The reason that I don't remember is that I couldn't listen to it. This was very early on in '96 or '97, and there still weren't any mp3 decoders for the Mac at the time. Thus, into the trash went the file (which surely would've come down via Hotline). Not too much later there were non-realtime decoders that could be used to convert mp3s into something easier to handle, like mp2. And eventually real mp3 players began to show up, and these files that were rapidly becoming popular finally became useful.
At least storage wasn't a problem back then, as I had probably a 2GB hard disk at the time. (Just moved my music from an 80GB drive to a 120GB drive, but then I'm mostly ripping to lossless codecs now)
What's needed is a prior art reference indicating that there are various ways of storing video, all more or less substitutes for one another, and another reference or references that deal with the important aspects of the Tivo functionality, and lastly a reason to combine them.
The novelty requirement, remember, is where someone already invented the same thing. The nonobviousness requirement is where no one already invented the same thing, but the pieces are sufficiently in place that to combine them is not worth any reward.
The canonical example of nonobviousness is where people had been making doorknobs out of metal, and someone realized that they could make the doorknobs out of clay. No one had ever done that before, so it was a novel invention, but it was an obvious invention which anyone might have done, and which didn't deserve a patent.
But you are right that we can't use hindsight; it has to have been obvious at the time.
Well, you forget that it also must be a nonobvious invention as well. A VCR that was novel, yet not really an improvement over the prior art, isn't worthy of a patent.
It describes using MPEG2 technology to replace the tape mechanism in a VCR.
And that's a fairly obvious thing to do, meaning that it's not patentable. Tivo may have done that first, but that's merely because it's long been impractical. Nowadays people are using all manner of codecs for this, which isn't nonobvious either.
Not in that it's unconstitutional in and of itself (though perhaps it does violate the Ohio Constitution) but rather because it's preempted by federal law.
17 USC 301 makes void any state law that is equivalent to any of the federally created copyrights. This Ohio statute sounds as though it pertains to duplication -- which is already covered in 17 USC 106, making it void, at least in regards to that portion of it.
Honestly, you'd really think that someone would've checked that sort of thing in advance.
Well, technically, the Macintosh begat the Lisa, but took considerably longer to be completed. There was a huge amount of cross-polinization between the two projects, but the Mac was the first UI-oriented project.
I think that Hiro would be born around 1970ish, putting the book at 2000, only because Hiro is an Army brat, and went to school with other Army kids all through high school. He wouldn't've been able to do that once his dad left the Army, so he must have been at least 18 sometime in the late '80s.
Probably Stephenson just didn't pay a huge amount of attention to this.
It's been a while since I've read Snow Crash, but I'm pretty sure that it takes place, well, basically now. Somewhere between 2000-2010 for sure, and I think it was '05.
I'm fairly sure there are some dates dropped in the book someplace, though.
As we don't live in a socialist utopia, of course anyone who produces, for want of a better word, intangiable products has the right to be able to make a living from them.
You still haven't supported your argument.
America was not a socialist utopia in 1790 either, but they didn't give copyrights to anyone other than Americans that wrote books or drew maps. Painters, musicians, sculptors, choreographers, so forth, were screwed. How could that possibly be, if your so far unfounded premise is correct?
It definitely can be argued that the artist's lifetime + 70 years (or whatever it stands at now) is way to long
Why is it too long? First you say artists have a right to make a living off their works, and now you're saying that it's not too much. Your statements so far seem to lack rhyme or reason.
I'm looking for you to back up your wild ass claims with some sort of overarching theory. It should explain WHY artists should have a right to make money from their works via copyright, why it might apply to some artists and not to others, why we would make some rights exclusive to the artist and not others, why we'd choose certain term lengths, etc.
Besides, I don't see this as the Copyright Wars. The RIAA and artists have the right to protect their livelihoods, just as I would have the right to go after anyone copying software that I wrote.
But should they have these rights? It's not as though they're self-evident. I'm willing to say that there may be a good reason to permit it, but that means there'll be other factors to consider that might weigh against such a right, and that in the final analysis we might want to limit the extent of the right.
Yeah, I also wondered about that. It seems like it's got to be renting British Lords, but given how few of them there are compared to the number of people celebrating Christmas, I'd expect the price to be much higher.
No, there is protection for trade secrets, just not how you think.
Trade secret law really isn't about the protection of the secret, per se. It is a branch of unfair competition law. It's designed to prevent corporate espionage, because you can get in trouble not for discovering the secret, but for HOW you discover the secret.
Reverse engineering or independent creation are fine.
Sneaking in in the middle of the night and stealing the plans from the competitor is not.
