was actively seeking. The Virginia law prevents certain methods of marketing.
Spammers do not have a First Amendment protection for their activities. The Supreme Court said as much in a 1970 appeal of a junkmail restriction law. The Court said:
>> We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another. If this prohibition operates to impede the flow of even valid ideas, the answer is that no one has a right to press even ``good'' ideas on an unwilling recipient. <<
Note that the fact that a vendor does not have the right to send unwanted material has NOTHING to do with whether or not there is a cost to the recipient! The right simply DOES NOT EXIST!
See http://www.junkbusters.com/ht/en/dmlaw s.html.
However, if the ACLU chooses to use the arguments you presented, the law might well be ruled unconsitutional because of the interstate commerce argument. If so, that would mean that only the US Congress could pass a law of this nature.
Jail's too good for them. They should just be rounded up and shot in the back of the head for the good of humanity and the improvement of the species. I hope usenet spammers fall under this law, too. The usenet has been practically unusable since the public found the internet.
Personally I'd like to be able to bill spammers for the time it takes to hunt them down and add their domains to my IP filters (Rounded up to the nearest hour, would be an easy $120 per mail.)
by that argument, then I can sue you for what's inside your house if you invite me inside. If you have a picture of George Washington and I didn't like, I could sue yer butt off. Yet again you *AND* the aclu are wrong.
burn baby burn...gonna be a burning tonight!
Could it be that the law was because of the influence of big ISPs like UUNet, AOL, and MCI WorldCom all of whom have headquarters and major operational infrastructure located in Virgina? Of course the Pentagon and CIA are located in Virgina too.
Quick! What's your address, we want to hold a meeting of the skinheads america group on your lawn, we'll be burning effigys and live humans too! All protected by the 1st!
Man first they jail murderers, now they want to put rapists in jail too. Next think they'll be putting people in jail for breathing too much, or something.
This is _NOT_ a first amendment issue, this is a HARRASSMENT
issue.
If telephone solicitors started calling you collect from out of state,
using deceptive lines like "it's your uncle" so that you'll accept
the charges, I'm SURE you wouldn't say that they have a first
amendment right to do this... spam is no different: the receiver bears the cost of
the medium, whether they want to or not, and the sender will go
to great lengths to conceal their real identity to keep it that
way.
ANYONE who thinks this is a free speech issue doesn't
understand what the issue really is.
Hah! Not surprising, this from the state where oral sex is illegal.
I think much of the point to the laws they implemented which "protect" people entering abortion clinics were put in place because some people were getting hurt. Still, why a new law? I thought assault was a crime before this additional waste of paper was scribed?
I'm not trying to state that all of the ACLU's actions are just. It's an organzation of people and as such it is inherently flawed. I'm saying that the Constitution should always be the first measure that any law is held against. That's what the ACLU is trying to do in their actions against this "Spam law". I don't see that as being a problem. If a jury says, "Well, we don't see it your way. It is Constitutional." So be it.
But to get all huffy about the fact that they have simply challanged the law? That seems counter-productive. I'm happy that there are organizations out there like this who are willing to step in. For the most part, the ACLU are pretty good at defending the Constitution, paying attention and doing something about what they see as wrong, while the sheep grab another beer from the fridge and flip throught the channels in blissful ignorance. Their track record is not perfect and never will be. But I still appreciate the ACLU, even if I don't always agree with them, and imagine that, I don't.
Xiombarg - Password still in the abyss...
Hey heY! let us not forget the great Frank Viola, dam fine pitcher back in the day for the Twins, then he mucked about with the Sox for a while, then god knows what.
No word on his musical abilities.
But let us not forget the name Viola.
>Your 1st amendment right to speak ends when you force me to pay for your ability to do so.
Do you have your own private Bill of Rights?
Where do I get one? Doesn't say anything about
freedom of speech except when it costs money, in fact, it sez:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion,
or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech,
or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the
Government for a redress of grievances.
-- The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
Junk fax law.
I believe you are correct. The 1st Amendment protects the "content" of one's speech not the right of one to harass in any form. A quick example: Someone coming up to me once a week and saying "You are a jerk. I hate you. You are stupid" is certainly not harassing. However someone following me around and every minute saying "You are wonderful. You are the best" is harassment. In neither case was the content of the speech the problem. The problem was the harrassment. Therefore if someone constantly tries to force me to receive communications I have explicitly said I do not desire then they are harrassing me. The content of these communications is irrelevant. That being said, I still would rather see a technological solution to the problem of SPAM, rather than a legal one. For example I use procmail to filter out known spammers. With advances in Active Networking research it would not be unreasonable to push that filter further into the network and prevent the spam from consuming any more bandwidth than necessary.
Couldn't have said it better myself. Except maybe I would have added phone solicitors.
You mean you haven't gotten spam from
Idiots selling cable descramblers that don't work
Idiots selling pirated software
Idiots selling search engine submissions
Idiots selling long distance phone service from no-name companies
Idiots claiming that they can collect money that you are supposedly owed
and my favorite: spammers selling a spam-removal service!
(This is the same 1st Amendment AC)
Now you have a justification to hate spam.
I always had "a justification to hate spam"!
I dig the post you linked to. I didn't think of that. However, we're still left with some grim thoughts about balancing the burdens imposed by such a law, and I'm not sure that there's any rational way to do it.
I'm really not sure about this one at all, but I'm still leaning towards opposition to the law (and BTW, I'm a hard-core bleeding heart tax'n'spend liberal from Cambridge MA, not a libertarian
Listen, assh0le, he wasn't talking about the content of his messagae, he was saying it was stupid to post twenty fucking links to it, pigfucker.
How do retards like you manage to work the web browser?
have to do with this anyway???
~;-)
You fail to correctly understand the "erect a billboard" analogy. What is was doing was making an example of how spam voilates one's personal boundaries. Most laws--trespassing, stalking, assualt, etc.--are laws that exist to protect one's personal boundaries and personal space.
A piece of spam voilates my boundaries. A billboard on my lawn without my permission voilates my boundaries.
- Sam Trenholme
The receiver bears the cost of all advertising, whether it is a banner ad on
Yes, but you log into slashdot knowing that there will be ads. You go here voluntarily. I think that would make a difference (legally, I mean; personally, I "feel" like it does -- but the Supreme Court doesn't care about my "feelings" and we can all be thankful for that
a phone call to sell siding that uses the service you pay for,
Much closer analogy IMHO. That one comes and finds you whether you like it or not.
or an ad on television that is on the cable channel you pay to subscribe to.
This one smells to me more like slashdot; the commercials are part of the service.
I'm getting tired of hearing about the ACLU and the CDA.
The ACLU did NOT play a pivotal role in getting the CDA overturned.
Alot of other people got the ball rolling before they
lifted a finger, such as the EFF. SO let's not pretend the ACLU
saved the day because they didn't. Frankly it would be interesting
to imagine the ACLU defending some of these crazies back in the day of the First Ammendment's
ratification (1791). I doubt the courts would be amused.
The First Ammendment isn't some sort of blanket clause, and a lot of it
has to do with context (both in history and culture).
So this guy is right on...FUCK the ACLU!
Nah, don't make spam a criminal offense, just allow anyone receiving the spam to take an aluminum bat to the knees of the spammers. As someone who's gotten upward of a dozen pieces of spam in a single day, I want the first whack.
Which do you think is a bigger bandwidth eater: spam or bad HTML? People with hi-res backgrounds and unwanted content on their web sites do mountains more harm to bandwidth than spammers. I think most people get in an uproar about it not because of bandwidth issues, but because they feel like their personal area of the internet has been fouled up by some idiot with a pyramid scheme. I'm not deriding that (god, I hate spam too), but it's not something worthy of fucking with the first amendment. ISPs and others with routers should do more to block servers that send out spam.
I hope they trace you and turn your account into yellow paste. Smurfing is evil, spamming is evil, you are evil.
Oh Mr. Roundeye!
/. weenies rail
You're sooooOOOOOoooo manly. Your email
filtering exploits have filled me with awe.
Programmer AC with an AOL account
(who amusingly watches you
against stereotypes, then ironically turn
around and stereotype all AOL users)
Today the ACLU announced that they will fight to preserve the rights of Neo-Nazi's in the big argument on wether or not Neo-Nazi's can Burn and vandalize the ACLU Headquarters. Aparently the ACLU Says yes.
. . . to uphold the constitution regardless of the opinions of morons.
T.S.
:)
Read the bill at http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?ses=99 1&typ=bil&val=sb881
I don't see anything in there that would make spam illegal. I _do_ see
stuff making it illegal to abuse someone mail server, forge return
addresses, or distributing software that assists in the above activities.
It looks like you can spam all you want under this law, as long as your
ISP is willing to put up with it and you put your return address on it.
Constitutional freedoms were only intended to apply in cases where nobody cares anyway.
For example, free speech is fine, unless you offend some member of the majority. Then, naturally, it should not be permitted.
The Constitution prohibits the passing of any restrictive law, unless somebody wants to pass the law. Then it's an exception and it's okay. The problem with these liberals is that they think that the 1st Amendment was meant to protect speech in cases where it actually NEEDS PROTECTION, which is absurd! Crazy liberals! What'll they think of next?!
(Not that in this case it really does need much protection, of course; I'm aiming at more general principles of right-wing legal thought.)
My original reply addressed several points that had nothing to do with your comment - like the cost issues. I put those comments in (perhaps inappropriately) because of various other comments logged on /.
/.
I guess I was just lazy and didn't want to post replies in several places.
Anyway, my main point was that spammers do not have 1st Amendment protections (at least in my reading of the 1970 opinion). I didn't have any opinion on the Virginal law specifically - I haven't read anything about it other than what's here on
It seems (based on what others are saying here) that the Virginia law has several major flaws. I don't doubt that it's poorly written; however, it is possible to have a good anti-spam law written that does not violate 1st amendment rights. The author(s) just need to limit the scope of it such that it truely addresses only unsolicited commercial email.
As a sidenote (here I go again, drifting slightly off-topic...), a bill has been submitted to repeal the anti-junkmail law that was upheld on appeal in 1970. That's a step in the wrong direction.
just find it interesting the way the ACLU picks and chooses the laws it challenges.
You mean when they brought a lawsuit against a schoolboard that wouldn't allow a 15 year old girl wear a T-Shirt that said "Jesus loves you" to school?
Maybe you're not a dittohead, but you're just about as educated as one. The ACLU doesn't pick and choose.
read his post, kid. then explain what strikes you a "stupid" about it, if you're able.
give me your address so I can set a cross on fire in front of your house. It's free speech ya know. Just remember, when those skinheads set you on fire, it's free speech defended by the aclu.
Neither of those examples is "speech". Setting shit on fire on somebody's lawn is way over the edge of any reasonable definition of speech, as is setting HIM on fire. Get a grip, stop dealing in paranoid fantasies, and face facts.
Am I the only one to notice that Virginia was spelled as Virgina not once, but twice?
Someone got their mind on something other than spam?
This reminds me of the Onion article about the ACLU defending some guy's right to burn down the ACLU headquarters.
l
http://www.theonion.com/onion3211/acludefends.htm
. . . as forcing us to practice their religion. They think that unless the schools force our children to pray to their god, they're being "oppressed". They think that unless they can tell us what we can read and watch, they're being "oppressed". They think that their "freedom of speech" includes standing outside of our bedroom windows with a video camera.
Well, they're crazy. Nobody's gonna defend that kind of insanity. There's no legal, moral, or rational justification for it.
Anyway, I'd be absolutely shocked if there haven't been examples where Christians have had VALID complaints (I'm sure it does happen now and again), and the ACLU has gone to bat for them. They've gone to bat for the damn Nazis for god's sake, who in most cases are just hypertrophied Christians anyway. I can't see why they wouldn't stand up for more moderate Christians as well.
Hey, stick with me here for a minute -- I'm not crazy. If somebody in my office was the same way about being a Wiccan, s/he'd get the same reaction. Likewise most religions, New Age bullshit, or whatever. Nobody wants to hear about anybody else's religion all the time. It's not a polite topic of conversation in this culture, and it never has been.
This person has an absolute, unquestioned right to talk about it. I agree with that, but I also have a right to consider it tacky and annoying, and I have a right to be a bit cool towards people who get on my nerves. When either one of us tries to *force* his/her view on the other, or if we behave unprofessionally, then there's a problem.
its blatant discrimination and support of the supression of a religion,
What the hell are you talking about?! Ignoring it does not equate to suppressing it. The ACLU is not a government agency. They can spend their money and time however they damn well please. They do, in fact, take cases for Christians as much as anybody else -- but Christians have a multi-billion dollar right-wing lobbying movement (not to mention psychotic murderers shooting people they don't like) backing them up, and they don't NEED help from the ACLU, so they don't often ask for it.
If you can't back up your accusations, don't expect anybody to take them seriously. The fact is, you hate the ACLU because the fight for the rights of people OTHER than white male heterosexual Christians, and that pisses you off. Well, tough shit. It's a free country, whether you like it or not.
You Christians think the rest of us are obliged to give you special consideration all the time, and it makes me sick.
Even if I don't pay for it directly in a per unit price plan I pay for it indirectly through my ISP price. The ISP's will need to be able to handle the tremendous amount of spam they will be getting if it because acceptable. It will add additional strain on the internet as a whole also.
:)
If you pay per bit, you should be asked if you would like to accept the charges. If the ISP pays per bit (they do), they should be asked if they would like to accept the charges, all the way down the line. Eventually it would reach the spammer sending the email.
