Possibly. I have a feeling it was just people being silly.
You can, of course, license a patent in a way that it becomes identical to not being patented at all, anyone can use it in any way for free.
But deliberately patenting something to do that, on purpose, is just dumb. If you really want to do that, just write up a description of it and run it as an ad in a local newspaper.
Tada, instant unpatentablity by anyone else, for a hell of a lot cheaper than a patent.
YOU are the only person who has at all suggested it makes it worse. YOU misread the article to support this concept.
All the article said is that they kept a list of removed addresses, which I have show is correct, by getting spam to one
They obviously send to all their lists, and no one has ever tried to imply otherwise in the past 3 years or so.
You are, simply put, strawmanning.
This, BTW, isn't meant to imply that such a claim is invalid...spammers do classify email addresses, and if you are someone who opts out, you'll get marked as someone who reads spam. They know, at the least, that you don't have a spam filter set up, so it's worthwild to send to you. (Of course, they still normally send to all their list, but they could, for example, send to you first, in case they get cut off.)
Providing evidence of this that isn't 'anecdotal'...I have no idea how you can prove spam even exists except anecdotally. And, hey, you made the assertation that spam exists, you prove it does without using anecdotes.
I guess the distinction is between "physically" trespassing (walking on your property) or "virtually" trespassing (mail, phone, email, IM). You'd like to think they are the same, but they are not. At least not as far as the law is concerned.
They are not identical, but they are treated similiarly. You can, in fact, order someone to stop calling you, and you can sue them if they continue to do so.
And, BTW, I'm not talking about telemarketers being required to keep a do not call list, I'm talking about anyone. You can send certified mail to anyone and require them to stop calling you.
PS: you might own your phone, but you don't own the line (up to the little box attached to your house, eventhough it's on your property) or the number (it's just been "assigned" to you).
While you don't own the line, I don't see what that has to do with anything...it's not public property. It's akin to a mall and a shop...I lease a shop in the mall, I can't order people out of the mall. So? I can order them out of the shop.
Um, you can't patent somehting and then public domain it. Public domain is giving up all copyrights on something.
And you don't even need to do that with patents! If you don't patent it, it is 'public domain', whatever that means for for patents, automatically.
The entire concept is absurd and idiotic. Spending thousands of dollars to patent it, and then attempting to un-patent it, using a process I'm not even sure exists short of issuing some sort of non-revokable free license to use it, when all you had to do was discuss it in public and then not patent it, for free, is crazy.
It's either a trick or the guy doesn't know anything about patents. Someone needs to email him and figure it out.
All the suggestions you have received are incorrect. The correct way to do this is to use the SMTP submission port, port 578 or whatever it is. Google for 'smtp submission port', assuming google's working.
You submit to that box, that box handles outgoing mail. Very simple. It's not port 25, so ISPs don't block it.
Oh, and everyone assumes some sort of SMTP AUTH with the submission port, but pop-before-smtp works just fine with it too, if you want to set up an easy way to do it. Or if you have dyndns or a fairly static IP you can just whitelist yourself.
In fact, it's incredibly fucking easy to verify it, and I've done it before.
All you have to do is follow one of the unsubscribe links, one of the ones that go to a page you tye in your email address, not the ones that encode it. And then type an email address, one that gets no spam.
As I have access to mail server logs, I typed in a non-existence address, a random string of letters.
The address gets about 30 rejects a day.
This not only shows spammers not only ignore unsubscribe requests, but they completely ignore the fact said addresses don't even exist.
And, no, I'm not providing logs. This is an easy enough test to run, and I'm deliberately never exposing that address in any forum ever again as an experiment. It's not dictionary attackable, and it's all from that single unsubscribe.
And, of course, someone calling you when you have explicitly (and provably) ordered them not to is also illegal.
I'm not entirely sure in what universe my home phone isn't my property. You used to rent phones from the phone company, but they don't that anymore. (And, legally, you can order trespassers off rented property anyway.)
It is illegal to call someone's telephone when they have asked you to stop. It is illegal to enter their property when they have asked you to stop. It is illegally to access their computer when they have asked you to stop. It's all basically the same thing, with differing laws to cover various specifics.
