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Canadian Judge Cites Netiquette in Anti-Spam Ruling
HadMatter writes "An Ontario Superior Court Judge may have made netiquette a principle of Canadian case law, according to this article in the Globe and Mail. A spammer was denied an injunction against an ISP who terminated an account on the basis that Spam is in breach of the emerging principles of Netiquette, and that Spam is not allowed unless a contract specifically allows it. The ISP says they had no choice unless they wanted to get cut off too. Could the law be catching up to accepted practice? "
Exactly right. Spam is *not* a free-speech issue.
People have the right to say what they want, but they don't have the right to demand that you buy them a soapbox to stand on.
Noone is outlawing advertising. They are outlawing stealing. You havethe right to advertise on YOUR property. You do not have the right to advertise on SHARED property.
I think the reason a lot of old timers get so upset about spam is because it is such a disgusting betrayal of the belief that people are basically decent. There are things in this world that, although shaped like humans, view your kindness as an "available medium".
An Object at rest CANNOT BE STOPPED! -The Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight
I wrote them expressing my distaste for spam quite politely, and informed them that this behaviour makes many people such as myself specifically avoid their products.
This was their reply
Date: Sat, 10 Jul 1999 13:59:57 -0400
From: "BeaverFloor.com"
Subject: RE: Unsolicited email
Why whine about it.
Hit the delete button and be done with it
Next!
Gary Hartl
BeaverHome.com
This is only half true.
Sure it costs money to receive mail, spam included, but it's not free to send it either. It all depends on your contract, if you mainly pay for outgoing traffic (isp's and content providers) or incomming trafic (most regular customers and universities).
The internet is a large number of (inter)connected networks, with originally everybody taking care for his own part of it, ad sharing the costs for connections between them. This has shifted a lot, but in a sense, it's still true.
Therefor, it's hard to say who pays for the messages, but it sure isn't only me!
the pun is mightier than the sword
This is not legal advice. I probably don't have a license in your jurisdiction. If you need advice on this matter, see a lawyer who does.
Mr. Geist has *really* got to go back and study legal history. In particular, he needs to study the history of the Common Law (English speaking); his response is inconsistant with it.
If you boil the whole thing down to its essence, the judge has ruled that custom is enforcable. Or, more precisely, that the law is not going to overturn custom on its own. The origin of the Common Law is judges *uncovering* the law, not making it. They did so by examining custom, and precedent became important because it showed that another judge had already found the custom. The dominance of the legislature in issueing law is (in the English speaking world) a twentieth century phenomenon.
ANother issue that needs to be addressed here is that of government involvement. This type of ruling is *exactly* the kind needed to keep government out of the picture. This is not legislation, or fiat, but a determination of property rights. There is a huge difference between the government determining what can or cannot be communicated, and the courts awarding or refusing to award damages for breach of property rights.
While one solution to *determining* those rights
would be for a legislature to decide, the better approach is probably to rely on custom, as this judge did.
This is not to say that there is no need for legislation to allow the private solutions. In particular, either legislation or changes in court rules need to address "joinder" and "venue."
Joinder determines the manner in which claims can be combined, while venue determines *where* they can be brought. In particular, I see value in allowing an ISP, as part of its service contract, to be allowed to act simultaneously on the claims of all its spammed subscribers. That is, if 1000 customers receive the same spam, it should be legally possible for the ISP to enter court for the whole lot at the same time; its not practical for each individual to do so.
Similarly, a well defined notion of which court the matter should be filed in would be useful, though not critical: the home jurisdiction of the spammer already has "in personam" jurisdiction, while the victim's jurisdiction has jurisdiction due to the contact made by deliberately sending the message into it.
hawk, esq.
OK, this is off topic, but people here seem to be under the assumption
that the courts say that kiddie porn is OK.
If any of you had read the rulings, you would see that this is _NOT_
the case.
The judges said that the law against kiddie porn is TOO FAR
REACHING, and infringes on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms..
specifically, according to the law, it is illegal to have any printed
matter that describes minors engaging in sexual activity, EVEN IF THE
STORIES ARE FICTICIOUS!
This is (as the Judges put it) one step away from "thought police."