I know that you couldn't realistically be asked everytime a packet was routed to you if you wanted to accept it, but it could be automated.
ISP's wouldn't allow spammers if they were immediately blacklisted (Internet Death Penalty) for endorsing it.
And as for not buying from said company, you don't have to reply via email. Pick up a phone and call that 1800 number they give you. Repeatedly, preferably with a war dialer
If you come into my yard at 3AM and start yelling "CAR FOR SALE, CAR FOR SALE"
You're right, but why can't I do the same to some SHITHEAD with a car alarm?! Or just trash the car. Those damned things are intolerable (not to mention useless).
The abortion protesters aren't just talking.
a felony for sending some email?!?
more laws won't stop stupid/irresponsible people
from spamming..
the LAST thing we need is any more governments
getting involved in the internet, the LAST
realm of almost truly 'free speech'
(oh and i hate spam too, but i have a delete option)
True, but your freedom of speech ends when my rights are stepped on. People may have the freedom to "peaceably assemble", however they do not have the right to "peaceably assemble" on my front lawn without my consent. If you use your rights to assemble on my lawn and will not leave, then I can use my rights to have you arrested.
Your rights do not give you the right to take away my rights and spamming takes away my right to privacy. It might not cost me any more "money" to download the spams (because I have unlimited access per month) however it does cost in other valuable commodities. First it costs much wasted time, time is very limited these days for most people and is not something to be frivolously wasted. It also costs me much wasted disk space on both my PC and the disk space provided to me by my ISP (which is very limited, and therefore valuable to me.) Each of these wastes turn into money wasted in one way or another. (i.e. I have to spend more money with the ISP to get more space so I don't lose any valuable email due to spams taking up space)
Also, the freedom of speech act does not give you the right to force me to pay money for your freedom. If you want to give me your opinion, you cannot give it to me and then force me to give up my money for what you told me, hell, you ca not even force me to spend any time at all listening to you. If you want to say something that I do not want to hear, I can walk away, hang up the phone or turn off the radio or TV. However, with a spam, I am forced to wait until it has downloaded and waste my precious time before I can delete the damn thing.
Then there's the fact that the spammers out there do not even obey the current law on spamming. The current law states that they have to provide an easy way for me to tell them that I do not want to be spammed. However, most spams have no easy way to do this, and the spams that do, do not even comply with your request. The first spam I received after the law was passed, I requested to be off their list, and not only did I not get removed, I starting receiving more spams more often. The people who actually spam you have so many different email addresses set up for their spams, that once you've asked to be removed, you'll get spamed ten times as much from the same company, it's just using a different address to bypass the current law.
So no my dear freedom fighter, outlawing spams would not break the first amendment, it would actually uphold it.
And I HAVE actually gotten useful spam. After registering a product, I've gotten unsolicited upgrade offers, seminar invitations, pointers to related resources... Same stuff I'd get in the mail - some of which I've been interested in.
I wouldn't call this spam. It's unsolicited in the sense that you didn't ask them to send it, yet you definitely showed interest in their product by registering it.
Spam is more like randomly sending email ads to people who have shown no interest in your product.
I admit that I once registered a program I downloaded, and got automatically subscripted to an unwated mailing list. That pissed me off...
The ACLU often defends important and valid principles, but it is the bizarre things they defend that lead me to suspect they have ulterior motives, beyond what they claim to stand for.
For example, they recently argued that school vouchers violate the separation of church and state. As if letting parents decide where to send their children to school somehow constitutes the establishment of religion by the govenment. Fortunately, the supreme court saw through that rouse.
Also, if the NRA defended the Second Amendment as vociferously as the ACLU defends the First, they would argue that we should be allowed to carry loaded handguns stuck in our belts anywhere we go, even in airplanes and courtrooms.
.....opinion! where do they get free speech in this?
E-mail isn't public, phone number are. Phone numbers are published in phone books of course but e-mail isn't normally done this way. people can put themselves on sites that do list them or post on a newsgroup, but part of the reason people want to be anonymous is because they don't want that crap.
Commercial speech isn't a protected form of speech, political speech is (this *should* be well
known to everyone)! Certainly if the anti-fax-spam measure is constitutional, so should any reasonable anti-commercial-e-mail-spam measure (e.g. must request the spam before recieving it).
Life without the ACLU = a life where justice reigns and criminals go to jail and spammers get whaled on.
ACLU == American Criminal Labor Union
They never did anything while courts were snatching kids away from competent fathers who desired and fought for custody because their agenda was to make sure women "got it all" in a divorce!
Did you dream that story up yourself, or were you lied to? The ACLU doesn't get involved in cases like that unless it's something really bizarre and singular which involves constitutional issues.
If you've got any documentation, I'd love to see it. Honestly, I don't believe that you do. It sounds like a Rush Limbaugh fairy-tale.
The ACLU will always be an ultra leftist organization
Heh. Funny. The U.S. Constitution is not an "ultra-leftist" document. It's moderately to the left on civil-libertarian issues, but not remarkably so. On most other issues it's pretty much dead center.
and it'll be a cold day in hell before they ever defend anyone except the "politically correct" groups.
Like the KKK, like Christians, like anybody else who comes along with a good test case. Yeah, right. The ACLU doesn't just pick up random defendants out of the drunk tank or whatever. They get laws declared unconstitutional. Laws apply to everybody, regardless of anything (excepting some particular atrocities like Jim Crow laws -- but as a black conservative, I assume you consider those to have been "all in good fun" or something), and when the law is removed then everybody gains freedoms (which belonged to them in the first place anyway). *Everybody*, I said. If the Christian kid is allowed to wear a Jesus t-shirt to school, somebody else's kid is by the same decision allowed to wear a wiccan t-shirt, or muslim, or hindu, or any damn religion you can name. The ACLU has NO CONTROL over who gets to take advantage of freedoms once those freedoms have been gained. That's the whole point.
all protected by free speech, and the aclu supporting spamming of course. I'd sure like to see I WILL KILL YOU's in my mailbox some day...or I WILL BURN YOUR HOUSE DOWN or WE'RE GONNA SKIN YOU ALIVE multiple times in my mailbox.
as the ACLU sees it, it's probably just another expression of free speech.
Where are they when anti-abortionists were banned from protesting in front of people's houses, when they were limited on how close they could approach people. Where are they when we gun restrictions after gun restrictions placed on us. The way things are going, there will be no right to buy guns by the end of the century. I see plenty of evidence already.
They can spend their money and time however they damn well please.
They damn well seem to be spending it to defend our murderers, rapists, thieves, and drunks in prison. Not only do they spend their money, but waste taxpayer money on frivolous court cases; many of which have been argued before.
Christians have a multi-billion dollar right-wing lobbying movement (not to mention psychotic murderers shooting people they don't like) backing them up
Ah...so christians kill people they don't like. I haven't seem them take out everyone they don't like(i.e. democrats); so its doubtful they organize murderers.
OTHER than white male heterosexual Christians
Since when I did become white and male and hetro all in one line. Freakin stereotype.
You Christians think the rest of us are obliged to give you special consideration all the time, and it makes me sick.
Maybe we should keep our money and quit feeding the homeless and giving away clothes and close down those shelters. Then see who's doing all the work for the unfortunate.
The only real axe that I have to grind is with the outspoken fundamentalists who relish shoving their religion in the face of anyone within shouting distance, so I guess we're in complete agreement. :-)
But the idea that Christians are being oppressed in America is somewhat far-fetched. While I have no doubt that many folks are uncomfortable, unreceptive, and in some cases hostile towards open expression of religious concepts, it's pretty tough to say that your civil liberties have been infringed upon if somebody doesn't happen to agree with what you're saying.
Civil liberties is what the ACLU does, ya know.
This law specifically covers falsified headers, not missing or modified headers.
As long as your local grocery store can send you their ads with snail-mail, you're gonna get spam. Ohwell.
Make that Anonymous-Too-Lazy-To-Register Coward...
:-)
send flames to challaxs@SPAMLESS.up.net if you wanna send them straight to me, though.
As much as I appreciate that the spammers are getting a free ride off of the rest of us to some extent, I would have to be extremely desperate before I wanted to get the government in on anything. It seems ok at first to say "well, but this is a special case, and besides, we're only going to let them stick their toe in the door" That doesn't work very long-- next thing you know they stick in their leg, throw the door open and invite all their friends in for a party in your living room, empty your fridge and then make you go to the store to buy them more beer, chips and salsa out of your own pocket to support their party, and this party is NEVER leaving. You invite these guys into the house and your house is theirs next thing you know.
Nope. I want to keep the government at the other end of a 10 foot pole, and I'm looking for a longer pole all the time. So far their past record doesn't look too promising and yet we want to let them in on more things to control.
Besides, I've had fairly good luck with, as another poster suggested, the old "read source code, do traceroutes, send messages to the ISP's in the chain". That and I suppose I recently became a spammer myself when I emailed the other 70+ victims in the CC: field of one of my latest inbox spams asking for any info, and used it to track the spambastards down, but I don't think anyone minded THAT "unsolicited email".
Spam is the far lesser evil. I'd rather not get rid of spam by moving in a bigger evil to supplant it. That's a cycle you don't want to begin, cuz it it's a real bastard to stop once you start.
It's scary to think how many of their rights people will forego for thin mints...
That's nonsense. Commercial speech is regulated out the wazoo! You can't spam fax (thank Bob), slap advertising posters any old place you feel like (try plastering ads on the side of your local police station for a gander at how "protected" it is), drive down main street from dusk to dawn with a loud speaker on your car exhorting people to buy Pig Crunchies, etc. What's the common theme? Inconveniencing people unduly or costing them money out of their own pocket. But that's exactly what e-mail spam does!
I mean really, duh.
A simple observation is that we have nuisance laws that allow you to sue anybody for anything. Why not include spam in that category? Its not curtailing free speech, but giving the individual the means to fight back. If you love spam, then just dont sue the sender. OK? Just like you can delete the message, you can refrain from sueing in court. In fact thats the easiest solution. The law never says that you are required to take a spammer to court, only that you have the right to if you so choose.
I really dont understand why so many "Free this" and "Free that" people dont understand freedom. Why shouldn't I be allowed the freedom to stop someone who is harrasing me and millions of others. It doesnt mean that I will automatically
sue anybody I have never heard of just because they got my email address and sent me something.
For example, if I recieve an unsolicited email from somebody because I signed their guestbook, thats to be expected. But if they sell my email to others and I get a slew of MMF crap, then I have a right to stop it. Not the original guy who's web page guestbook allowed the harvesters to get my email address, but the actual senders of crap that I know nothing about, and want nothing to do with.
Do you guys think people will be sueing over every email they get asking "are you the John Smith I went to high school with?" C'mon. Get real. People are not going to sue over everything, only the obvious. Thats why nuisence laws work. You dont just complain because your neighbor uses power tools during the day, but if he sets up a 24x7 factory in his back yard building furniture, then you have a complaint. But to say that we should have not recourse, just because we might not mind some unsolicted email is like saying you cant sue your neighbor for downing trees just because some of them might fall in his back yard and not land on your house. If the tree lands on your house, you should have some recourse. But if it lands in his yard, then you dont. Thats reasonable. What we have now is that he can fell trees, and if they land on your house, tough luck, you shouldn't have a house if your dont want to remove the tree that fell on it.
If you really want to get their attention, let the address postmaster@ns.aclu.org and postmaster@ns.acludmz.aclu.org get into the spammers lists. They'll come around eventually. :-)
I agree. The net isn't just thin air that people are expressing their views into. Spam has negative consequences for all users, not even counting the irritation factor of receiving it. This anti-spam law is not against speech (the content), but against the behavior of spammers.
Consider: the telephone is another communications technology, one that we agree it would be wrong to legislate against what is said on it. Bell Atlantic might own the network, but they can't say "you can't say those things on the phone". BUT: laws can be made against those who place harrassing calls. Several states have laws against telemarketers who, when asked to stop calling your home, persist in doing so. Imagine if every day you received hundreds of phone calls that you didn't want. If they persistantly were from the same company, you'd better believe you would be within your rights to take legal action against that company for harrassment, and the phone company could do so as well.
Spam isn't all advertising, it has alot of aspects of the act we call theft. Not only is it stealing time, it's steals money, electric power, network bandwith, hard drive space. If the spammers were taking the total brunt of the cost, I might have to take sides with the ACLU, but they are stealing from the rest of us. That's ALOT different than snail mail junk! Now you might say that junk mail is stealing as well but can you calculate exactly how much they stole? No... you can SAY they stole your walk to the mailbox, or that they are wasting the mailman's time, but you can't calculate (to the penny) a damage, because the company is paying for that service! That's the price we pay with junk mail, because it's free enterprise, the money is lost by the company, not the consumer when we throw it away. With spam there is calculable monetary damage to the consumer. The law is all about pushing the lines and even drawing some new ones but it's still a rather exact institution. You have to prove damage before you can accuse somebody of a crime. I know another concern is that people think that this is just a stepping stone towards totalitarianism, rubbish! If you can calculate damage you can charge the crime. This has nothing to do with constitutional rights!
That's my two cents
return to sender
why not just download ad blocking software?
mine has an option "disable popup boxes", works fine on geosh*tties sites.
I've visited their website, and while I agree with them on issues, I find other positions of theirs outrageous.
They DO pick and choose.
I.E. I've seen them aggresivly go after the "religious right" because the RR has allegedly dangerous beliefs
CLUE: The first ammendment is supposed to apply to everybody, not just those the ACLU finds palatable. Also, religous freedom is explicitly guaranteed in the first ammendment, even though the ACLU seems to pretend otherwise at times
They manipulate us into voting for them with nice sounding sound bites, focus groups, etc.