For example, in the Tick comics, the Caped Wonder disguises himself as Clark Oppenheimer, thanks to his glasses. At one point, after the Tick breaks them, Clark has to curl his fingers around on his face (like the glasses frame) to preserve his secret identity.
True, but I don't see any facts as to whether it was coming straight from other countries, or whether there was a US-based intermediary importing and reselling domestically. The EFF response might've been useful -- had/. linked to it, since I don't have time to go looking for it.
Yeah, but that was importation of products that had been made in the US by the US rightsholder, exported abroad, then reimported back into the US again.
It wasn't a win for importation generally.
IIRC there's a concurrence that makes this a little more clear.
spam was illegal before this, it was just illegal under various trespass laws
Only if it was in fact trespass. Trespass is more or less an unauthorized crossing onto someone else's property.
If it is authorized then, it's not trespass.
Authorization can be express or implied. It might also be presumed to be implied in the absence of express language to the contrary.
For example, there is a presumed implied authorization for people to come up to your door and try to sell you stuff, at least to some degree. You'd have a hard time suing door to door solicitors for trespass.
But if you revoke that authorization, by actually giving them notice they're not authorized anymore (e.g. 'get the hell out of here') or constructively giving them notice (e.g. placing a 'no solicitors' sign on the gate so that it's reasonable for us to expect solicitors to be aware of it, even if they might happen not to be), then you could turn it back into trespass.
If that's how things work with your front door, why would it not be how things work with your mailbox, your telephone, or your email account?
By having these things, you're presumed to be allowing people to use them to communicate with you. You can always rebut that presumption with the slightest effort.
Providing it in the mail addess has been done for years, or have you never seen mail addresses with 'NOSPAM' in them. It didn't work.
You don't understand. I think it works fine as a form of notice, since either spammers will see it there and it becomes actual notice, or will have to have tools remove it for them (since the address doesn't work otherwise) in which case they have constructive notice, I'm sure.
I didn't say it was a magical talisman that would get rid of spammers. Anyone can ignore a 'no solicitors' sign as well.
The trick is that if they proceed despite the notice -- THEN I agree that there should be a cause of action against them, perhaps for something like trespass, or some other anti spam law.
As for providing it in the protocol, that won't work for half a dozen reasons, the last of which is that mail clients do not connect to your server, they connect to other servers which pass the mail on, and then don't know if it's spam or not, so don't know to stop sending it when they get the 'I do not accept spam.'
Well I never pretended to know how email works. I had just hoped that something could be done at that level.
Well, you can worry about thaty all you want, but I fail to see how I cannot use prior restraint against someone contacting me. That's something the government can't do. The internet is not government property.
The government's facilitation and involvement in it, such as via 'do not spam list' is where I see posible issues of prior restraint.
the 'reasonable assumption' someone wants spam? And complaining that people might want spam is idiotic. I'm sorry, it really is. If they wnated spam, they'd have to go with some email provider that promised not to block or filter it, and, guess what? There aren't any. It's too expensive to provide a mailbox big enough to handle spam.
Funny. I have three mail accounts and they're big enough to handle spam intake. They are of course finite in size, but then so are all mail accounts, and there always is some degree of pruning that has to be done.
I bet lots of people's accounts are too small to keep copies of mailing lists for long periods of time either, and they must've wanted those if they signed up for 'em.
Anyway, the values of the First Amendment are to favor speech. Even unpopular speech. We have to assume that, in the absence of anything else, people want to communicate and be communicated with.
It is highly paternalistic to assume that people should be protected from lawful advertisements. (unlawful, that is to say basically, deceptive spam isn't the same thing though) Commercial speech is often protected by the First
I'd like to see some basis for your assumption that a company owning the copyright to something prevents people from buying or importing from another country.
The relevant laws are 17 USC 106 (the right to distribute), 109 (first sale), and 602 (importation).
The relevant case is Quality King v. Lanza Research, 523 US 135 (1998).
"[The prohibition] encompasses copies that are not subject to the first sale doctrine-e.g., copies that are lawfully made under the law of another country...."
The importation is direct infringement -- the linking is likely contributory infringement, as there is an underlying direct infringement, probably constructive knowledge of infringement, and material contribution to the infringement.
Keep in mind that these are not knockoffs or illegal versions, they are 100% legit for their country of origin.
Of course -- 602 doesn't _just_ apply to piratical copies though; it applies to copies that were lawfully made, just not lawfully made under US law. If Miramax owns the rights under US law, only it can lawfully make, or cause to be made, copies. The fact that it was lawfully made in DVDistan is basically irrelevant.
The companies have no right whatsoever to restrict buyers from purchasing foreign versions, or selling those foreign versions in North America. Sending out a C&D is just legalspeak to frighten people off.