Suppose you wrote a completely fictional story, and in it, one of the
characters (say, the main antagonist) is a pedophile... and (to
describe his character) you describe one of his/her fantasies. BOOM,
you could be jailed for possession of child pornography.
Most Canadians don't understand what's happening with this law,
because all they hear is prudes whining about the pervert who
got aquitted because his lawyer was smart enough to realize that the
law should be challenged.
The Judges disagreed (correctly) with ONE part of the
law... unfortunately, they have to strike down the whole law, as they
are not able to select bits and peices.
The problem is with Parliament.. they should re-write the law so that
it doesn't contradict the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Read again.
I'm not claiming that commercial e-mail should be illegal. I'm claiming that unsolicited commercial e-mail should be illegal.
I am sorry that I can't see the major breach of constitutional etiquette, maybe I'm just a stupid Norwegian.
But (being a stupid "euro" and all) my view is that businesses should not be allowed to "expand themselves and advertise" for my money, unless I freely and willingly give them that money, or if it's really solicited.
What constitutional right -- in your country -- do businesses have to use my money without my consent, by the way?
However, there should be a way to distribute information. A way for new, smalltime companies to say "here we are, and this is what we do".
Sounds kind of like a web site to me...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
I think that most advertisement is unsolicited. Television commercials, radio commercials, ads in the newspaper and the mail, billboards...no one asks for them, and many people find them annoying; personally I don't like having commercials interrupt a show I am watching, but that's the way it works. That's how the networks get their money and it's how the businesses can expand. If we say that unsolicited e-mail from businesses are illegal, what is to stop the crusade from going further to billboards, or newspapers, or radio commercials, or television commercials? If that is your stance and your crusade, that is well and fine, but at least admit it, take up the flag and prepare to go all the way. But to say that e-mail should be protected while every other medium is legal is a hypocrasy. And elitist. Just becuase it's the internet does not mean it's in some way higher than the rest. It's just another medium. And businesses do have a right to advertise in whatever medium they choose to.
As for businesses using your money without your conscent, I would argue that they pay the same ISP bills as you, probably more so. They have as much right to e-mail as you, and seriously, how much can it cost you? It's electrons for goodness sake! I would much rather have electronic junk mail than real junk mail - at least we don't have to sacrifice a natural resource for it!
Unless you consider electrons natural resources. Which I usually don't, there being so freaking many of them.
And for the record, I don't know why you think I think you're stupid, but it's obvious that you're an educated and intelligent
-zi-
"Get out of my way! Can't you see I'm trying to save the world!!" -Xion
Stealing? What is being stolen? Bandwidth maybe, but that could be said of so many things other than advertisements. And the "my property your property shared property" concept gets rather blurred as you reach the virtual mediums, doesn't it? What is mine on the TV? What is yours on the radio? What is his on the internet? Can you really define possession on a virtual medium? Television carries commercials and no one is outraged. Radio carries commercials and no one is outraged. Billboards scream commercials and no one is outraged. Commercials have been around even since the time of the "old timers", so why is it any different now? Just because it's a new untamed medium? It's still virtual. There is no you. There is no me. Just ten trillion electrons.
I admit it, if a business were to emplace a large rotating neon sign advertising their steak house in my front yard, yes, I would take approiate action (C-4 anyone?
All in all, it comes down to a simple annoyance and inconvience, but what a small price to pay for the exorborant power of the internet! Or television! Or radio! And, and this is a good thing, when you want to leave this undefined virtual world, there is always an off switch, and then you can rejoin the real world. When the day comes that there is no off switch...well, that's when we should get worried.
"Get out of my way! Can't you see I'm trying to save the world!!" -Xion
Gah, forgot to turn off HTML formatted. Another try!
To : info@beaverhome.com,
postmaster@beaverhome.com
Cc : postmaster@globalcenter.net,
root@globalcenter.net,
abuse@globalcenter.net
Subject : Spam is NOT acceptable
You might thing it's the equivalent of electronic junk-mail, but there's a huge difference. In real-life junk mail, you have to pay for the printing and delivery of the mail. In spam, most of the charge is on the shoulders of the ISPs, who then take it out on your users. Would you like getting a million "have you seen me?" cards if you had to pay a tenth of a cent for each one? It seems innocent enough, but a million would be $10,000 at that rate.