They pander to the lowest common demoninator.
When they get in, they do the opposite of what you want them to do or even what they promised to do all the while telling us that, we the people that we are in control.
oh ya? well i'm sorry if you received my louisville slugger across ur face in error.. DIE SPAMMER! DIE!!
can we kill a few of these motherfukers?????
When RMS stated to an interviewer that he (RMS) only supported encryption to hide things from the government, the interviewer asked, "But isn't the government just a logical extension of the community and family?"
RMS replied, "Um, no, I don't think of the U.S. Government that way"
I was waiting for this to happen.
I've long noticed a contradiction here, how many of the same people who put blue ribbons on their site and at the same time are dead against spam.
I'm not for spam, but 1st ammendment issues aren't so cut and dry as the blue-ribbon people make them out to be.
Free Internet speech-- Is it what we really want?
This means we have to defend hate sites, sites that post dangerous activities, such as bomb recipes, maybe even how to create chemical or biological weapons and numerous other less-than-savory things.
Good thing some people out there still know what's up. Everyone else needs to turn off "The 700 Club" and throw out their copies of "Anthem."
I agree with you -- but would every judge in the country agree with you? You may think it's a flimsy argument, but J. Random Lawmaker may not. My point was that "I pay money for bandwidth, therefore I can sue if I don't like what gets sent over my bandwidth" is a legalistically scary argument.
Furthermore, the first amendment to the constitution makes no distinction between commercial speech and other speech; it means "free" speech as in "unfettered by law," not "free beer."
Well put.
Tobacco ads should be on TV as long as the gov't allows ads for anything else that is unhealthy and legal. For instance, McDonald's ads are all over TV with their food that is terrible for you and causes heart disease (just like cigarettes). Many of them target kids (just like Joe Camel). Why not have a fit and take them off the air?
You know, I thought you were making an intelligent argument until--- "The NRA advocates proliferation of firearms entirely without regard to the effect on society; the more damage it does, the better." What the heck? Where did that come from? The NRA advocates the freedom to own a firearm, not owning the firearm itself. The NRA teaches anyone how to use a firearm safely! And EVERY SINGLE state that passed a concealed carry law saw a dramatic decrease in crime! I say the NRA advocates Freedom! And yes, freedom comes with a price, my friend. "They can take my keyboard when they pry my cold dead fingers from around it!"
Say you find someone that farmed a newsgroup for your email address. Then what, sue them and ask where they got your email? They say, "You sent me this mail that requested my information on the Super Product 2000," and present a nice email, made in Word (they wouldn't be using vi, I'm sure :)).
It's tough to prove how they got your email. And then you'd have to somehow prove you didn't send that email...
To my knowledge, the ACLU has NEVER ONCE been right about ANYTHING!
There's one group whose rights the ACLU will NOT stand up for: people that have normal, decent
moral values.
Sure, they'll defend your right to stand on the street naked and sing the Star Spangled Banner with your thumb up your butt, but if you want to say that maybe, just maybe, God exists... WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!
Well, that whole post was rather clueless. No comment needed.
- A.P.
--
"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Here's what I sent them:
Mr. Willis-
Re: your stance on the soon-to-be-law making spam illegal, I welcome you,
anytime you're in Charlottesville, to come by and look at our spam logs.
Spam is the moral equivalent of me standing in YOUR living room with a
megaphone. Do you have the right to stifle my speech? Yes? Because it's
your property. This is my network (well, my boss's...I'm just the engineer
on this choo-choo), so I guess I have the right to stifle a megaphone
toting idiot in my workplace.
Perhaps another metaphor...what if I were to stop by your house or office
and plaster 1000 handbills on the walls. And another guy did it. Then
another guy. Who cleans it up? That would be you.
That's what working at an ISP is like on the spam front. It is not free speech. It is theft of services, pure and simple. We have to deal with the bounce messages, the complaints, then more bounces, then more complaints, then...you get the idea. I have no sympathies with the direct marketers who feel their right to make a profit from my time is threatened.
Ultimately, that is the type of person the ACLU would be sticking up for in this matter. Parasites. Though I suppose they have their place in someone's cosmos.
This is NOT a civil liberties issue. You have no more right to send 10,000 emails across MY network than I have to drive my car 10,000 times
through your front yard with a pizza ad on the roof.
Perhaps you are aware of the fact that we do NOT own our postal boxes?
The USPO dictates what can and can't go into it. But, I do own my email "box". I pay for/trade for it. Therefore I dictate what can and cannot go
into it. So what gives bob@selling-crap.com the right to send me and everyone else unwanted email? Is the right to "send" more eminent than the right to refuse? I'd hate to think where that logic would go if extended into the rest of human interaction.
I trust this little rant finds you healthy and prosperous.
best,
jamie
--------------------------
Your Favorite OS Sucks.
^D
Gods know I love the First Amendment, but it's not relevant in this case. Spammers are free to say whatever they want... they're just not free to steal my bandwidth, my CPU time, and my storage space to do it -- not to mention my time. If they want to try selling something on the 'net, they can get a web site like everyone else and use their own bandwidth, CPU time, and storage space for their advertising, and we can all choose for ourselves whether we want to give them our time.
Incidentally, I think the same logic is applicable to telephone solictors... I'm the one paying for the phone line and service, after all... why should they be allowed to use it without my permission?
I don't like this. Such anti-spam laws are *much* too subjective. What is a "malicious spammer"? If I collect a list of email addresses of Slashdot posters and send them a mail advertising my new Linux-oriented site, is that malicious spamming? What if I "spam" slashdot posters with offers for free beta versions of a car mp3 player? I'm sure very few would object to *that* spam, but could I still get thrown in jail for it?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
would most certainly object to it. Why? If I had a need for what you offer, I would search you out. I most certainly do not want to pay for you to send me unsolicited messages.
I don't object to targeted messaging like that, especially when it's not asking me to buy something. If somebody wants to give me free stuff, send away.
If, however, you want to pay my ISP bill every month...I guess I'd suffer through it.
What does the ISP bill have to do with this? Nearly every ISP nowadays offers unlimited (unmetered) service, so you don't pay your ISP by the minute. Therefore spam isn't increasing your ISP charges. If you live outside of the US in a country without free local calls, I suppose you could have a case for them increasing your phone bill, however.
Any unsolicited mass internet mailing should be considered malicious. Should you go to jail for it? Probably not. But if you do not bring that as an available sentence...what do you do to repeat offenders?
Just keep fining the repeat offenders. Increase the fines each time. Perhaps put in a clause to confiscate any assets gained through the spamming in addition to a fine.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Posted by Mojoski:
I just read in an AP story that this law ".. would make it illegal to own software that helps people falsify their on-line identities". Does this mean that Netscape Mail would be illegal cause you can change your identity to a bogus email message? I can kinda see where the ACLU is coming from if the law really says this.
Posted by SpikeONE:
The following is what I sent to the ACLU.
--
Virginia's new Anti-Spamming Law - YES
Tell Mr. Kent Willis that his statement that "there was little evidence that spamming was enough of a problem to justify constraints on free speech on the Internet" is wrong. As a Network Administrator of a multi-million dollar company, I know how much bandwidth and time is wasted by unsolicited e-mail. It seems that Mr. Willis isn't worried (or knowledgeable) about the costs associated with such e-mails.
Also, his statement that "Expression is protected in the commercial context as well as the noncommercial context, and no one has yet to come up with a valid or compelling state interest in limiting the way e-mail is sent," is wrong. The First Amendment guarantees Freedom of Speech but it does not guarantee that I MUST accept any and all e-mail from people or companies that I do not want to associate with. If I get unwanted or offensive postal mail in my mailbox, I have the right to ask the originator to stop. If they are unwilling to stop then I can ask the Postal Service to step in and make the offender comply with my wishes. Why in the world should e-mail be any different??
I would DEFINITELY vote "YES" if any legislation similar to this were to, somehow, make it's way onto the California State ballot.
Posted by Apocalypse668:
I beg to differ. Spam is hardly protected under the 1st Amendment; the ACLU itself has acknowledged that junk mail is not protected. What's spam, but electronic junk mail? I'm sorry, but the ACLU is wrong in this respect. I'm a member, but I reserve the right to disagree with anything and everything I see fit. That's what the ACLU is all about, isn't it? The right to disagree and say that you do so?
Posted by SpikeONE:
You are, of course, correct. E-mail is not regulated. So..... I'm stuck. I wish it was (so I and my users don't have to deal with all the garbage that comes across our line) and I'm glad it's not (because I value what little privacy the Internet has left in it). As an earlier message points out, the legislation really prohibits the mailer from using false return addresses. So my rant about First Amendment rights and whatnot doesn't apply. Figures. The hands typeth before the brain thinketh. Cheers.
I have no problem with fines. That is a appropriate punishment. But making this a felony is going too far. This is how the prisons get filled up and why violent criminals get released. We arbitrarily declare certain behaviours to be felonious, then we have a situation where a large proportion of the prison population is in there for piddly crap. It's like we're just concatenating this list of of things you can do to get sent to prison for 5 years. Soon we might as well say it 5 years for every offense. See, this is all the politicians know how to do. Whatever happened to making the punishment fit the crime? Why not make first offense spammers go support the network of a big university to "pay" their fine? If they spam again, then send them to jail.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
For the people above who are equating SPAM with other forms of mass advertising (flyers, junk snail mail, phone calls) there is one key difference. There is a TANGIBLE COST to spam for the receiver and their providers. This cost is usually more per piece than the person sending it is paying! This is why Fax SPAM is illegal, because it costs more to RECEIVE a fax than it does to SEND one. (Paper is not free, especially thermal paper.) There is a FEDERAL LAW against SPAM faxes, why should email be any different?
This law is not about limiting advertising options or free speech, it's about PROTECTING the bank accounts of anyone who receives SPAM. Personal freedom NOT to be paying for someone else's advertising comes WAY before an advertiser's freedom to advertise with SPAM.
If there was a way for me to get SPAM without me having to pay for it (ISP charges, per minute connection fees, server space, etc.) that is fine
What if all of your junk mail came POSTAGE DUE and you had no choice but to accept it? What if all your phone solicitors called COLLECT and you could only accept the charges? This is what SPAM is, it's about what it costs the receiving party
I'm proud that the state I live in has adopted such a harsh stance on this issue. I'll support it 100%
-----
Only 28% of slashdot readers use Linux or *nix, while 55% of them use Windows. How ironic.
If you can read this message, your threshold is too low.
Most of you don't want free speech, you want to have unlimited personal rights and freedoms and to restrict those same rights and priviledges to people you don't like or disagree with.
Free Speech is only "free" when it does not infringe upon MY rights as a private individual. If you come into my yard at 3AM and start yelling "CAR FOR SALE, CAR FOR SALE"
Did they infringe upon your 1st amendment rights? Hell no, and no court in the land would say they did. My rights as a individual OUT WEIGH your right to yell in my face uncontrollably.
If I were on public property, then I would not be able to stop you directly, I could just leave.
My inbox is NOT public property and NO ONE has the right to invade it yelling and screaming without me having legal repercussions.
I support this law 100% especially since I live in Virginia
-----
Only 28% of slashdot readers use Linux or *nix, while 55% of them use Windows. How ironic.
If you can read this message, your threshold is too low.
And isn't your address public record as well? Does that give an advertiser the right to trespass on your property for the sole purpose of putting up a billboard? NO.
Does the fact that your birth certificate is public record give someone the right to stalk you? NO.
If you have public phone number where you get faxes, does that make junk faxes legal? NO. The fact that your fax number is on your business card does not negate the fact that it is illegal to cost YOU money to send an advertisement.
My personal right to communicate should not be snuffed out by a SPAMMER who will troll for my address and then violate my right to personal privacy. Just because I give something out (my email), this does NOT make it public domain!
-----
Only 28% of slashdot readers use Linux or *nix, while 55% of them use Windows. How ironic.
If you can read this message, your threshold is too low.
This is incorrect. In case after case, the court precedence is that PERSONAL RIGHTS come before anyone's constitutional right to badger me.
Is stalking covered under the 1st amendment, NO.
Is breaking into a house to paint racial slurs on the walls covered by the 1st amendment, NO.
Is walking into yard and burning a cross covered by the 1st amendment, NO.
The key point I'm trying to make is that free speech is only free in public forums, my inbox is NOT a public forum, just as my house and yard are not. When the 1st amendment goes up against personal rights in private situations, the 1st amendment always loses.
Remember, as Americans, we are granted "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness". This supersedes any amendment made to the constitution when it's regarding a private setting such as my email INBOX.
-----
Only 28% of slashdot readers use Linux or *nix, while 55% of them use Windows. How ironic.
If you can read this message, your threshold is too low.
Then why are junk faxes outlawed? I'll tell you why, because there is a DIRECT and TANGIBLE cost to the RECEIVER.
If my phone was a public forum, why do I have the right to PROSECUTE someone for harassing phone calls? If it's public, you could say what you wanted right? Right. The fact that you CAN'T say whatever you want on MY phone proves right there that it's NOT public.
-----
Only 28% of slashdot readers use Linux or *nix, while 55% of them use Windows. How ironic.
If you can read this message, your threshold is too low.
The law also criminalizes the distribution of software that makes forging email possible. Software like sendmail, for example, while probably not an intended target of the law, would be illegal under it.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
To honor the first amendment, you have to allow for spam. If you don't like spam, use your first amendment rights and fight back. If every person that got an unwanted spam told the spammer that they would never buy product from said company again, there wouldn't be a problem, and said company would go out of business.