The problem is that telephones have no way to say 'NO SOLICITING', just like SMTP has no way to say 'NO UBE', in any way that's understandable before they enter your property and bother you, unlike the real world. And while you can put up a gate on telephones, just like the real world and things like FTP (password prompts), many people do not wish to purchase a gate, as that annoys legit visitors also.
And, now, of course, telephones do have a way to say 'NO SOLICITING'. It's perfectlly legal, as long as you own the telephone or rent the line.
And the DNC list is, itself, telling them not to call you back.
So what's your point? It's as legal as as 'NO SOLICITING' sign. It's someone saying 'I don't want to listen to a certain type of speech.'.
Now, the constitional issues arise simply from the blanket rules and exceptions. They should have a menu with a dozen types of speech, from policitial to charity to commerical to even personal (That gets you a star next to your name in the phone book, saying you do not want personal calls from people you do not know.), and you enable or disable whatever options you want.
And, of course, no requested calls are banned at all, just like if you put up a NO SOLICITING signs and then tell local Girl Scouts to come by your house because you want some cookies.
That's almost right. The BBB is funded by local businesses that feel they met the standards of the BBB, and hence the BBB that they fund won't say anything bad about them, but will said bad things about their competitors with worse standards.
So, technically, the problem could that all businesses in SoCal are 100% ethical and hence there's no motive for anyone to form a BBB, because they wouldn't gain from it.
Anyone can take any spam and modify the headers and IP addresses to frame anyone they want. Your possession of spam with full headers is not your proof of who spammed--it's your allegation.
Anyone can just claim to have seen someone murder someone else. A witness isn't a proof someone commited murder, it's an allegation.
And? You claims person X commited a crime, the police check it out. If they did not, in fact, commit such a crime, and you were delibrately lying to the police, you can and will be charged with a crime.
And if a hundred people claim person X commited a crime, like would happen in spamming, well, they still check it out. But their job is a lot easier, no need to worry about the character of their witnesses.
Frankly, your argument is completely idiotic. It applies a million times better to computer crime, and people are caught for that all the time. With spam, you by defination have at least dozens of witnesses, and if spam was illegal would be less of it, and people knew that if they reported they would get the person who did it arrested, they'd be lining up to report it.
Trying to pretend that the courts won't accept electronic evidence is about the same as claiming they won't accept eyewitness evidence. They indeed do. And it's certain enough to track down, arrest, and more importantly search said spammer, and find physical evidence of the crime in his possession.
So you say we should make it a criminal offense and have our police chasing down spammers? I'm against spam, but I don't want our law enforcement tied up in spam investigation--I want them out there catching murderers, thiefs, and maybe even a terrorist now and then. The police are busy enough without having to deal with a flood of spam complaints. Heck, *I* don't even have time to investigate spam anymore--I just block it.
Spammers are thiefs. They are also usually computer criminals, having delibrately installed trojans on, at this point, millions of computers.
Most viruses, nowdays, are written by spammers to provide zombie machines to send spam from.
Hence the virus email is 'commerical', as in, it is used to make a profit, the profit being to send out spam.
However, calling UCE 'spam' is silly. No one cares if one person gets emailed with a single unsolicited business proposal, and there are times where that is appropriate. (For example, you wish to purchase an apparently unused domain name, so you email the domain's technical contact, despite there being no indication they wish to discuss any such offer.)
And, while there are problems when UCE is done in bulk, the problems are the bulk, not the fact it's UCE. If someone has a truly personal business issue to discuss, even unsolicited, people do not mind, anymore than you'd mind if someone knocked on your door and offered to buy your house, despite it not being for sale.
However, such individual unsolicited commerical emails are few and far between, and are being drowned out by unsolicited bulk commerical email, which is equivilent of people throwing flyers into your yard.
It all really does come down to consent, not content. Reasonable people can be expected to have consented to sometimes be contacted, personally, out of the blue, to talk about some legitimate business thing. No one consented to have tons of any sort of flyers dumped on them, though, commercial or otherwise. (Also note we need to start enforcing fraud laws here, too, to take care of fraudulent UCE which isn't UBE.)
Which is why I hate the whole 'UCE' thing. Commerical isn't the problem. And all restrictions on commercial are doomed to fail in the US. Restrict fraud, restrict trying to evade filters, and restrict bulk-without-consent.