Or how about this - would you like it if telemarketers started calling your toll-free phone number to sell you things? Sure, you could just hang up the phone, but each one costs you what, 10 cents? 200,000 of those is $20,000. Adds up quickly, doesn't it?
How much does it cost you and your current ISP to deal with each of these messages? I'm sure you're getting flooded with them by now.
I support the Canadian court's ruling against you. You had no right to spam, nor does anyone else.
Have fun trying to remove this burden from your name...
---
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?
What is spam?
Spam is the single fastest way to piss off your target audience, ever.
If you spam me trying to sell me something, I'll go to extreme measures to NOT buy your product. Up to and including doing without its functionality.
If you spam me running for office, not only will I not vote for you, I'll organize a group to campaign against you.
If you spam me with a scam I will quite merrily report you to the FTC. If you spam me with a chain letter or a hoax, I'll flame you so hard you'll burst out crying at your terminal.
Doesn't sound like there's much in the way of legitimate use of spam.
Spammers often cry "Free Speech!"--and even here I've seen well-meaning opponents of censorship grudgingly concerned about this. But a couple of points:
i les/page1.html
1) I've always wondered how much valuable Net resources are leeched by Spamhounds like these. 200,000 e-mails a day just from this one spammer? All the spam taken together must use up so much bandwidth/server space that I shudder to think of how much it costs us. I say "us" because you can bet the Spam hogs don't pay enough for their accounts to pay for all these resources, so we who use less bandwidth/server space subsidize the spamming through higher service rates charged across the board. Don't forget to add in Usenet server space, either: I was disgusted to find porn spam on comp.security.pgp.discuss today.
2) E-mail and Usenet spam are different from junk-mail, and so should not be treated as junk-mail. Many spam-houses argue that since junk mail is okay, the e-junk should be too. Wrong: Spam mail/postings cost the sender essentially nothing, so some Canadian store like this which couldn't afford to mail 200,000 brochures *can* e-mail 200,000 adverts--the cost is borne out by the service providers/usenet feeds, which pass the costs on to *us*. So, the real life analogy would be if companies could send us junkmail for free, but we were forced to pay the Post Office for our mail boxes--with the price being very high in order to subsidize all the postal carriers and real estate needed to process all the junk mail.
3) Our time is valuable, and Spammers steal it. I can just get rid of all my real-life junk-mail in a few seconds, but not so with Spam. Whenever I post to newsgroups with a real address, I get flooded with so much crap that it takes a long time to wade through--especially when I get "real-looking" subject lines like "Re: your posting.." which are designed to *mislead* us into reading them--in essence, this steals our time. Not to mention Usenet, which can be impossible--Usenet was designed for USErs to NETwork, talk to each other, exchange ideas and binaries. So, the very presence of Spam is theft--theft of our time, as well as the resources which were not meant for it. It's analogous IRL to being barraged by demented salesmen hawking everything from pyramid schemes to doggie pr0n every time you go out in public--harrassment in real life, and it shouldn't be tolerated on usenet except in places like alt.commercial.sex.ads or alt.get.rich.quick or whatever would be an appropriate NG meant for commerce, not casual discussion.
Just my humble opinion.
* * *
ERROR: DIVIDE BY CUCUMBER
RESTART UNIVERSE [Y/N]?
http://homestead.dejanews.com/user.sirwinston/f
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew Jackson
In short, I'm paying to maintain MY email address. If I don't want to receive SPAM, I shouldn't have to. Why should I PAY to receive crap that I wouldn't want to see even if it were FREE?
:-)
Example: I have an account on a certain nationwide ISP. (soon to change) I have NEVER given out the email address. I NEVER use it when submitting forms and what-not on web sites. Uh, come to think of it, I NEVER USE IT. I normally use my school email. Its much more reliable than any other service. I only use my ISP for connectivity. I use my school email for everything.
Which account do you think I receive the most SPAM on? Hmm?
I get more spam off my email address from my ISP (that I don't use!) than I have ever gotten before on any account. I repeat, I GET NO SPAM ON THE ACCOUNT THAT I USE MOST. Uh, wtf? If anyone has any ideas as to why this might be, I would love to hear them.