Yeah that works well. Then they know your e-mail address is active and they will continue to spam it and sell it to other companies.
Even if I don't pay for it directly in a per unit price plan I pay for it indirectly through my ISP price. The ISP's will need to be able to handle the tremendous amount of spam they will be getting if it because acceptable. It will add additional strain on the internet as a whole also.
With snail mail I don't pay for my mail box. Every house has one. I don't pay extra if I get a lot of mail. The company sending the stuff DO need to pay to send it so they wont be sending out so much that it breaks the back of the already overstrained U.S. postal system. It cost virtually nothing to spam from the senders point of view. But it can become very costly to ISPs and recipients if the load gets too high.
Also another thing. Junkmailers are required by law to remove you from their mailing list if you request it. Spammers have no such restriction.
Later,
Xamot
?
I get 30-50 spams a day in my "main" account. So I did a couple of things. First, I set up a second account, which I only tell of to friends. Second, I set up rotating e-mail aliases, which I use for newsgroup posting. Every once in a while I change the older of the two aliases and use that new one as my address on newsgroup posting. It's not perfect, but it has cut way down on the spam to the trusted account.
.com, .net, etc. Otherwise your provider's mailer will still have to deal with all the foo@dontspamme.bar.com e-mail and send out bounce messages.
Note that my e-mail address above is a munged version of the untrusted account. Someday soon it will go the way of the dinosaur.
P.S. If you munge your account, munge at the highest level -- just before the
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I dislike spam. The folks who do it are cheap hucksters with the morals of a used car salesman. They cost time and money, sometimes big time. We had our mail relay highjacked, and it wasn;t pretty. The only way spam will be reduced is if the laws allow the spammers to get nailed. AND if the law allows the IPS's, etc. to go after the spammers - i.e. cost-effective.
I know that freedom of speach is an issue here, and the ACLU is right to question this in court, but spammers must be held responsible for their actions. You can't yell fire in a crowded public area and expect to get away with it.
Free speach is just like any other constitutional right, it carries with it responsibility for what is said, when and how.
BTW, I take my hat of to the ACLU folks. They piss me off sometimes, but they stick to their stated beliefs, no matter how popular/unpopular their stand is.
"shop smart:shop s-mart" ash
I have to disagree with the ACLU here. The summary of the law states that spam is defined as (for the purposes of the law):
- Unsolicited
- commercial
- Forged or invalid return address.
For me, the last item is the key. I see no free speach issues there. All it says is that if you want to mail bomb the world, you'll have to stand up and take the heat for it. To put it another way, you may not convieniantly push your commercial speech off on the world, and then make it inconvieniant for the world to speak back to you.Look at your junk snail mail. You will find a return address there which you may use to reply to the commercial speech contained within. In many cases, they even provide a pre addressed and stamped envelope for that purpose.
Unless there are provisions to the contrary of the summary in the bill, I fail to see the problem.
Oh, that's a lovely argument.
"While it is true that the main problem with people throwing bricks with notes attached to them through living room windows is the commercial people who want to sell us stuff, I can imagine a need for it: say the media are completely owned by large corporate interests which block out what environmental whistle blowers have to say. The only recourse the environmental people might be throwing bricks with notes attached to them through living room windows."
You only pay to send it.
Your ISP has to (either directly in many non-US countries or indirectly in the US) pay for a bigger pipe to handle spam. They will pass those costs directly on to you. And this is not the same as the rumors of LD charges for a call to an ISP. This is simply that only so many bits will fit down an ISPs pipe.
Spammers don't often provide legitimate return mail methods and often do not remove you from the list.
This is exactly the same as getting a billboard erected in your front lawn because you gave someone your address.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
Yes, I'm in a pissy mood right now.
At least you signed it right.
Regardless of junk snail mail, someone has to do the sorting. Conveniently, there are laws in place to forbid people from sending you something if you ask to be removed from the list (not so for spam). Usually it's filtered through several people or a very few people do it full time. The cost is far less than negligable.
Yes you did. It's still spam. By not making a statement about it you implicitly included it. Hrm, is it "exactly the same"? No, of course not. Is it an effective analogy? Of course so. If it weren't would you be capable of logically destroying that analogy? I would hope so. The fact you couldn't through 2 replies shows that you are simply trying to assert the analogy into being poor. It don't work that way, boy.A billboard being set up on your property does three key things. A) It reduces your property value. B) It reduces your available space on your property. C) It costs you time and money to remove it.
A) is similar to the ISPs loss of economic power through more servers required, more bandwidth, etc.
B) is similar because it reduces the available space on your disk quota (you can't ask for a better mapping).
C) is similar because it impacts you directly by costing you time to download it as well as the potential cost of money to download it for those on metered (either per minute and/or per Mbyte) bandwidth.
About the only difference is it is quite a bit more expensive to put up a billboard than spam 100,000,000 people.
That said, the law probably should be struck down because it doesn't target only the right mail.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
You, sir, are an idiot.
The ACLU has supported the KKK's (oh, doesn't that hurt) right to free speech when it was done on their own property and in public places.
Yeah. Always leftist.
--
Ben Kosse
Remember Ed Curry!
Hmm, Have you read the bill? I have no use for the right of making unauthorized connections to an online services for the purposes of falsifing addresses. This bill doesn't really do that much; I liked Washington's better.
extract spammer.email > mailbomb.spammer ???
Clinton made me a Republican. Bush made me a Libertarian. Trump is making me question reality.
I'm glad the ACLU have the guts to come out and challenge this.
I hope the challenge fails, or results in only a modified form of the law - but free speech is SO MUCH more important than some annoying email in the linux kernel list.
If I'm beaten up/tortured by the police, and in an attempt to generate some interest in my case and some funding for my defence, I resort to mass emailing, that seems like an acceptable use of spam to me.
I think there need to be restrictions on SPAM, especially on the commercial stuff, but formulating the law well will be very, very, hard. By challenging the law, the ACLU will make people think harder, and hopefully result in a better formed piece of legislation.
-----
(sung to waltzing matilda - origin, I think the Steve Dahl radio program in Chicago in the late '70's)
. . .
marching through Skokie,
marching through Skokie,
please come a-marching through Skokie with me,
and we'll sing and we'll laugh as we wave our little swastikas,
please come a-marching through Skokie with me.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
"I hate Illinois Nazis. . ."
-Jake Blues
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The ACLU tends to err on the side of free speech. This means that they often end up defending (legally, not morally) unpopular causes such as the right of Nazis and Klansmen to demonstrate.
The argument that needs to be made, then, is that spamming is not protected speech; it is in fact theft of services (which is already a crime). Because it consumes resources belonging to people who have not agreed to be involved in the spamming -- and who would, if asked, refuse to be involved in spamming -- it amounts to unlawful conversion of those resources.
This is also what separates spam from junk mail. Junk mail has to be delivered because the Post Office is a public entity (and, technically, your mailbox is federal property).
Totally negatory. Bulk mail is delivered because the bulk mailers pay for the privilege. They're consuming Postal Service resources, and they pay for those resources. In fact, the bulk-mail industry effectively subsidizes the rest of the Postal Service's operations, because they actually pay more than the cost of the resources their mail consumes.
Spammers do not pay for the privilege. Spam takes up disk space on the mail server I administer, and my employer is not compensated for this unauthorized use of our services. This is why spamming is an act of theft-of-services.
--for a moment of sanity.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled Libertarian ranting.. (actually, they don't seem to be doing much ranting on this topic. At least I assume not since most of the rants I see are in favor of this law...I'd think one of the few things that I can agree with the Libertarians on is that the ACLU is a Good Thing[tm])
Daniel
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
I was wondering why we didn't hear more Libertarians cheering on the ACLU. I was looking forward to being able to agree for a change. Figures.
Daniel (not going to start a 2nd amendment thread. Worse than KDE/GNOME..)
Hurry up and jump on the individualist bandwagon!
All I can say is that I'm proud of the fine state I live in. GO Virginia!!!
da w00t. mtfnpy?
Limiting the "rights" of vandals to crash and/or fill up mail servers, or thieves to hijack domain names and mail servers to relay spam is not limiting anyone's freedom of speech. Do you have the right to spray paint your opinion on your neighbor's house? Let's look at this crap for what it is: one person's rights STOP when they stomp another's rights.
-jrm
--always remember to pillage BEFORE you burn...
You are just wrong.
The issue has not one thing to do with free speech or "vague government legislation."
The government isn't telling anyone that spam is bad--the people are telling the government that spam is bad, and the government is doing its job. The government is there to do the people's bidding, and the majority of users are getting fed up with a tiny number of weasels causing vast grief in the name of "freedom." Majority rules.
Harassment, vandalism, and theft are all crimes. period. They should be punished up to the point that they stop. If it takes jail time to rid the world of spammers, more power to Virginia. The idea that I should "put up" with someone else's garbage on my computer, or sacrifice my time and energy to some shyster "for the good of free speech" is ridiculous.
Your right to free speech does not extend into the right to cause harm to OTHERS. There is one hell of a big difference between freedom and chaos.
And finally, possessing a common item with the potential to cause harm isn't illegal (with perhaps a few exceptions) unless you use it. (and hurt OTHERS) Someone can generate all of the spam s/he wants w/o sending it, and fill up his/her own damned hard drive for all I care. The issue is when that activity causes grief to others.
The common thread here is OTHERS, a concept spammers should try and comprehend...
--always remember to pillage BEFORE you burn...
I dont think this is so much a First Ammendment issue as First Ammendment has been shown to not stand up in many cases, including those of inciting violence or impeding the the fair conduct of business (some that could arguably be applied to spam).
The real issue is this: ALL you Linux-loving, peace-and-freedom, individualistic, anti-establishment people here have a responsibility to stand up to govt. intervention on principle EVEN when you happen to enjoy the fruits of that particular effort.
If you let them regulate the definition of spam, and provide legal and financial consequences for it, that is one major roadblock passed for them to control the entire net with legislation (before you jump, I know it takes the enforcement of laws as well, but the threat of idle, normally unenforced laws has always been the more evil form of passive enforcement).
I say that if we want to claim the Internet is its own society, with its own social contracts and means for dealing with internal problems, then we can let ANY laws such as these get passed, and instead elect to do what we've always promised: be completely self-sufficient and self-regulating... otherwise, guess who will go it for us? And just because you aren't in the US does NOT mean that you shouldnt care.
I hate spam as much as the next geek, every domain name I register is an invitation to 6 months of UCE, every post here, on usenet, anywhere in public... but Ive dealt with it, and I think in general we are much more capable of doing so than the govt., and won't welcome the day when we have state prisons jammed pack with no-collar Internet "criminals".
Binary Boy
Exactly... I tend to think that any Internet-oriented law will tend to be either dangerously vague, or worthlessly specific. I think, no matter what, a clear policy of jurisdiction and extradition needs to be established if the net is to be governed by a legal body.
Most of our problems could be solved by better application of technology and not legislation... spam is probably topof the list. Is it too much to ask for simple sender-authentication, for instance, instead of criminalizing a simple exploit?
Binary Boy
Well the Dominoes ads, you ask the post office to stop delivery of junk mail and they have to stop it. I guess.
I'm going to wait before I judge this law; I want to see how it's worded (depending on its wording this could be as bad as the CDA, or it could be a Really Good Thing).
In theory, however, it's good. The ACLU argues that the Constitution grants everyone the right to free speech; in this they're correct. However, the Constitution does not grant anyone the right to take that free speech and forcibly cram it down the throats of two million people who don't want to listen, which is what spam does.
if people weren't getting hacked to bits and raped all over the country, maybe this law would make sense because these lawmakers would have nothing else to do. but as it is, they don't even want to put rapists and murderers to death... why fill up jails with spammers???
"The lie, Mr. Mulder, is most convincingly hidden between two truths."
--
And Justice for None
jail time now for "spam", eh?
gotta side with the aclu on this one, "spam" can be defined in so many ways it's ridiculous.
I also concur with the post about slashdot effect potentially being affected. if your site causes a "spam" of the toshiba website, I imagine Virginia could confiscate your computers and jail you.
just another BS law for sake of "protecting" the world from itself.
don't most emailers come with filter technology now? I get spammed once and once only from site X, I don't need some dumb ass legistator saving me from email I don't want.
I am amazed to see slashdot come out for this.
maybe a poll:
is the slashdot effect = spam?
So, Americans will find it illegal to send e-mail to more than x people 8-) I see a marketing opportunity for those of us that are outside that jurisdiction 8-)
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
they'll defend wackos and more wackos, but what about your avg university conservative?
http://www.salonmag.com/col/ho ro/1998/12/07horo.html
-l
Help cure AIDS, cancer, and more. Donate your unused computer time to worldcommunitygrid.org. Join Team Slashdot!
I am quite disappointed to hear about your plans to oppose the virginia spam law. I can see why you might see this as a free speech issue, but it most certainly is not. Be aware that there are already laws that charge violators with a $500 per page penalty for sending unauthorized faxes and I think the two situations are analagous. The reason "fax spamming" isn't protected by freedom of speech is because the cost of the speech (paper, ink, busy fax lines) is forced upon the receiver. Spam is precisely like this. Every spam message goes through countless machines on the internet eating up bandwidth and diskspace. This is money, plain and simple. Let me put it another way - would you support telephone soliciting if the calls were collect and the receiver was forced to accept them? The ACLU has done a great many things with regard to freedom of speech (particularly protecting unpopular speech) that I admire but you folks are out of your element here - my guess is that it never occurred to you all that spamming forces a financial burden on people without their permission as I cannot believe you would push forward with this action while in possession of that knowledge.
there are two kinds of people in this world - those who divide people into two groups and those who don't
I'm not sure who I agree with. Virginia or the ACLU. Although I hate spammers as much as the next person, this might be a step in the wrong direction.