Yes, it would require you to, instead, use your work server as your outbound MX for sending email with that address.
I, of course, see no problem with this, and I don't understand why others do. That's how email is supposed to work.
Letting people send email willy-nilly from any IP in the universe is what got us into this mess. That must be changed, period.
It can be changed by RMX records, it can be changed by doing something that says 'email=no' in the rDNS records, it can be changed by everyone blacklisting *dhcp* and *dsl*, it can be changed by outbound port filtering, and it can be changed by requiring rDNS match HELO, the last three which have already started.
But it does have to change, and any change will result in people whining and complaining that's how they used to send email. The people running mail servers on cable modems and DSL have already started bitching because they're getting blocked.
Email need to be sent from server to server. And the server it's sent from needs to have some accountabilty to the domain the mail is sent from, and vis versa.
How on earth is Hotmail an 'infrastructure providers'? For that matter, how is your ISP's mail server an 'infrastructure providers'? (No ISP sits around doing content filtering over the wire, the actual infrastructure, that's just absurd. The closest they come is filtering out packets with spoofed IP addresses.)
Using your defination, it's just as logical to claim you are a 'infrastructure providers'. I mean, you're a box, owned by a private party, connected to 'infrastructure', whatever the hell that is, which is a wire owned by a private party, exactly like mail servers are. I'm going to email you a virus, I hope you don't go filtering it out using software or anything.
And spam isn't a content issue, anyway, it is, and always has been, about consent. Filtering on content is a stopgap measure, and no one wants the state to pass any laws about content of email, mainly because that's unconstitutional in the US. And there's plenty of filtering that isn't based on content, like blacklists.
You're stuck in 1999. Spammers don't care if addresses are good anymore.
My mail server gets so many attempts to send mail to addresses that are not valid, have never been valid, and were never listed anywhere that it's not funny. Hundreds of spammers have the same list of ~40 completely made up addresses that have never responsed with anything but the 5xx invalid user code, whatever that is.
They've realized that since it costs nothing to send email, that it's not worth wasting time filtering out bad addresses. After all, there's always the chance that it's your IP that was blocked, and thus you can send to that user from another IP.
Next time you're at his computer, open up a random piece of spam, and show him the headers. In particular, point to the spam 'origin', which 99 out of a 100 times will be an illegally installed proxy on some sap's cable or DSL connection. Point out that the spammer commited a felony by hijacking said computer.
Then ask him if he wishes to do business with felons.
That is almost exactly the right analogy, but cars are easier.
Seriously. Do you realize how easy it is to break into most cars? I've locked my keys in a car at my house and manufactured a slim jim in 20 minutes, out of crap I had laying around, and was in the car three minutes after that, despite never using one of them before. (The secret is that you're sliding something forward (I think it was forward.) with the slant, not trying to 'hook' something and pull it. Took me two and half minutes to figure that one out. Next time I read the directions.)
And while I've never tried to hotwire a car, I can't imagine it can be more than an order of magnitude harder. Stealing a car is easy, and 'Gone in 60 Seconds' isn't just the title of a movie.
The main thing that stops cars from being stolen is, basically, laws. Laws against car theft, laws making theft harder, and laws making the results harder to sell.
And, by and by, car theft is not a problem. Sure, cars are stolen, but you do not normally expect to come back and find your car stolen, or really consider it a likely possiblity.
Pretending we shouldn't have laws against car theft because, after all, we have keys, and Lo-Jack, and car alarms, is stupid.
And I tend to agree with that definition. But how can I prove it wasn't solicited? How can the spammer prove it WAS solicited? If I have a mailing list that sends a confirmation email to the user and only signs the user up if he confirms via a link in that email, how can I prove that that process was followed? If someone subscribes someone else to my mailing list and I send that user a single message confirming the opt-in, can I be accused of spamming them with my confirmation message? How can I prove a given spam was sent bulk without going through half the legal process of filing a lawsuit against the spammer? Is the receipt of a single spammny message sufficient legal ground to ask for a court to confirm whether the message was sent in bulk? Could spammers then say they received a couple of emails from me and have the courts sift through MY email just because someone accused me of spamming?
And if someone kills someone, how can anyone prove he did it?
What kind of stupid argument is that? We have the courts for a reason.