The ISP is EarthLink. We dial up on UUnet PoP's. Avoid at all costs. I'll be switching ISP's within the week.
Later.
Yes, spam is evil, and no I will not be crying any tears for
the poor spammer who got booted from their ISP.
But a few thoughts:
(1) If nettiquette becomes law, then it won't be nettiquette
any more. The principles of nettiquette are not always
precisely defined, because there's no reason they should
be: they're just customary rules of thumb.
(A favorite example: are you allowed to publically post
email that was sent privately to you? This is usually a
rude thing to do, but I would argue that there are
exceptions. What if it was a death threat?)
(2) If you look at the terms agreements ISPs are offering
these days, they are all decidely one-sided. They seem
to run something like: "We guarantee nothing, you agree
not to post anything that will violate any laws or
otherwise offend a little old lady from Passadena, if
you behave inappropriately we will yank your service, we
get to decide what's inappropriate, and we may change
this agreement without notice but you still have to
follow it."
The inspiration for these agreements is largerly the
necessity of dealing with spammers at the ISP level, but
this seems to have resulted in a world full of spineless
ISPs, ready to roll over at the first ominous legal
letter they receive.
What good is a constitutional guarantee of freedom of
speech if your wire can be cut?
Anti-spam laws I could fathom (and would support), but a court upholding *netiquette*, which is basically a form of etiquette for electronic communications? That doesn't make any sense. It's like fining people for not saying "please". Pretty soon, people who turn their soup spoon in the wrong direction or wear hats indoors will face charges. This goes beyond the problems with netiquette being unspoken.
:)
I can see a very slippery slope forming here. (Blame Canada
I'll be the first with my elbows on the table when the Miss Manners revolution comes.
(4)-lexx:~> telnet lexx.truthandjustice.net 25
Trying 209.226.XX.XXX...
Connected to lexx.truthandjustice.net.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 lexx.truthandjustice.net ESMTP Sendmail 8.9.3/8.9.3; Sat, 10 Jul 1999 05:25:34 GMT
VRFY scarr
250 User Scarr [scarr@lexx.truthandjustice.net]
There... Now, a spammer conected to EarthLink might try something similar to verify E-Mail addresses, or they could be doing something as simple appending @earthlink.net or @earthlink.com to common E-Mail addresses, like adaml, or jsmith, etc...
There HAVE to be other methods. I don't believe it's in the financial or legal interests to give user information away, but you never know.
-- The unsig...
What is spam? Who will decide what is and what isn't?
I think that trying to decide whether or not a piece of email is spam is like having an elephant walk into your room, and you say "Is this *really* an elephant?" It's pretty OBVIOUS what constitutes spam.
As far as spam being wasteful, someone already pointed out how much of an extra load it is on large/popular mail servers, or domains with a smaller bandwidth. Are there any estimates on how much email being sent is unecessary spam? I would have to guess it as bei
Dude, you're clueless, really. Porn featuring lesbian & anal sex is legal & freely available in Canada. Video shops in my town are stacked to the rafters with this material. And I don't live in Quebec.
As for kiddie porn, the law will be amended to make it stand up in court.
The website for Nexx Online does not show their contract. But from the FAQ, Nexx is not an ISP and only provides web hosting. There is no mention of spamming, probably because it's not easy to spam with the tools which they provide.
I think the spammer was spamming from ISPs, not from Nexx, and although spamming was not mentioned in the Nexx contract they cut off the spammer's response addresses.
So the significance of the ruling is actually that the Netiquette common sense was added to the contract. I think it is right, and wonder if "The Tragedy of the Commons" (game theory analysis, electronic commons) has been recognized by English law.