The way I see it, public speech needs to be protected no matter what the cost. Even some idiot advertising free porn on the corner of Main and 3rd street, or whatever. But when a spammer sends spam directly to MY mailbox, I consider that an invasion of privacy. The same goes for telephone solicitors. What if you found your e-mail address or phone number posted on a bathroom wall? (USENet groups are pretty close, but they don't count , when we post our e-mail addys to USENET, we are posting to a group of people we generally trust. If someone posted your e-mail address to alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.hamsters, you would most likely get upset.
So I don't know the correct answer. But I think that spammers are violating our rights, and not just because it shifts the cost onto us. If you're in a public place, and someone is speaking, you can just walk away. If you get an e-mail, you have to either read it or delete it. With deceptive subject headers, usually you can't just filter it all.
Josh
Yes, "unsolicited" covers a lot of ground. But, the bill doesn't criminalize unsolicited mail. :)
:)
There are 3 things the law criminalizes:
1. Sending unsolicited *bulk* e-mail in violation of an ISP's policies.
2. Sending UBE with forged headers.
3. Distributing spamware.
The examples you give are highly unlikely to lead to lawsuits under this law, and if they do, they're certain to be laughed out of court.
And yes, bandwidth is "too cheap to meter" on average - but some of us pay a larger share of the bill than others, and some folks (spammers) want everyone else to foot their bill. This helps address that particular inequity. In fact, it'll help keep bandwidth "too cheap to meter" - figures I've seen indicate that of a $19.95/month account, $2-3 a month is necessitated by excess hardware and manpower expenses due to spam.
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
The only time I've ever seen a "remove" phone number that was 1-800, it was an automated system, and the number was at the bottom of... a junk fax. Well, d'uh, folks. I don't see a loophole in the law saying that you don't have to pay the $500 fine if your junk fax has a 1-800 remove number at the bottom... do you? ;)
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
How many time have we heard, on these very pages, the screams of terror at even the smallest infringement on the rights and privileges of free speech, and online speech specifically? How many times?
The real test of one's devotion to the ideal of constitutionally protected speech (sorry to be US-centric for a moment) is when we must defend free speech even when its purpose, medium, or presentation is not exactly what we'd like.
If you want free speech, and you want it defended, and you want unpopular ideas to still be legal thoughts in your head and legal words in your mouth, than you must defend constitutionally protected free speech even when it comes in the form of spam.
There is no test for constitutionally protected free speech that spam infringes on. Mindless loads of commercial email, while not happy, pretty, or nice, are not fighting words, they do not present clear or present danger, they rarely insight real physical violence.
Most of you don't want free speech, you want to have unlimited personal rights and freedoms and to restrict those same rights and priviledges to people you don't like or disagree with.
The irony is shocking, and it makes me laugh.
Andrew Gardner
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
Oh yes it is. Commercial speech is just another form of speech. It might be unpleasant, stupid, ill-informed, and mentally deficient, but than again so are most political commentators whose right to free speech is as real as yours or mine.
Andrew Gardner
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
Two things.
Spam doesn't stalk you. It doesn't stand on your lawn at 3am and scream at you. It doesn't walk up behind you and kick you in the head. Those are all physical crimes which are dealt with by other statutes.
Does spam waste CPU cycles. Yes. Does it waste network bandwidth? Does it bring even the best mail servers to their knees on occaison, why yes it does. But so does porn. And most people in this forum would rather die than see the CDA pass again in any form because you recognize pornography as free speech.
Isn't it a little maddening that commercial speech is the greater evil here?
Second, the whole point is that my first amendment rights don't end when I start to make you unconfortable or start to say things that don't make you warm and fuzzy inside. I still have the right to say those things.
Your inbox is yours. So are your ears. I can say things that make you unhappy, and whether I email them to you or I send snail mail, or I whisper them in your ear, they MAY be protected speech.
If I email you something that the Supreme Court has set up as speech that is not protected, and the governmental autority under which we live has regulated that speech, then you have legal reprucussions. Otherwise, you don't have any rights that are being infringed on.
Andrew Gardner
Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside a dog, its too dark to read.
If we allow the courts to exercise this kind of leverage over net content, even though it appears to be in 'everyone's favor', what will be regulated next? Porn? Mp3's? Objectionable language? Sexism? Racism? Improper server configuration? Bad spelling? (okay, I'm all for jailing people on the last one!) Each of these is a 'hot spot' on someone's hit-list, but in the end it spells out an attempt to reign in and 'civilize' the anarchy of the web.
You consider yourselves sophisticated users? And you can't deflect SPAM?
Shame on you!
Jail time for SPAM appeals to my childish sense of justice, but bodes ill in the long term for everyone.
Congratulations to the ACLU (and I'm a republican!) for standing up for what they think is right.
**>>BELCH
You hook up your computer to the 'information highway' by choice. You repel unwanted guests by turning them away at the door.
**>>BELCH
No, wait. Sorry 'bout that. I totally don't.
Restricting access to YOUR server is YOUR responsibility.
**>>BELCH
There were some very interesting comments here yesterday, but now they're all gone. I looked as far down as threshold -15, but no change.
Oh well. I'll say it again.
Eat My Shorts.
;)
**>>BELCH
does anyone else notice that this is called virgina??? do you suppose this is intentional or accidental?
Marques Johansson
I'm impressed to see how many /. participants understand that liberties must be defended for all, not just the folks you agree with.
I'm a proud (card-carrying) member of the ACLU, and while I would love to see a legal (and constitutional) framework to keep spammers out of my mailbox (and for that matter, telemarketers off my telephone), I understand that may not be possible at the same time as preserving a legal climate and culture that promotes the free and open exchange of ideas... Even unpopular or commercial ones.
Any law involving restriction of speech rights must be subject to a thorough vetting of its constitutionality. If it passes such a test, well and good, but if not, then I'm afraid it was a bad law, and other solutions to the spam problem must be sought.
I hate spammers, and instinctively I would really like to just kick their asses (just like I would like to kick the ass of all those people who just sit on left turn signals at stop lights), but really, shouldn't the punishment fit the crime? Aren't we a "civilized" country? Spamming is more akin to harassment, not assualt or theft. If somebody is guilty of harassment, do they face the possibility of jail time?
--
Mark Fassler
fassler at frii dot com
After re-reading it, the law does say, "distributing software which makes possible the transmission of false e-mail with the intent to facilitate the transmission of false e-mail." So I guess simply offering sendmail for download wouldn't qualify, unless I also had the intent for people to use it as a spam-engine. So that wouldn't affect your average law-abiding non-spamming citizen.
I still have reservations about the constitutionality of it and also whether the punishment really fits the crime.
It's also interesting to note that (as far as I can see) not one single representative voted against it.
--
Mark Fassler
fassler at frii dot com
They can make it illegal to falsify headers. Individual sysadmins and companies could (at their discretion) not accept emails with a missing from: header.
It's constitutional, and it solves most (if not all) spam problems.
--
Mark Fassler
fassler at frii dot com
Among other questionable things, this law criminalizes "distributing software which makes possible the transmission of false e-mail."
http://leg1.s tate.va.us/cgi-bin/legp504.exe?ses=991&typ=bil&val =sb881
In other words, your favorite e1eet hackerz site that happens to have a copy of Up Yours or any other mailbombing software is now guilty of a misdemeanor in the state of Virginia and subject to a fine of $1000 for each and every download of that software.
(One could even argue that sendmail itself, that famous MTA built on trust and cooperation instead of verification and security, is software that fits the above description. The following clause requires that it also have "the intent to facilitate the transmission of false e-mail." Would that mean that anyone offering a downloadable copy of sendmail without the antispam provisions built into recent versions is also liable for $1000 per download?)
It is possible to write a good law against spam. This is nowhere near that law. This is a brutally overbroad law which criminalizes a wide range of legitimate and proper activity on the net, and the ACLU deserves our thanks for challenging it.
Jamie McCarthy
Jamie McCarthy
jamie.mccarthy.vg
....that doesn't allow motorists to carry radar detectors.
(Gotta give MORE power to the troopers, huh?)
Brian
Actually, you are the one looking foolish, posting a link to the same site all over these comments.
Brian
Yes, taking cars from Drunk Drivers is a good thing (IMO).
But the New York law allows SUSPECTED drunk drivers to have their cars taken. WITHOUT a trial or conviction. This is a police state.
Brian
Don't call ME an idiot. I did read the comment, how do you think I knew the links were all to the same place? Perhaps efficient, but very redundant and tiresome. Just because someone doesn't agree with yourpost doesn't mean they didn't read it.
Brian
The CDA could have gotten you arrested for making these indecent comments in a public forum. (Well, in theory). The ACLU fought that law so you could have the right to post stupid indecent comments in a public forum.
The ACLU does get involved in cases where Christians were discrimentated against. I don't know how many cases they've got involved with where Christians _as Christians_ were being discriminated against.
Part of the reason probably is limited resources. A Christian can often rely on the donations of thousands of churchs and several groups such as the Rutherford Institute and the Christian Coalition. Why should ACLU spend its limited funds getting involved?
ACLU takes on a small fraction of the cases its asked to. Just because they can't carry a case means nothing. The CDA was different because it was a major, blatant case they had to take a stand on.
I'm not fully familiar with the postal regs, but putting a false return address on letters is definitely illegal and could constitute forgery or impersonation. Not putting one at all could violate "truth in advertising/labeling" type laws.
-- Old Man Kensey
All they need to do, and I mean all they need to do is FORCE SPAMMERS TO HAVE VALID REPLY-TO ADDRESSES. This is perfectly reasonable, and it would stop spam OVERNIGHT.
All this other legislation is totally ridiculous.
support gun control: take guns from cops
Duh - this IS what they are doing - I hadn't check the bill itself due to it's slashdottedness.
... who cares?
However, the part about the programs being illegal doesn't seem to make sense
support gun control: take guns from cops
I often side with the ACLU on many matters, but I have to disagree with them here. There should be two people put to death: telemarketers and spammers. Period.
Thank you.
What the hell are you talking about? The bulk mailers are PAYING FOR IT. The USPS is MAKING money off of the bulk mail! That would be equiv. to a denial of svc. attack giving MORE bandwidth and CPU time to the person recieving the attack! Hell, in that case fire away!
I'd love it if phone solicitors were outlawed!
Well crap. There goes my whole argument. In THAT case it is close to the same thing since, if they ARE indeed in debt, we will pay for it in the end through taxes.
Make those bulk mailers pay!
Dammit, what good is a cake if you can't eat it? That seems rather unreasonable to me!
But seriously, I agree with your point. There are existing federal laws against hackers (Although they are only barbed if you hack a bank or some other money-tracking system. If someone just hacks your home web server, the law is useless.) which can be used against malicious hackers. However, heavy fines are better than jailtime. The government seems way too concerned with taking away people's freedom lately. We are all subject to the Ostrich Effect - throwing people in jail for non-violent acts like spamming is simply the politicians sticking their heads in the sand. Throw them in jail instead of dealing with the problem.
I personally see it far better for society at large and the environment if we passed laws prohibiting unsolicited physical mail (rlSpam), and allowed only email spam (With regulation on that as well, opt-in rather than opt-out. I think my right to the pursuit of happiness [ie: not having to read spam] overrides some Joe Lamer's "right" to promote some business proposal) instead. Think of how many millions of trees (Probably a lot of rain forest forestation is devoted to this questionable practice) get chopped each year to be turned into crap junk mail.
not like anyone will even read my post or anything.
but i truely wonder why this was posted as if to sound that the aclu is doing something bad?
besides that id rather know when someone has me in there database when they send me spam...
i mean atleast then i can take preventaive mesures to stop it from happening again.
unlike some people who think that you have some form of privacy on the inet... *ha!*
I am a fervent supporter of Constitutional rights and and a supporter of ACLU actions. This letter is to urge you to show restraint in your opposition to laws outlawing unsolicited e-mail, so-called SPAM.
As a thirty-year software developer and a vigorous user of the Internet, I have first hand knowledge that Spam has become one of the most insidious forms of invasion of privacy. There is not one day in which I don't receive unsolicited e-mail for sex, illegal multilevel marketing schemes, and other questionable ventures. This is in spite of the fact that I do not frequent any locations on the Internet in which this kind of thing is topical. These messages gobble up Internet bandwidth at the cost of every system and every user in which they touch.
As a very knowledgeable computer user, I have taken the time and effort to attempt to trace some of these messages back to their origin. What I have found out (and this is common knowledge among Internet users) is that the Spammer often uses deception to disguise their origin, their identity and their intentions. Most often, the technique used is "spoofing," which is to construct a bogus e-mail header with the intention of disguising the identity of the guilty party. To make their e-mail look legit they must necessarily target an existing Internet domain. The company or person providing the service for the targeted domain must then somehow deal with the reprocussions of being a target.
In no other commercial endeavor are advertisements as blatantly dishonest. In no other commercial endeavor would it be tolerated to use another's good name to foist commercial messages on an unwilling public. These practices deserve to be illegal and should be penalized severely.