And pretending we don't have evidence that a person is spamming is completely and utterly insane. Completely. There's no way to pretend the issue is uncertain. It's never been uncertain. Everyone knows exactly who's spamming, and if the government wants to find out all they have to do is seed spamtrap addresses and wait for them to get email.
And why would you have to go through any legal process? I don't have to sue someone if they steal my stuff, I walk down the police station and tell them, and they arrest the guy.
As for someone lying to the police...do you know what happens if I walk down the police station and tell them you stole my stereo, and you didn't? I don't either, and I don't really want to find out.
Except that spammers make money because idiots pay them to spam.
And how the hell much do you think it costs to make a spam run? And how much do you think it costs to make a spam run with stolen credit cards?
Trying to make the profit from spamming dip below 0 is obviously impossible, and internet access is quite often free. Ergo, spamming will always make more money than it costs.
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You can, of course, license a patent in a way that it becomes identical to not being patented at all, anyone can use it in any way for free.
But deliberately patenting something to do that, on purpose, is just dumb. If you really want to do that, just write up a description of it and run it as an ad in a local newspaper.
Tada, instant unpatentablity by anyone else, for a hell of a lot cheaper than a patent.
I said the concept of 'public domain' applies purely to copyright law, not patent law. There is no such thing as the public domain in patent law.
Your SMTP server doesn't take external connections? What? How do you get email?
All the article said is that they kept a list of removed addresses, which I have show is correct, by getting spam to one
They obviously send to all their lists, and no one has ever tried to imply otherwise in the past 3 years or so.
You are, simply put, strawmanning.
This, BTW, isn't meant to imply that such a claim is invalid...spammers do classify email addresses, and if you are someone who opts out, you'll get marked as someone who reads spam. They know, at the least, that you don't have a spam filter set up, so it's worthwild to send to you. (Of course, they still normally send to all their list, but they could, for example, send to you first, in case they get cut off.)
Providing evidence of this that isn't 'anecdotal'...I have no idea how you can prove spam even exists except anecdotally. And, hey, you made the assertation that spam exists, you prove it does without using anecdotes.
They are not identical, but they are treated similiarly. You can, in fact, order someone to stop calling you, and you can sue them if they continue to do so.
And, BTW, I'm not talking about telemarketers being required to keep a do not call list, I'm talking about anyone. You can send certified mail to anyone and require them to stop calling you.
PS: you might own your phone, but you don't own the line (up to the little box attached to your house, eventhough it's on your property) or the number (it's just been "assigned" to you).
While you don't own the line, I don't see what that has to do with anything...it's not public property. It's akin to a mall and a shop...I lease a shop in the mall, I can't order people out of the mall. So? I can order them out of the shop.
And you don't even need to do that with patents! If you don't patent it, it is 'public domain', whatever that means for for patents, automatically.
The entire concept is absurd and idiotic. Spending thousands of dollars to patent it, and then attempting to un-patent it, using a process I'm not even sure exists short of issuing some sort of non-revokable free license to use it, when all you had to do was discuss it in public and then not patent it, for free, is crazy.
It's either a trick or the guy doesn't know anything about patents. Someone needs to email him and figure it out.
You submit to that box, that box handles outgoing mail. Very simple. It's not port 25, so ISPs don't block it.
Oh, and everyone assumes some sort of SMTP AUTH with the submission port, but pop-before-smtp works just fine with it too, if you want to set up an easy way to do it. Or if you have dyndns or a fairly static IP you can just whitelist yourself.
All you have to do is follow one of the unsubscribe links, one of the ones that go to a page you tye in your email address, not the ones that encode it. And then type an email address, one that gets no spam.
As I have access to mail server logs, I typed in a non-existence address, a random string of letters.
The address gets about 30 rejects a day.
This not only shows spammers not only ignore unsubscribe requests, but they completely ignore the fact said addresses don't even exist.
And, no, I'm not providing logs. This is an easy enough test to run, and I'm deliberately never exposing that address in any forum ever again as an experiment. It's not dictionary attackable, and it's all from that single unsubscribe.
I'm not entirely sure in what universe my home phone isn't my property. You used to rent phones from the phone company, but they don't that anymore. (And, legally, you can order trespassers off rented property anyway.)