To how things work. The BC decision will soon enough be reversed or otherwise nullified. The fact is, the Canadian authorities are too repressive in general to allow such a glaring thing as this to go on. The Court system has been liberal towards such matters the last few years because of judicial activism, but the legislators are always passing ever more restrictive laws regarding anything and everything sexual. As I said before, the BC Court ruling will mean absolutely nothing soon enough. This is after all the country which made it illegal to possess *fiction* about sex with minors. If you think this abberation will last long, you know *nothing* about Canada and its restrictive pornography laws. Don't you know that BBS computer systems have been seized in Canada for having cumshot archives??? Evidently, you *don't* know much about the see-sawing that has gone on between legislators and judges regarding these issues, and the fact that the legislators always swing the pendulum back when a higher Court won't. Fact is, this temporary lull will mean nothing in the long run. Lastly, don't forget that all it takes to ruin someone is prosecution on a sex crimes charge--conviction isn't even necessary to ruin someone's life, my friend. Just ask the Canadian BBS operators charged with obscenity whose businesses got shut down and who squandered all their savings on attorneys, all because of a few facial pics; just ask the guy who was prosecuted for childporn for having stories about young girls. Think about *them* before you render an opinion, mate...
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew Jackson
Sorry for posting this twice, for whatever reasons, Slashdot seems to be repeatedly cutting my response short. :/
What is spam? Who will decide what is and what isn't?
I think that trying to decide whether or not a piece of email is spam is like having an elephant walk into your room, and you say "Is this *really* an elephant?" It's pretty OBVIOUS what constitutes spam.
As far as spam being wasteful, someone already pointed out how much of an extra load it is on large/popular mail servers, or domains with a smaller bandwidth. Are there any estimates on how much email being sent is unecessary spam? I would have to guess it as being *at least* half the messages out there, if not more (simply because a spammer can fire off 100-200K of messages in a day). This is unecessary, and is a big contribution to the congestion out there. It is good in the sense that it forces networks to be upgraded to handle the load, but it would be nice to see this balance out so that eventually most networks are big, inexpensive, and spam-free.
ALL spam is a waste. Real-life spam uses up unecessary amounts of papeand ink, and usually ends up cluttering landfills, since the good majority don't recycle. Wrong to have the government step in? How can we NOT have them step in? This isn't "freedom," this is abuse.
In other words, the law states that you have a choice about whether you want to receive telemarketing calls or not.
The problem with Spam is that 99.9% of all spammers hide their identity (or at least try to). You rarely get the chance to ask them to remove you from their mailing list. And even if that option exists, I doubt it actually gets removed.
If I had some sort of control over what I get and what I don't get, then I would be able to live with spam. However, I will never buy something from a telemarketer, and I will never buy something through uncolicited Email (or Spam). Those companies always get in my bad books (Sprint anyone)... I just don't like businesses invading my time like that.
The above is very odd. I have to hit the 'Preview' button 10x just to get it to appear correctly, then it STILL chops it! I'm not using special characters or anything. Ideas?
Think Murphy Brown's truckload of potatoes on Dan Quayle's lawn
The ship sank. Get over it. (This sig was cut out from another's shirt and painstakingly hand-posted)
The issue is not content, it's control.
There's a pretty good distinction between the "Liz Dole thing" and spam. It's a matter of interactive vs. passive technologies.
Most internet technologies are interactive. You specifically request data. If you don't want additional data, you stop it. The simple availablility of some content seems to really upset some folks. But, in keeping with the "Liz Dole" theme, just launching a 'web browser is not going to cause playboy.com to pop up on your screen; it takes the user's commands to do that.
There's also the issue that filtering technologies tend to also filter subjects such as women's health and gay lifestyle issues, which may or may not have more cultural significance than "Hot Lusty Teen Babes 4 U!!!!" But that's beyond the scope of this discussion.
Email is mostly passive. A user does not do anything specifically to receive data - it is sent to them by the actions of another. Granted, a user can attempt to assert some control over the process by using filters, limiting the distribution of their email address, etc... but the nature of the technology still remains.
I don't believe the issue itself is commercial content on the 'net. Instead, its a matter of who controls where or when that content is distributed.
Let's look at some personal examples...
I have a hobby. The hobby has a growning industry that has really began to understand the commercial prospects of the Internet.
There are a few possitive ways for this industry to take advantage of these possiblities.
I go to an information web site about that hobby. The site has banner adds. I don't mind that at all, since those advertising revenues helps pay for the upkeep of that site (if I don't like it, I can complain to the site's owner and ultimately stop visiting the site).
Meanwhile, I'll go to commercial sites for businesses having to do with that hobby. This is fine also, since I'm curious about whatever that business is selling. The second I decide that I've seen enough, I can stop the entire process.