AOL, based in Virginia, is a target of many Spammer attacks because their visibility allows the Spammer to remain relatively invisible. That's why Spammers choose the big guys as targets. However, every server on the Net is subject to these attacks. Even my little server on a dial-up line has been attacked. Nobody is immune. Fighting this kind of thing has been costly for me and I have no doubt that it has been very costly to AOL.
These activities are intolerable to any Internet provider. They have a real cost in handling complaints and for providing the additional security necessary to block the attacks. The state of Virginia, acting on behalf of their citizens and businesses, including America On-Line, has the right to make these kind of activities illegal. But, how does one do this without infringing on the very freedoms which the Internet provides. With this technology we may be treading on new ground here.
I am not a Constitutional scholar, nor have I read all the arguments for and against the new Virginia Spammer law. However, I would urge you to take a strong position opposing the practice of using the public forum of the Internet as a free-for-all to dishonestly foist strictly commercial messages on the public. In this age of instant Internet communications, one person's right to free speech must be tempered by another's right to privacy and the right not to have any just any transmission crammed down their throats.
Thank you for the opportunity to comment.
Regards,
Arne W. Flones
Define 'malicious'... There are already laws in place for 'malicious' spammers who attempt 'denial of service' attacks. Besides 'denial of service' problems, how can spammers be differentiated between 'malicious' and 'non-malicious'?
Too many of you people want your cake and eat it too...
Been there, Done that, Sold the t-shirt to the next idiot in line
What makes them malicious? Just because you don't like the fact that you receive the email?
Have you tried getting yourself removed from their list?
I received that same E-mail to only one of my email addresses. I get it maybe once a month. The PORN SPAM I get daily comes to just one address - an AOL address I used in chat rooms. I think I know where they got my email address. My other email addresses, I get very little SPAM (an alternate AOL address has gotten 1 SPAM telling me about some local community involvement group in the last 2 months.) So I ignore it and it doesn't become a problem.
Been there, Done that, Sold the t-shirt to the next idiot in line
By mass-mailing junk mail, I am taking time away from the processing of other 'real' mail. The more Junk mail produced, the more postal employees have to be hired (or time to get my 'real' mail gets longer.) Gee, that sounds similar to a 'denial of service' attack.
I guess that means you are wrong.
Been there, Done that, Sold the t-shirt to the next idiot in line
I just don't believe that Virginia has the power to do this.
Yes, they can pass the law, but I don't believe it will be as far-reaching as they would like.
Virginia will only be able to stop spammers that commit their offence (not including the reply-to in this case, if my understanding is correct) in Virginia itself. Virginia can't come to, say, California, and arrest a spammer whose crime happened to have some effect across the border.
It should be a national law.
Then only outlaws will spam.
If 90% of everything isn't crap, your standards are too high.
I'm much more concerned about junk snail mail than easily trashed spam. I don't want to give up any rights to fight this minor annoyance. Further, much of the beauty of the net is it's relative freedom from governmental intervention. It can't stay that way forever but let's not hasten the end of it's "Golden Age".
-Steve
The proposed law defines malicious spamming as any spamming action that causes the victim more than $2500 damage. (i.e., AOL users get mass-spammed, sucking AOL resources... if the cost of handling the spam >$2500, AOL can sue the spammer for punitive damages. Basically.)
marijane
--
marijane
the most glaring being 'war on drugs', that is not
only violating freedoms, but costs a lot of human
lifes, not to mention the prolifiration of
narcotics, as a result of trivial market action
(the cost of the drugs is inflated by the
government effort to banish them, which make
dealing them so profitable). A honorable mention
would also be cryptography. What about the ban
to receive certain radio frequncies, like cell
phones, which are not encrypted in the first place
because of the desire of CIA,NSA and FBI to be
able to listen to cell phones at their leisure?
Vassili Leonov
...and then they change their address to something else so that you can't block them. if I weren't so nice (yeah. sure.) I would try to track them down and bomb their list into oblivion...
Lea
well, actually, they are required to remove you if you ask and provide a valid address to do so. whether most of them do or not is a separate issue -- becasue even if they say they do, most of them provide false and broken email addresses and change often so you can't block them for long.
/.? I don't think so. Geocities is one of the many who have gone over the line...)
it's really a pity that a medium with so much promise for commerce, as well as everything else, can be so misused that ANYTHING relating begins to leave a bad taste in people's mouth. spammers are hurting other ecommerce by their example, just as Geocities is hurting other sites that use banners by making them so obnoxious. (think about it -- would you have gotten that banner blocking software just to protest nice unobtrusive ad's like
*grrr*
just one of those annoyances in life. guess we all have to deal with it.
"Little bunny Lea/hopping through the forest/picking up the SPAMMERS/and BASHING them ON THE HEAD"
(not to mention Geocities)
"the problem with standing up for free speech is you end up defending sons-of-bitches" - I don't know who said that, but it applies here.
I hate spam as much as the next guy, but jail terms for email spamming is more than a little ridiculous. I have to side with the ACLU on this one. If you would rather have government control over mail transfer than do a little exercise with your delete-key finger, you should have your head examined.
0 1 - just my two bits
You get spam from companies????????
Amazing. All I ever get spam from is:
Idiots selling vitamins.
Idiots selling viagra substitutes
Idiots selling e-mail lists
Idiots selling horny women
Idiots selling horny men
Idiots selling e-mail harvesting programs
Idiots selling Ponzi schemes
I never get e-mail from a real company.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Law???? Heee Heee that funny!
The spammers put that on their mail to deflect the stupid people who believe that there is some kind of law that they need to comply with. The smart ones still read the headers, do a traceroute, and complain to every ISP in the chain.
att.net sucks. Those people cannot control their network. cw.net is the same. Sorry. I had to release pressure from my venom sacs.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
I hate the ACLU.
I don't listen to Rush Limbaugh, actually. I just find it interesting the way the ACLU picks and chooses the laws it challenges.
I should probably be a little more clear...
I don't think this anti-spam law is the right way to go. So I would support the ACLU on this one. Generally though, I don't like them. Specific examples? I'll go with the most controversial one: abortion.
Disclaimer:
If you reply, keep in mind that the topic isn't specifically about abortion and Slashdot isn't the place to debate it. Usually each side just becomes further entrenched in their opinions...
For the people above who are equating SPAM with other forms of mass advertising (flyers, junk snail mail, phone calls) there is one key difference. There is a TANGIBLE COST to spam for the receiver and their providers. The cost is usually more per piece than the person sending it is paying!
That's a fine assertion to make when we're speaking of the unsolicited pizza and drycleaning coupons that turn up in our mailboxes at home. The value of the labor required to crumple that up and throw it away is negligible.
On the other hand, I work at a school. Our teachers are frequently blanket-mailed offers for seminars, the latest instructional software, insurance, etc. They don't ask for it. It comes because someone sold or otherwise released a list of teachers at our school. Some people we get mail for have been gone for years, which is a testimony to how little we can do to close the barn door now. The horse wandered out several years ago.
Is the mailman taking the unsolicited mail and putting it in each teacher's box? Nope. It's addressed to the high school. He leaves it at the door. Instead, the clericals are left putting it out. They don't work for free.
Just deciding to tell the secretaries to toss it isn't a good idea, either. That's tampering with the mail. So the taxpayers get to pay for a secretary to deal with it for at least an hour a day, every day. I imagine our school isn't alone in dealing with this, and I suppose in the private sector there's a similar issue. Experience with the military tells me the same: the unit mail clerks often have to deal with a bulk-mailing that happened because some scummy used car dealership bought a unit's alpha roster at $.10 a name and went crazy with the label maker and copy machine.
I don't think spam and unsolicited snail mail are that different. They can both cost the recipient depending on the context in which they're distributed.
----------
pudding_yeti@yahoo.com
"Give me $20 worth of pudding, or kill me."
----------
mphall@cstone.nospam.net
"A horse laugh is worth a thousand syllogisms"
While I agree that the first amendment is *extremely* important, I don't think that laws against spam violate that amendment.
Using snail mail as an example, would you like to pay postage due on all the junk mail you recieve?
To those without per minute charges or bandwidth limits, spam is merely an annoyance. But if you have to pay (per bit, whatever), it becomes a real issue of cost. This will be aggravated even more if the phone co's get the interstate charges they want from ISPs.
Nunc Tutus Exitus Computarus.
from the Library of Congress Website thomas.loc.gov. Lots of good info there, you should check it out.
Amendment XIV
(1868)
Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they
reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any
person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
Section 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state,
excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States,
Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a state, or the members of the legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such
state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of
representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of
age in such state.
Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the
United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state
legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against
the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.
Section 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in
suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any state shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid
of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held
illegal and void.
Section 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
"Heavens, it appears that my weewee has been stricken with rigor mortis!" -- Stewie Griffin
If I put up a suggestion box in my hypothetical store, does that give people the right to dump ads in it? Nope.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
argh, the ACLU can make you happy one day fighting for the little guy who can't do it (or afford the legal fees) on his own, and the next day you find them acting as whore for spammers.
No, I'm not joking about this. I am against this rule from a start. No I'm not a spammer, and yes, I do anything in my power to keep my e-mail from getting outside my small circle of close friends. The reason this laws is bad is that it sets a precedent.
You are all being hypocrites when you scream and fit when congress passes the "CDA" or "COPA (CDAII)", but praise the fucking lord when it passes a law which does something equally illegal, but which you have support for. Spamming is communication. Unwanted communication? YES. Annoying communication? YES. Illegal communication? NO.. until now! While spamming might tick the socks off of you, it is still just an individual/company communicating with you. Set up a filter if you dont want your mail being bombarded. Ask for laws which safeguard your privacy, but not for those which restrict the freedoms of others.
btw, it's VirginIa.
Case 1: Law passes
-Spammers get out of state/country accounts
-You still get spam
Case 2: Law fails
-You still get spam
It just doesn't matter.
What's worse is if we lose any rights due to this. But just based on stopping spam, a law won't help.
--
Four years in jail
No Trial, No Bail
New worlds are not born in the vacuum of abstract
ideas, but in the fight for daily bread --Rudolf Rocke
\
:)
From the point of criminalize unsolicited phone calls... They are criminalized in most states. You have the 3 strikes rule and if you can document that you requested to not be solicited again those three times you can have legal action initiated.
I don't mind someone calling once, or e-mailing once... if they do it a second time and it's accidental, I don't mind either... but I'm fraggin tired of being told I can quit my job and make 400K per day simply spamming people if I buy this magical CD of e-mail addresses... The e-mails have no way to remove yourself from the list, they have no real reply address, the headers are spoofed or sent from an account that was dropped (wisely) by their ISP in a matter of days (Hours?). The contact information is rarely accurate and the spam to the best of my knowledge does nothing but suck bandwidth that I could be using to whoop yer arse in Q2
\
one might as well criminalize unsolicited phone calls, unsolicited postal mail, unsolicited pages, as well as the communication of any other content that someone might not want to receive.
Zanthor
I was a little disappointed to see Hemo's statements. While I can sympathize with wanting to do something about SPAM, when I read the law I don't think it is the right kind of legislature to deal with the problem.
:P
This is from the summery:
The bill also adds the following to the list of those acts constituting use without authority or computer trespass: (i) using the services of an electronic mail service provider in contravention of the authority granted by or in violation of the policies set by the electronic mail service provider; (ii) falsifying e-mail transmission information in connection with the transmission of unsolicited bulk e-mail; and (iii) selling or distributing software which makes possible the transmission of false e-mail with the intent to facilitate the transmission of false e-mail.
---
As some other posters have already stated, "false email" is too vaguely defined and could be argued to encompass even legitimate domain masquerading. It should be much better defined.
What I really object to though, is clause '1'. I think spamming should only be illegal when it's done for malicious (DOS) purposes or as unsolicited *commercial* advertisements. I don't think email should be illegal simply because it was against the recipient's "usage policy". That's where I see possible violation of freedom of speech.
I also don't think the law should outlaw anonymous remailers. These have their legitimate uses. I don't think that it does, but I would like the definition of "false email" clarified so there's no room for doubt.
I am not a lawyer, I know that my arguements are not black and white. Please flame gently
- OT
Seriously! (I'm the moron who posted about the First Amendment vs. spam above, and I now think I was probably wrong, but I'm gonna play devil's advocate and agree with myself anyway
Sooner or later, the courts will have to decide in a case that's right on the border. What then? Bear in mind that the "border" is miles wide, because the courts don't know shit about software. For all we know, a really sharp DA (sharp as a *lawyer*, I mean; morally he'd be a moron) could indeed demonstrate to the satisfaction of a judge and/or jury that sendmail's primary purpose is falsifying routing information. How many small-town judges are there in this country who "don't hold with that there innernet"? It's not a good thought.
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
I dunno, but what about anonymous remailers?
Then you're into "proving intent" and that's a mare's nest if ever I saw one. I'm not a lawyer, of course; I just play with myself in front of the TV.
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law." --
I have a pretty dim view of this group. They seem to only embrace liberal causes. :)
And of course, I'm still waiting for them to start defending our second amendment rights
It is possible to win a suit against telephone harassment, why not e-mail harassment as well?
Does anyone remember a story where the gov't of China jailed some guy for "spamming" other civil rights workers and organizers and their friends and family about civil rights? Or did I just completely lose it?
Does anyone remember a story where the gov't of China jailed some guy for "spamming" other civil rights workers and organizers and their friends and family about civil rights? Or did I just completely lose it?
h tml
Nope, I didn't lose it. Here it is:
http://slashdot.org/articles/98/12/04/1132244.s
The law is a step in the right direction, but there are many problems, and caveats, along the way.