It is illegal to call someone's telephone when they have asked you to stop. It is illegal to enter their property when they have asked you to stop. It is illegally to access their computer when they have asked you to stop. It's all basically the same thing, with differing laws to cover various specifics.
The problem is that telephones have no way to say 'NO SOLICITING', just like SMTP has no way to say 'NO UBE', in any way that's understandable before they enter your property and bother you, unlike the real world. And while you can put up a gate on telephones, just like the real world and things like FTP (password prompts), many people do not wish to purchase a gate, as that annoys legit visitors also.
And, now, of course, telephones do have a way to say 'NO SOLICITING'. It's perfectlly legal, as long as you own the telephone or rent the line.
If they're paying to use government built towers, then how on earth are they getting paid with your tax monies?
So what's your point? It's as legal as as 'NO SOLICITING' sign. It's someone saying 'I don't want to listen to a certain type of speech.'.
Now, the constitional issues arise simply from the blanket rules and exceptions. They should have a menu with a dozen types of speech, from policitial to charity to commerical to even personal (That gets you a star next to your name in the phone book, saying you do not want personal calls from people you do not know.), and you enable or disable whatever options you want.
And, of course, no requested calls are banned at all, just like if you put up a NO SOLICITING signs and then tell local Girl Scouts to come by your house because you want some cookies.
That's not to say they won't claim you opted in, but you didn't.
So, technically, the problem could that all businesses in SoCal are 100% ethical and hence there's no motive for anyone to form a BBB, because they wouldn't gain from it.
But, of course, that's just silly.
Anyone can just claim to have seen someone murder someone else. A witness isn't a proof someone commited murder, it's an allegation.
And? You claims person X commited a crime, the police check it out. If they did not, in fact, commit such a crime, and you were delibrately lying to the police, you can and will be charged with a crime.
And if a hundred people claim person X commited a crime, like would happen in spamming, well, they still check it out. But their job is a lot easier, no need to worry about the character of their witnesses.
Frankly, your argument is completely idiotic. It applies a million times better to computer crime, and people are caught for that all the time. With spam, you by defination have at least dozens of witnesses, and if spam was illegal would be less of it, and people knew that if they reported they would get the person who did it arrested, they'd be lining up to report it.
Trying to pretend that the courts won't accept electronic evidence is about the same as claiming they won't accept eyewitness evidence. They indeed do. And it's certain enough to track down, arrest, and more importantly search said spammer, and find physical evidence of the crime in his possession.
So you say we should make it a criminal offense and have our police chasing down spammers? I'm against spam, but I don't want our law enforcement tied up in spam investigation--I want them out there catching murderers, thiefs, and maybe even a terrorist now and then. The police are busy enough without having to deal with a flood of spam complaints. Heck, *I* don't even have time to investigate spam anymore--I just block it.
Spammers are thiefs. They are also usually computer criminals, having delibrately installed trojans on, at this point, millions of computers.
Most viruses, nowdays, are written by spammers to provide zombie machines to send spam from.
Hence the virus email is 'commerical', as in, it is used to make a profit, the profit being to send out spam.
However, calling UCE 'spam' is silly. No one cares if one person gets emailed with a single unsolicited business proposal, and there are times where that is appropriate. (For example, you wish to purchase an apparently unused domain name, so you email the domain's technical contact, despite there being no indication they wish to discuss any such offer.)
And, while there are problems when UCE is done in bulk, the problems are the bulk, not the fact it's UCE. If someone has a truly personal business issue to discuss, even unsolicited, people do not mind, anymore than you'd mind if someone knocked on your door and offered to buy your house, despite it not being for sale.
However, such individual unsolicited commerical emails are few and far between, and are being drowned out by unsolicited bulk commerical email, which is equivilent of people throwing flyers into your yard.
It all really does come down to consent, not content. Reasonable people can be expected to have consented to sometimes be contacted, personally, out of the blue, to talk about some legitimate business thing. No one consented to have tons of any sort of flyers dumped on them, though, commercial or otherwise. (Also note we need to start enforcing fraud laws here, too, to take care of fraudulent UCE which isn't UBE.)
Which is why I hate the whole 'UCE' thing. Commerical isn't the problem. And all restrictions on commercial are doomed to fail in the US. Restrict fraud, restrict trying to evade filters, and restrict bulk-without-consent.