I get regular commercial email from one of the local hobby businesses in my area. I don't mind that either, since I signed up for it at the business' site. This email is not unsolicited - I asked for it. And I am confident that it would stop as soon as I requested.
The way that a buisness would upset me would be to force their advertisements on me unwanted. Even though I'm interested in the hobby, I don't want email from the company unless I've asked for it. And ultimately, that would also apply to public discussion forumns like usenet (if a newsgroup is chartered for that hobby's commercial posts, that is another matter - once again, I can either subscribe to or ignore the group).
In each positive example, I have control over the decission to receive that data or not. When that control is taken from me, I get upset.
Buddy, I follow this kind of news for a *living*, and you live in another *country*.
Of course "unconstitutional" means the same thing in Canada and the US (and every other country with a constitution). It's the constitutions themselves that are different; please don't try to split hairs.
It is *not* illegal to sell/distribute anal/cumshot/lesbian porn. Not, not not. I can walk downtown and into two shops on the same street within four blocks of a police station and buy or rent any of hundreds of such videos, should I wish to (and I don't). Try and do *that* in Oklahoma, Jethro! I don't know what provinces the whiners in rec.arts.erotica live in, but it's probably Manitoba, the most repressive of the provinces, and still nowhere near as bad as (say) Tennessee.
The BC ruling may well be overturned, but it'll have to be by the Canadian Supreme Court, and it'll likely be a year or more away; and even if they do make a ruling, they will cite "community standards". Guess what? Community Standards in Vancouver are a lot different than Community Standards in Flin Flon, so it still might remain legal.
The ruling was that the law as stated made it illegal for people to possess material created wholely from their imagination without any children being harmed (ie: stories). All the province has to do is to change the wording of the law to reflect that it only covers photos and videos and such, and *then* they can get the guy for his photos of naked boys. Ick.
Again, you don't know what you're talking about regarding it being illegal to possess fiction about sex with kids. Sigh.
Can you truly not tell the difference between an ad in a magazine and sending 200,000+ emails? This is a case of a bar that offers free peanuts throwing out someone who brings an elephant.
/dev/null but the fact that I have to go to the trouble to use a different server depending on the particular connection. Never used to have to do that, why would you? Sendmail is sendmail running on just about every computer on the net. Spammers killed that. There used to be email phone books all over the place (on them gopher servers, where's gopher.slashdot.org :)) real convenient to look someone up. Spammers killed that too. You could have your email address unmunged in your usenet posts.
/. buy Rob some tacos to commander(well Andover gets the tacos now). Spam in my inbox pays for what exactly?
Email is a medium for personal communication that occasionally gets used by _SUBSCRIBERS_ for discussion lists. It's not there to feed elephants. This does not mean I hate elephants or advertising.
Spammers steal not just a little bandwidth, they kill servers dead. It's a major pain in the ass to recover from a relay-rape, folks who had the misfortune to use an open server don't get ANY email, sometimes for days. The additional inconvenience is not just sending the spam to
This is not a small price to pay for the Internet this is the price that is paid for trusting people. There were 30 million people on the Net before there was spam. Spam _COSTS_, Ad's on tv pay for the tv show, Ad's on
If there is nothing wrong with spam, why don't they use their own names?
An Object at rest CANNOT BE STOPPED! -The Evil Midnight Bomber What Bombs at Midnight
I think there need to be distinctions made in the blanket word of "spam".
No! No! No! Any email sent to me in my private mailbox, I have to pay to receive. I don't want to pay for other companies adverts.
Also, I don't want my companys bandwith (we offer webbased emaiservices) to be abused by spammers who want to advertise. EXCEPT of course if the ones they send ads to have *requested* the ads.
If anyone want to send ads to our webusers, they better;
1. Pay us for the bandwidth they use.
2. Pay the users that they send the ads to, for their time, their extra phonebill, and so forth.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
This is not about censorship. The court merely upheld the ISP's right to terminate the customer's account for violating their TOS. Neither the government nor the court is banning spam (unlike many US states I should add).
... and we won't.
Of course, it's only due to the good work of Paul Vixie and other spam-fighters that pretty much all ISP's feel the need to have a TOS that prohibits spam.