First and foremost, as with all things 'legal', it's going to be a matter of MONEY. The only people that will be able to substantiate suffering from SPAM, will be those that can demonstrate a financial loss caused by unsolicited email.. ISPs are most probably the only ones to really benefit from this law - by citing wasted bandwidth, storage and processing requirements, and disgruntled former subscribers. The fact that AOL is based in Virginia pretty much seals it. If we look close enough, I'm sure that AOL will turn out to be the driving force (lobby) behind the bill.
Secondly, just what constitutes 'malicious' SPAM? Is it a mass-mailing targetting over a certain number of users on a particular domain? Is it subject matter? One man's SPAM is another's newsletter or business opportunity. Is 'unsolicited' really the key phrase?
I think that this is a financially driven effort that will not benefit consumers in the long run.
A foolproof definition of SPAM is required before it can be regulated.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Bulk mailers pay significantly less for USPS services then do individual consumers. It's an economies of scale approach that has outlived it's usefulness.
If the bulk mailers were to pay the current 33 cent / envelope cost, we'd all get fewer trees in the mail. But then they too would resort to eSPAM.
As for the gov making money on postage - well... They make money through taxes and subsidize the Postal Service.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
And why nail everyone between you and him with your vengence.
:)
The DELETE button works well, and takes less time then picking through the headers, verifying addresses...
-- If you ignore him, he'll go away. If you find him, and KILL HIM, he'll never come back.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
I agree that the passive approach doesn't get the point across, but my time is too valuable for me to look at full headers, figure out where it REALLY came from (though that's not even possible in some cases) and sending a nastygram to the postmaster there.
.hk, .tw etc, but that doesn't work well either, since there's plenty of people I might like to hear from overseas..
.nl and .de - and US laws are not enforcable out there. And...
Further, setting up an intelligent filter doesn't get rid of the problem either, since at best, you'll never get spam from that specific address or site - spammers jump around too much for that to be a definitive filter. And blanketting out whole domain is too heavy handed. Though I hate to admit it, I have friends on uunet, and other spammer favored sites.
I do kill all mail that comes from
Legislation would solve the problem if
a) spam were not an international nuisance - as I get as much crap from the orient as I do from
b) spam could be clearly defined, which it can't. If it could, I'd have a reliable filter in place already, and it would be a moot point for me. But, there's no specific site to be regulated, no verbage to be pinned down in the messages, nothing to clearly define it.
And I HAVE actually gotten useful spam. After registering a product, I've gotten unsolicited upgrade offers, seminar invitations, pointers to related resources... Same stuff I'd get in the mail - some of which I've been interested in.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
f you ignore it, you'll only be inviting more. it's not that the spammers say "Oh gee, he didn't
respond, i guess we won't e-mail him again". You're on a mailing list. No one bothers to check it.
True. I've seen a tool that will forge an 'address not valid' response, but it all depends on the logic (or lack thereof) on the other end. Besides, a forged self-defense reply is no better then a false original, right?
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
You see it everywhere you go...it clutters your (snail) mailbox, your email box, the roadsides, the countrysides, your favorite stock-car driver, it is everywhere: ADVERTISING. It is an insideous plague that attempts to blind us with unwanted messages. It is like someone following you around all day long speaking nonsense into your ear. It has corrupted politics (Clinton took money from whom to do what?) and even basic economics (Why make the best product? We'll just have the best advertising!)
Why is OOP popular? Because it hides the implementation details. It makes things simpler. What does advertising do? It makes things harder. What kind of deoderant should I buy? Well, I'm only familiar with 50 different brands, too bad I can't remember which one was voted best by Consumer Reports!!!
Every message we process is a tax on our brains. If advertisers had their way, we would spend all day immersed in cutesy copyrighted slogans and names, sucking the teat of Brand Recognition, till we spend so little time on the things that matter (life, love, pursuit of happiness) that we hose down our neighbors with AK-47s. Unnecessary processing of advertising messages should be OUTLAWED!!!
Slashdot: Liberal News for Nerds. Liberal Stuff that Matters.
You see how insideous this advertising stuff is?!! I'm even doing it when I'm ranting against it!!!
Slashdot: Liberal News for Nerds. Liberal Stuff that Matters.
See my other comments here
Slashdot: Liberal News for Nerds. Liberal Stuff that Matters.
Stop posting links to your earlier message. It's
really fucking annoying.
I have friends who use AOL and when they get spam in there email they really get spam. I had a friend who went away for 2 weeks and when he came back he had over 200 email in his inbox and it was almost all spam, as most of his friends new he was a way. This is is a real problam in his case.
People talk about rights and the first ammendment. What does the first ammendment have to do with SPAM? Is it a spammers right to send me XXX links? What about the children that get there own email accounts, that then get XXX spam?
What about this 'loose weight' crap?
What about the ISP's that get overloaded with SPAM ?
I have email accounts for MY usage NOT a spammers USAGE!!!!!!!!!!!!
I should not have to sign up NOT to recieve spam. If I want porn I'll use a dam search engine, they always turn up porn sites. If I want to loose weight then I'll do a search on loosing weight damit.
I live in Virginia, and I think it is great that they are WANT to stop spam so badly. (AOL is in VA too by the way.)
I however do not think that they have a clue about what they are trying to do. How are they going to stop spamers in other states or countries???
I hate watching my inbox fill up and then haveing to delete all that crap. It is a waste of time. MY TIME and I woudl personally like to charge every spammer for my time of deleting there spam. If I had a penny for each peice of spam that I recieved I might be richer than Bill Gates!
Only 'flamers' flame!
See: MAPS Realtime Blackhole List
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I'm from Europe so no expert on that first amendment, but isn't it just about "free speech"? So what on earth has "free speech" got to do with the right to force yourself into peoples home to "speak" to them? (not to mention that it's about marketing, not "speech" as such). In my ears "free speech" doesn't mean "free to force everybody to listen". It should be about being free to speak to whoever wants to listen. No?
Whoa there. That would be crazy, agreed. You don't need sendmail or any mail software *at all* to forge an address, so that's bogus anyway. You would have to make the whole SMTP protocol illegal.
You can also end (most) of the credit-card offers. Here are my notes from when I did this last year. Some of this information might be out of date...
Notify each of the three credit reporting companies (Equifax, [800] 556-4711; Experian, formerly TRW, [800] 353-0809; and Trans Union, [800] 680-7293) that you don't want your name sold to other marketers
According to the Trans Union recording, if you opt out of one you opt out of all 3. The other two don't mention this (it's all done by voicemail --- they send you something in the mail to verify your information).
You can't reasonably expect to kill 100% of it without some pretty undesirable side-effects.
The solution is not to simply hit the DELETE button (the spammer's solution) nor create new crimes. Virtually every ISP out there has an anti-spam policy. Use it: Read the headers, find the guy's ISP, send them the spam, and he's cancelled, and hopefully out some money. Though please: Make sure the spam is fresh! Reporting old spams just wastes the ISP's time. Figure a spammer sends to 50,000 people in an hour. You've gotta figure at least a couple are going to see the message immediately or within an hour or two and report it. If you don't read your mail over the weekend and notice you have a spam from friday night, forget it: The spammer was probably cancelled saturday morning.
Spam can already be dealt with by enforcing contracts with terms of service and with civil lawsuits on the basis of theft of service.
Of course, if you are running an open relay and someone uses it to spam the world, then you're just a victim of your own stupidity.
-- Blame any errors on your own stupidity. All wrongs reserved.
Of course you can yell "fire!" in a crowded public area and get away with it. Especially if it's on fire.
The judge who wrote the whole "shouting 'fire' in a crowded theater" thing changed his mind a few days later, but some folks just love to quote it anyway. Also, I'm familar with the Bill of Rights, but I've yet to see anyone produce the much-touted Bill of Responsibilities.
There are plenty of legal remedies against spammers already using existing law.
And, if your mail server really got hijacked by spammers, you have only me to blame.
-- Blame any errors on your own stupidity. All wrongs reserved.
Got your attention? Good.
I see a lot of /.ers spouting that spam is commercial speech, so it isn't protected by the first amendement. This is dead WRONG. Granted, it does not get the same degree of protection as politcal speech. Think about this: If commercial speech had no first amendment protection, then the selling of books could be regulated or banned.
From this page
Need more info? Search Google!
Now although the content of the spam is sometimes going to be protected (there's a lot promoting all sorts of bogus crap, which would not be protected), the methodology for sending spam is not always legal. If you are relaying off someone server without permission, you are committing theft of service. IANAL, and theft of service may or may not be a criminal offense, but would at least by actionable in a civil case. Sending spam without using a relay is almost certainly going to be a violation of contract with the ISP (terms of service almost always prohibit spamming), and this is enforcable by the courts. Some of these spammers get throwaway accounts using stolen credit cards. Guess what, that's also already a crime in and of itself.
And as someone else has pointed out, the law doesn't prohibit spamming at all. You can still spam using a throwaway ISP account, start up a HotMail account to direct bounces or send remove requests to (it's a real place to receive e-mail that you control, so it probably is within the law), and spam until you get cancelled without much worry about being arrested.
What's more, the spammers who do this for a living aren't going to be hurt by this. They'll have lawyers and if they're careful in how they spam, they'll get away with it.
Basically, this is about as bad as the anti-spam bill that (fortunately) died in congress last year in that both essentially legitimize the practice of spamming. I sure which I had a dollar for every spam I received that claimed they were an "ethical bulk e-mailer" (oxymoron) in compliance with S.1618, the Murkokowski bill. Barf. I'm already seeing the same spiel for California and Washington.
Regulating spammers will help spammers, and will probably hurt everyone else in the long run. Spammers should be stopped, but through Terms of Service agreements and theft-of-service prosecution.
-- Blame any errors on your own stupidity. All wrongs reserved.
> when we start talking about JAIL TIME...we've gone too far.
Um, jail time *if they are convicted and sentenced*. It's still just a law, they haven't thrown out the whole trial system.
How about this -- would you like to keep getting those long-distance and credit-card phone calls if they were calling collect? "Free speech" is fine, as long as I don't have to foot the bill.
Matt Slot / Bitwise Operator / Ambrosia Software, Inc.
Good lord, Keep It Simple, Stupid.
/. forums.
Make it unlawful to
A) Forge a header on a commercial mailing or posting.
(Legit Anon services already have spam checks in place to stop bulk sending through their resources.)
B) Send unsolicited commercial postings to any person or forum.
(Forums could 'request' such postings via a charter / motd / etc)
and while we're at it...
C) Post any 'FIRST!' msg's on
-TF
Yes, spam sucks. Yes, it would be nice to find a reasonable way to stop it. However, the fact that spamming costs you money indirectly is, in and of itself, not justification to stop spamming at any cost. The argument that "we have every right to make spam illegal because spam takes up disk space and network bandwidth that I have to pay for" is not very different from the argument that "those protestors shouldn't be allowed to picket Home Depot because it took me 1.5 seconds longer for me to get my plywood, and time is money."
We need to be cautious about the measures that we take to stop spamming, because the decay of constitutional rights almost always comes from very popular causes, like stopping racism, drunk driving, drugs, anything non-Christian, and now spam. In fighting for popular causes, it's easy to get carried away ("DEATH TO SPAMMERS!!!!") and trade away important rights. It's important to remember that all freedoms have a cost--you could prevent a lot of murders by not allowing anyone to leave their house after 7pm, for example.
As for being cautious, how many people read the bill before posting? It is the implementation that the ACLU is opposing; they are not necessarily opposed to the possibility of preventing spam. Also, even if this bill does happen to be good and constitutional, what the ACLU is doing is not wrong; they are just putting the constitutionality of this bill to the test. If the courts decide that the bill is constitutional, so be it.
I'd be happier if the spammers were legally required to remove you from their lists and propagate the removal up to the original source and send you a report of each removal and the original source.
Then those "one-time" spammers would be forced to have you removed from the list of whoever they bought their list from.
The next step is to penalize the harvesting of email from "public materials" such as list email, newsgroup postings, and web pages.
The last step is to require email collectors to use language equivalent to a contract when they collect the email address from the user. This way the user will know what the other party intends to do with their email address (or other personal information). This might be good for other industries that collect personal information (catalog sales, cable companies, phone companies, etc)
I definitely think there should be the ability to send email without revealing your identity, but it should be distinguishable from people who have a valid identity, and easily blockable.
> All software is broken.
I think you guys are missing the point. The article said "malicious spammers". Exactly what does that mean? My guess is the the ACLU feels that the term "malicious spammers" is far too general, and is atempting to have the bill modified.
If someone spams your mailbox to the point where the server drops, it's the same as dropping a cherry-bomb in a regular mailbox. They're both against the law.
Junk mail, however, is protected by the 1st amendment. Therefore, if you get one of the annoying messages from some porn site, it's legal (provided they don't send you porn!).
The real question comes down to where we draw the line. Spaming could be seen as a breach of personal privcay, denial-of-service, and other things.
I suggest anyone who wants to know why the ACLU is against this law visit their website at:
http://www.aclu.org
Do the obvious to e-mail me.
You are absolutely right, Spammers shouldn't be jailed, they should be shot.
;-)
PeterT
the contention that spam is "cramming" speech "down your throat" is just amazingly stupid. when was the last time you actually read the full text of an unsolicited email? if ever, would you say that you were forced to read it?
one might as well criminalize unsolicited phone calls, unsolicited postal mail, unsolicited pages, as well as the communication of any other content that someone might not want to receive.
then i'll tell you what -- don't maintain an email address. or, if you do, don't distribute it to anyone who potententially may one day send you text which you think you might possibly not want to read.
i have to say, you read saracasm like alanis morissette reads irony..