I, of course, see no problem with this, and I don't understand why others do. That's how email is supposed to work.
Letting people send email willy-nilly from any IP in the universe is what got us into this mess. That must be changed, period.
It can be changed by RMX records, it can be changed by doing something that says 'email=no' in the rDNS records, it can be changed by everyone blacklisting *dhcp* and *dsl*, it can be changed by outbound port filtering, and it can be changed by requiring rDNS match HELO, the last three which have already started.
But it does have to change, and any change will result in people whining and complaining that's how they used to send email. The people running mail servers on cable modems and DSL have already started bitching because they're getting blocked.
Email need to be sent from server to server. And the server it's sent from needs to have some accountabilty to the domain the mail is sent from, and vis versa.
Using your defination, it's just as logical to claim you are a 'infrastructure providers'. I mean, you're a box, owned by a private party, connected to 'infrastructure', whatever the hell that is, which is a wire owned by a private party, exactly like mail servers are. I'm going to email you a virus, I hope you don't go filtering it out using software or anything.
And spam isn't a content issue, anyway, it is, and always has been, about consent. Filtering on content is a stopgap measure, and no one wants the state to pass any laws about content of email, mainly because that's unconstitutional in the US. And there's plenty of filtering that isn't based on content, like blacklists.
My mail server gets so many attempts to send mail to addresses that are not valid, have never been valid, and were never listed anywhere that it's not funny. Hundreds of spammers have the same list of ~40 completely made up addresses that have never responsed with anything but the 5xx invalid user code, whatever that is.
They've realized that since it costs nothing to send email, that it's not worth wasting time filtering out bad addresses. After all, there's always the chance that it's your IP that was blocked, and thus you can send to that user from another IP.
Then ask him if he wishes to do business with felons.
Seriously. Do you realize how easy it is to break into most cars? I've locked my keys in a car at my house and manufactured a slim jim in 20 minutes, out of crap I had laying around, and was in the car three minutes after that, despite never using one of them before. (The secret is that you're sliding something forward (I think it was forward.) with the slant, not trying to 'hook' something and pull it. Took me two and half minutes to figure that one out. Next time I read the directions.)
And while I've never tried to hotwire a car, I can't imagine it can be more than an order of magnitude harder. Stealing a car is easy, and 'Gone in 60 Seconds' isn't just the title of a movie.
The main thing that stops cars from being stolen is, basically, laws. Laws against car theft, laws making theft harder, and laws making the results harder to sell.
And, by and by, car theft is not a problem. Sure, cars are stolen, but you do not normally expect to come back and find your car stolen, or really consider it a likely possiblity.
Pretending we shouldn't have laws against car theft because, after all, we have keys, and Lo-Jack, and car alarms, is stupid.
Thus commiting multiple felonies in pretty much any location in the world, BTW.
Spam is unsolicted bulk email.
Most viruses and worms use email to spread. (Yes, there are exceptions, like MSBlaster and that SQL one.)
This email is unsolicted, obviously, no one asks for viruses to be emailed to them unless they're running an antivirus company.
This email is bulk, because it's identically sent out billions of times by various machines.
Ergo, most viruses are spread by spam, because they are spam.
And if someone kills someone, how can anyone prove he did it?
What kind of stupid argument is that? We have the courts for a reason.
And pretending we don't have evidence that a person is spamming is completely and utterly insane. Completely. There's no way to pretend the issue is uncertain. It's never been uncertain. Everyone knows exactly who's spamming, and if the government wants to find out all they have to do is seed spamtrap addresses and wait for them to get email.
And why would you have to go through any legal process? I don't have to sue someone if they steal my stuff, I walk down the police station and tell them, and they arrest the guy.
As for someone lying to the police...do you know what happens if I walk down the police station and tell them you stole my stereo, and you didn't? I don't either, and I don't really want to find out.
And how the hell much do you think it costs to make a spam run? And how much do you think it costs to make a spam run with stolen credit cards?
Trying to make the profit from spamming dip below 0 is obviously impossible, and internet access is quite often free. Ergo, spamming will always make more money than it costs.
It is, however, hypocritical. Not to mention it shows a fair lack of belief their side will prevail, unless of course they signed up and then sued.