It's simple - we don't want spam. ISP's that allow spammers to operate will be blocked from exchanging mail (and in many cases any traffic) with those of us who don't. Companies that use spam will be kicked off the 'net, over and over again until like Sanford Wallace they finally get it.
Unlike junk mail, which is protected by and shoved down our throats by our national post offices, we don't have to accept UCE
I think it comes down to this.
:).
You have the right to speak and you don't want to be censored. Fine. But you do *not* have the right to be heard.
If a spammer wants to fill his web pages with banner ads, good and fine. I just won't 'listen' to it by going there (or by using junkbuster
This sig is false.
Weiner!!!
I'm gonna sue the next person who types to me in all caps...breach of netiquette...
Your contribution is valued... immensely
What the He-double-hockey-stix are you talking about??? Canadian law has been even more strict on kinderporn than US law has been. Are you unaware that the f*cking Canucks even made *stories* featuring underage *characters* engaging in explicit sex illegal? I mean, childporn is evil and all, but a *story*, fiction, words on a monitor, should never be illegal. Until recently, this was the case in our fascistic neighbor to the North...
;-) An old girl friend used to call me, in a very Mae West sort of voice, "The Porn King." But, I digress... :-)
It's true that a few liberal judges up there have taken a position that even pictures in and of themselves should not be illegal, but this liberal position was never adopted as the lex loci... I can only assume that this is what you've made reference too, else that you're joking (poorly).
BTW, certain provinces are more liberal/conservative regarding pr0n of any sort: Quebec being French and all, they're liberal and anything in the U.S. is okay, but other provinces have made such things as "money shots," anal, and lesbian sex "obscene" and illegal in all pornography.
If there are any further pr0n inquiries, resident expert Sir Winston will happily answer them.
"It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word."--Andrew Jackson
Has anyone else seen this at all?
I am an Australian user / admin and was wondering if any other ruling like this had been made.
Obviously you haven't been paying attention to anything except 'Merkun news. The Supreme Court of British Columbia ruled that it was unconstitutional to make it illegal to possess child pornography. Of course, it's still completely illegal to *create* certain kinds of child pornography.
And neither money shots, nor lesbian scenes, nor anal scenes are illegal in most provinces, including BC.
I think you're confused with the *importation* laws, which prohibit the importation of certain kids of pornographic materials, which are much more strict than the laws regarding production, possession, or sale.
The case of Little Sisters Bookstore was regarding such importation, and not regarding what they actually had for sale.
Now, if you want to talk about porno-unfriendly places, look at Tennessee or Oklahoma...
Oh Canada...
Our home that frowns on spam..
True pedo love with all our porn in hand.
Great, so we frown on poor netiquette, but make having kiddie porn legal.
Now there haven't been any comments about this article yet, but I predict that this ruling is not unfavourable to the
I don't endorse spam, and I think that schemes using e-mail to scam people out of money should be prosecuted under the full extent of the applicable laws. But the article pointed out that there are legitimate businesses who use e-mail to advertise, much like a circular in the newspaper, and this ruling appearently considers that spam. Laws to outlaw spam would be extremely hard to enforce and leave much room for interpetation. What is spam? Who will decide what is and what isn't? How many tax dollars will be spent on endless debates about what kind of e-mail is acceptable for you and what kind is not? Do you really want politicians deciding that for you? Personally, I think there are better ways to handle this, again going back to personal choice and responsibility. Don't want spam? Then instead of using just one e-mail address for everything, obtain at least two, one for private use between friends, and a public one that you can plaster everywhere if you like, to give to people you don't really know. A throwaway address if you will. If the spam on the public box becomes too intense, throw it away and start another. No loss. But I wager that if you keep the private address private, spam intensity will drop, probably even to zero.
The more power we give a government, the more power that government has. I think we can solve these problems with cleverness rather than blanket censorship and legislation. Junk mail doesn't hurt anyone. False schemes and illegal operations do of course, and as said above, those should be prosecuted. But junk mail is just an annoyance, and to get a government involved in that....I don't think it's necessary or desirable.
And to all non-Canadian
"Get out of my way! Can't you see I'm trying to save the world!!" -Xion
"breach of the emerging principles of Netiquette."
Nice of them to notice. Netiquette has been around almost as long as there has been an internet.
"Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, said the legal ruling is troubling because it attempts to define Netiquette and use it as a legal principle."
Not all that different than community "obscenity" laws. Also I doubt that the judge was defining "netiquette" so much as he was applying what was the prevailing "social" law.
Yay..! I love this country. Intelligent law (sometimes), we aren't trying to moderate the unmoderatable.. We even know how to poke fun at ourselves better then the Americans ever could insult us (Air Farce!!)
Yes, this past Canada Day was a good one, and Canada seems better by the day.
Were you implying that this was censorship?
:)
Look at this quote:
>Nexx had received complaints from people who had received the spam
> and a warning from Nexx's network provider Exodus Communications
>Inc. that this activity violated Exodus's anti-spamming policies.
The ISP had an anti-spam policy, and this company went against it.
Tough darts, farmer! Ya break the usage code, ya get shut down.
OTOH, If Nexx doesn't inform their clients that their ISP has a no-spam rule, then 2 lashes for Nexx as well.
As far as I'm concerned, spam is spam, and is unacceptable for ANYBODY, no matter how big or small your company is.
If you have to advertise on the Net, and there seems to be no way out of this one
be freakin' legit about it and don't spam people! Yeesh...
I swear I'm gonna kill anyone who sends me more US long-distance savings spam. I live in Canada for ^&*% sake!
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
The ISP had an anti-spam policy, and this company went against it. Tough darts, farmer! Ya break the usage code, ya get shut down.
..but their customers could of course take direct action.
OTOH, If Nexx doesn't inform their clients that their ISP has a no-spam rule, then 2 lashes for Nexx as well.
Nah, no lashes to nexx whatever was the case. If an ISP does allow spam, it can only do so for ITS customers. No ISP may allow anyone to spam my mailbox.
If nexx didn't explicitly deny their clients to spam - I don't think they could've done anything if one of their customers spammed their other customers.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
I agree with this ruling. In the context of the internet, matters concerning the internet should be considered with acceptable standards for the internet. Trying to apply standards created in the real world to the internet has been a source of continuing problems. I point to CDA and the bill/law referred to CDA II in the United States. There is no point trying to apply broad laws to the internet from a particular country. Laws like the CDA tried to do this. Until an international body can agree on universal rules for the internet, and agree on how regional laws will be applied and matters of jurisdiction can be determined, decisions and matters where the internet overlaps real life (like this lawsuit) should be decided in the standards of the internet.
With junk mail, the sender pays the costs for delivering the mail to your doorstep. It costs the receiver nothing to receive it.
With spam (and faxes) the sender pays 1/2 the cost (the sending) but the receiver pays to receive it. If it didn't cost me anything to receive spam, I wouldn't mind it anywhere near as much as I do, but its costing me money to receive something I never asked for, and don't want.
And the argument that "its only a few K" is nonsense. Yes, _each one_ is only a few K bytes, but how much spam do you receive each day?
Anyways, most of the people who will read this know this already, but its worth mentioning again IMHO.
At first I was upset by this story. I thought they said beaver.com had had its web access revoked. For a while there I thought the calluses on my palm were going to fade.
To : info@beaverhome.com, postmaster@beaverhome.com Cc : postmaster@globalcenter.net, root@globalcenter.net, abuse@globalcenter.net Subject : Spam is NOT acceptable You might thing it's the equivalent of electronic junk-mail, but there's a huge difference. In real-life junk mail, you have to pay for the printing and delivery of the mail. In spam, most of the charge is on the shoulders of the ISPs, who then take it out on your users. Would you like getting a million "have you seen me?" cards if you had to pay a tenth of a cent for each one? It seems innocent enough, but a million would be $10,000 at that rate. Or how about this - would you like it if telemarketers started calling your toll-free phone number to sell you things? Sure, you could just hang up the phone, but each one costs you what, 10 cents? 200,000 of those is $20,000. Adds up quickly, doesn't it? How much does it cost you and your current ISP to deal with each of these messages? I'm sure you're getting flooded with them by now. I support the Canadian court's ruling against you. You had no right to spam, nor does anyone else. Have fun trying to remove this burden from your name...
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"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
"'Is not a quine' is not a quine" is a quine.
Quine "quine?