By an ISP trying to get me to switch from my (much better) ISP! You'd think they would have known better. And the return address was valid too. You better believe I flamed 'em (and forwarded a copy to the RBL).
Actually, there's a great service that will sort through the headers for you, and notify the right abuse or postmaster address.
It's........Spam Cop.
Those of you who are whining so much about spam expose the fact that you couldn't program your way out of an autoexec.bat. A real programmer has written his (her) own spam filter which kills by address and by content -- just for kicks.
For you AC script kiddies on AOL I have no sympathy. Don't expect to restrict our first
amendment rights (you don't think any such legislation is narrow and with out subversive amendments do you? I have some wonderful designs for perpetual motion machines for sale which you might be interested in...) because you are too klewless to deal with the effects of your own "Me too!" usenet posts.
Give us a break!
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
The difference is that spam is unwanted. Perhaps you might have your emails to people who don't like you curtailed, but not the ones that people want.
I mean, hell, I like porn just as much as the next guy, but I'm quite sick of the sheer volume of spam that I get. Hell, I get spam for even educational teaching aids for high school teachers! How does that happen!?
I think more states need laws like this. At least it's meant against malicious spammers.
The ACLU makes sure that someone tests /.ers suddenly
the constitutionality of new laws. If the law
is just (as I think it is, though I haven't read
the text of it) then ACLU will lose. If it isn't
then they deserve to win. Are
trusting legislators to pass good laws? Don't
they want someone to keep the gov't in line?
--Denis "card-carrying" Moskowitz
I read it the first time. And the second time, before I realized it was just more spam. I fully support your right to post it not only once, but repeatedly, and to post links to it, regardless of the fact that you use an infintesimal amount of MY costly bandwidth to do so -- thereby indirectly costing me a small amount of money without my explicit permission. Unfortunately, I can't send you a bill for it, because I used an HTTP GET command to *ASK FOR IT*. The same applies to junk mail I recieve on my POP3 email box. According to RFC 1725, 'RETR x' means I WANT to download x.
Luckily, free speech is a two way street, giving me the unalienable right to tell you: Knock off the dumb x!=y BS, and say something original or shut the hell up. We read your message already. Do they not let you talk at home or something?
--Ivan (stingray@2xtreme.net)
---
The statement below is true.
Yes, the ACLU defends even the bible thumpers, who routinely of forget this kindness.
No worries. We're all gonna die on new years when the latest prophecies assert themselves.
In the meanwhile, I'm busy looking for homosexual teletubbies. Whom the ACLU will also be defending shortly.
Guy Cole (KQ6J) * "Expert Plain And Fancy Bit Twiddling" * gsc@acm.org
does this mean they can lock up those horrible people from Domino's who keep snail-mailing me ads? and what about those credit card companies? while we're on the subject of unsolicited advertising, how about those religious nuts who hand out pamplets on street corners? i want to be allowed to shoot them on sight. in fact, maybe we should even extend this law to people who speak too loudly in public.
:)
my point is, unsolicited communications maybe annoying but they're still protected by the constitution. if you start chipping away at the first amendment it won't be long until you yourself start feeling it.
-- neil
p.s. if the law does get passed, it'd at least be nice to see those idiots i went to high school with behind bars for mass e-mail ascii pictures of roses and crap like that.
While I don't like spam, I really doubt it should be made a jail-time offense.
I would just like a law which requires ALL spammers and people who sell mass-emailing lists to allow me to remove myself from their lists. Or possibley a law which states that requires spam to be identifable in some way which allows for ISPs do delete it before I get it. I have no doubt that commercial spam can be used effectively and in good taste, just don't force people to receive it. Most of the spam I get either doesn't have a remove option or, if it does, the recepients mail account is too full that when I reply my request is rejected.
And for all the people who say that junk snail mail and unsolicited door-to-door selling is just as annoying, I'd like to tell you that you can stop most of it. The post office will stop sending you junk email if you ask, most credit card companies and other direct marketers will take you off their lists if you ask. As for door-to-door sales, if you live in an appartment complain to the management and they can restrict that too, if you own your own home contact your local lawmakers and ask them to require a permit (believe it or not red-tape and registration fees will stop a tremendous amount of it).
I don't think that any law will ever stop all spam and I don't think it should be totally illegal. I just think there should be a way to turn it off if you don't want it. Freedom of speech doesn't mean that I need to listen to you, it just means that you can talk.
Imagine that you are a sysadmin grunt at a large corporation. Your boss asks you to send out his "marketing emails". I'm sure a lot of us have faced this sort of request. Does that mean that we are criminally liable if a judge determines it to be spam? Will we end up in court? Will the company be able to shift the blame to the individual who pushed the button? When you look at it that way, I'm sure this law will be against the self-interest of a lot of people reading this thread.
Alexium - open source software and articles for web publishers
gotta agree. What if the state of Virginia decides to define spam to include any email that contains the words "bomb" or "terrorist." This sounds like a good idea, but I believe this is the responsibility of the ISP's, not of the government. Scarry stuff.
-davek
homepage
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
"Government of the people, by the people and for the people."
Those of us in the USA ARE our government. I'm sick and tired of hearing "keep the government in line" and other such nonsense. I am the government, you are the government, etc. That's the whole idea. If you don't like the law, you should have written to your representative to protest it before it was passed! If you don't like your representative don't vote for him/her! We have the responsibility, let's use it! Sorry for the offtopic rant, this just pushes my buttons.
When was the last time you were forced to spend time and bandwidth downloading it because you can't decide which email you want to pull down from the server until it gets there?
Well then...I suppose the tobacco companies should go to court to get back the right to air their free speech on television. After all, if advertising is covered under the first amendment, then they could sue the crap out of the government for violating their civil rights all these years with that TV ad ban. The issue here is not free speech, the issue is making private corporations and individuals who have expressed no interest in your speech propagate it at their own cost. If you want to go sign up for junkmail lists, be my guest but count me out.
Darn!!! Guess I gotta go get rid of all my chlorine bleach and take that nasty gasoline out of my car :) After, these are two substances that are much too dangerous to let the average person have access to...what a crock!
Fine...I'll take whatever spam somebody wants to send me...as long as they are legally required to reimburse my/my provider's cost for the transmission and delivery of that mail...I could be raking in the bucks by the end of the year :)
AAArrrggghhh.....
It is a first amendment issue.......
and most ads are harassment....
I f*cking (---creative censorship) hate spam
but criminalizing it.... ?
what happens when the jokes i send out on an irregular basis to about 20ppl (with consent) gets fowarded (intentionally or otherwise) to someone who says no!! this is spam and my name is at the top of the list??? Do i mutter and pay my fine or go to jail?
What about the time you accidentally sent email to the wron person by mistypin the addy... what if they didn't like tha content... sapm again... suddenly you r a criminal....
nope....
screw this law
im moving out of virginia
In my opinion, the issue is not what spammers are saying, it's how they're saying it. They can advertise all they want and say whatever they want but perhaps not in my mailbox.
I don't really have enough information at the moment to form an opinion on the law itself but I would disagree that spam is just free speech.
>:]
We should all let the ACLU know what we think about this on the ACLU Freedom Network Feedback form.
Agreed. Let's all congratulate the ACLU for continuing to stand up for their beliefs.
it ain't the contents of spam that is a problem, its the delivery and deception that is the problem
e to the i pi equals negative one
I don't care if the contents are a plea for some political cause, an advertisement for a lexus, or a badly misspelled smut page link, if you are forcing me to spend time to deal with your message, what you are doing is NOT PROTECTED SPEECH. You DON'T have permission from me to force me to take time to deal with trying to ignore you.
Its not the contents of spam that is the problem, it is the underhanded ways that spammers use to try to force their message into MY TIME.
If you use methods that prevent my reasonable efforts in filtering email I don't want to see, then I should be able to seek redress. PERIOD
e to the i pi equals negative one
You're overlooking the subtle difference. In the case of junk mail, the PO is compensated for the service it is providing. The excessive junk mail in your example will in part, at least, fund the hiring of the new workers needed to process it.
Spam is a denial of service without any due compensation, which is where the whole "theft" argument is coming from.
Okay, I got Linux installed. So where's the free beer everyone keeps talking about??
Do we want to open the door to a raft of laws specifying criminal penalties for misuse of protocols? Could a law prescribing jail time for "falsifying routing information" be used to lock up hackers, or someone experimenting with or in contention with internet "authorities", or perhaps subversives the prosecutors wanted to silence, based on technical violations that had nothing to do with spamming? Criminalizing *any* use of protocols is a very dangerous idea -- it's inviting the government into an arena where "enforcement" has always been by consensus, not by the FBI. Not only could this law threaten free speech, it could make the the net a dangerous place to experiment with protocol variations, and set the precedent for even more dangerous laws. Making good law is all about avoiding bad precedent. In China, they just jailed an internet dissident for releasing a list of email addresses. No doubt they will claim it's just to protect citizens from spam! As usual, the ACLU is more farsighted than its shoot-from-the-hip critics on this one. If Jews in Skokie have to live with Nazis marching down main street (and they do, thanks to the ACLU), then we may have to live with spam. Civil liberties are cheap at such a price -- be glad you can still purchase them at any price.
"The Internet is a sphere whose center is wherever there is intelligence." (Apologies to HDT.)
The problem with spam is that ISP's and their customers pay for the spam, not the spammer.
A "junk-mail" approach should be taken - if I want to snail-mail junk, I pay. You get it delivered free to your door (so that you can efficiently recycle it).
If I want to send spam, I should be charged by the byte. If I receive spam, I should get a credit by my ISP.
ISP's should set up "spam" accounts. Spammers can use these accounts, and pay appropriately.
When mail leaves the ISP (to another ISP), it's logged. The originating ISP sends electronic cash once a month to the recieving ISP.
The recieving ISP knows that the mail was spam, and credits the account of the reciever, skimming a percentage off the top to pay for the mail-server usage, etc.
If spam is sent out OUTSIDE a spam account, then the spammer's ass ends up in jail.
Sounds crazy, but it might work...
if you show up at the post office to mail something, they won't take it unless it has a return address. i've tried ;).
Although I've never had a personal problem with spam, it's no good. We know this. What we don't need is a law against it. People shouldn't abuse the most powerful communication tool availible today. Simple as that.
the first step towards effective anarchy is responsible citizenship.
Does the ACLU consider that spammers deny their victims their freedoms:
(1) Email forgeries - Sending their spam with their victims' email addresses forged.
(2) Denial of Service Attacks on their victims
(3) Ruin victim's reputations
(4) Physical assault
(5) Deny/occupy/displace victims' time and bandwith.
All of the above, and more, has been well documented over time; Consolidated, organized efforts of the spam industry did items 1,2, & 3 to me 3 years ago and I'm still enduring the aftermath. Don't think for one minute that the spam industry is not well-organized until you see what they can collectively do to a victim they single out to make an example out of. I am still paying the price for disagreeing with one of them, and they are graciously allowing me to remain alive.
Junk mail.. That's a waiste of resources, but yet it's still legal.. I think I get more junk mail than spam mail..
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
Would I irritate you just by writing some software like that? Can you use your Spidey-Senses to tell when I am doing it? NO!
I am against any law that bans technology instead of addressing the improper use of that technology. Any of you who like to listen to MP3s should be in complete agreement with me.
But then again, they're Virginians, and I live in California. They can screw themselves as long as it doesn't affect me. When it does affect me, it's a different matter.
Note: I am a member of the ACLU and if they can show to me that this law is unconstitutional, I will back them. If preserving my first amendment rights were as easy as hitting the 'D' key, I would be a very happy man.
Is not.
if only it was like this universally :)
i used to get spam everyday from *@aol.com, so i setup procmail to forward everything from aol.com to postmaster@aol.com, after 2 weeks, it stopped, woo!
he who has the fastest cart always has the best lie.
when you get spam from people and it has like, where to send the money for something... just go there :>
pay them a nice visit... *smACK*
he who has the fastest cart always has the best lie.
SPAM is NOT protected speech...it is commercial speech and can be regulated.
SPAM is NOT the same as junk snail mail because the spammers do NOT bear the cost of its transport.
SPAM is NOT the same as telemarketing because there are currently no laws dictating that I MUST be removed from the calling list of a spammer.
The ACLU can get stuffed on this one. This is a law that needs to be passed. I am REALLY tired of everyone being so naive as to think that a law governing SPAM is some kind of slippery slope for further internet regulation. The government is coming...let's make sure when they regulate that they regulate CORRECTLY...this is an example of CORRECT legislation. The CDA was an example of INCORRECT legislation. Let's make sure our legislator's know and understand the difference, ok?
Spam=U(nsolicited) C(ommercial) E(mail) or UCE.
It is not protected speech as per 1st amendment. 3 words...given also above...Junk Fax Law.
BTW...the law most certainly does make "throw away accounts" illegal. It's called a violation of the terms of service.
no..it's not free, as in unencumbered.
Hey I love the idea of nailing the spammers to the wall...
But it is still going to be hard to enforce... it may be illegal in one state, but not in another, and it's definitely not enforceable in another country.
"What's that? You'd like to send spam? No problem, we'll just get our Canada office to do it for you..."
-
BlackNova Traders
I've found too many sites that I like on geocities
to do that. I just turn off javascript -- 99% of
the time, the only thing I'm missing out on is
annoyance.