No, they've got this right. It's not often used, and it's not well known, but they have got it. It's pretty stupid though, I admit.
Ah! But copyright is a strict liability statute. Intent rarely matters at all. If you infringe, even innocently, you're still infringing. It might lessen damages, or help in a fair use defense, but it generally doesn't matter what you intended.
The relevant laws are 17 USC 106 (the right to distribute), 109 (first sale), and 602 (importation).
The relevant case is Quality King v. Lanza Research, 523 US 135 (1998).
"[The prohibition] encompasses copies that are not subject to the first sale doctrine-e.g., copies that are lawfully made under the law of another country...."
Why do we have to reduce it to all businesses that are using spam?
Well, that's easy enough. You said: How many businesses do you think are in the United States? How many in the world? How much time does it take to opt-out from all of their mailing lists?
I said that you cannot count all of those businesses. Only those that are in fact using spam pose a problem in the first place! There's no need to opt out of nonexistant spam. Thus the number of businesses overall is irrelevant; what's relevant is the number of businesses using spam.
Spam, until this law was passed, was illegal.
Well, I cannot speak for the UK, not knowing about their laws. But in the US at least, things aren't illegal until they're made illegal. Some things are difficult to make illegal. I suspect that spam is one of these.
As for giving notice, with a per domain opt out list...that will never happen, at least not in the next ten years.
Well, 1) just to be clear, the sort of opt-out list I'm talking about is one where you provide constructive notice to the world. Provided it's prominent enough that spammers are reasonably likely to see it in the course of their actions (which to me implies that it'll be in the email address itself, or perhaps in the mail protocols) it's sufficient. 2) It is possible that there does not need to be a law permitting such opt out, though the government could perhaps help it along. Even if done privately, so long as the notice is prominent enough, I think it ought to be enough. Actual notice -- i.e. notice a specific spammer is in fact aware of as opposed to having knowledge imputed to him, is also good of course.
At least, that's assuming that there are no issues of prior restraint, which I'm growing a little bit worried about.
Basically, the concept of a 'no solicitors' sign on the gate to your door is long-established, widely honored, and usually can be backed up through means such as suits or prosecution for trespassing. I'm merely advocating an equivalent.
But do note that in the absence of such a sign, people are deemed to have consented to solicitation at least to some degree. I would argue that the same applies for email -- if you've got it, it's up to you to tell people not to send you ads. This protects spammers First Amendment rights (and they have them, at least for _some_ spam), as well as those of people who want to recieve spam and who shouldn't be burdened to have to explicitly invite communication that they wouldn't know existed if it was banned by default.
That is, more speech is generally better than less speech, even if we don't like some or even most of what's spoken. A restraint on speech should be the product of long and serious thought and absolutely no more expansive than absolutely necessary, if we're to have any restriction at all.
Plus of course there's always other private solutions, such as filtering or deleting spam, which is not terribly burdensome, being on par with having to sort snail mail so as to throw out the junk mail, or hang up on telemarketers, or tell door-to-door solicitors to go to hell.
Except you forget to a) reduce it to just the businesses that are using spam, b) you forget that constructive notice may be viable as a way of opting out of ALL legitimate spam with a single act.
There are innumerable door-to-door solicitors out there too, but you only need to put up one 'no solicitors' sign to get rid of them, or have a good cause of action for trespassing against any that dare ignore it. Provided of course that the sign was reasonably readable to them; it can't just be in your closet.
I think it's pretty easy, once the fraudulent spammers are removed from the equation. You don't need to opt out of fraudulent spam -- it's already wrongful.
Anti-spam laws just have to do with the honest spammers. They're the only ones who are newly affected.
Well, what I meant was that some weapons might make space fighters rather useless. If there's a wave of KKVs that the Battlestar can't dodge, and which are going so fast that they'd only be in fighter range for a few seconds or minutes (that is, within the area reachable by fighters; not necessarily engagable by comparatively slow-moving thinly-spread fighters), that's bad. And if that's the threat, and it's a realistic sort of weapon to use in space, then you're really going to want to have a different means of defending yourself.
Basically I'm trying to point out that space combat is not going to be very much like existing air or naval combat at all, unless laws of physics are bent so that things like fighters are actually useful.
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The reason that I don't remember is that I couldn't listen to it. This was very early on in '96 or '97, and there still weren't any mp3 decoders for the Mac at the time. Thus, into the trash went the file (which surely would've come down via Hotline). Not too much later there were non-realtime decoders that could be used to convert mp3s into something easier to handle, like mp2. And eventually real mp3 players began to show up, and these files that were rapidly becoming popular finally became useful.
At least storage wasn't a problem back then, as I had probably a 2GB hard disk at the time. (Just moved my music from an 80GB drive to a 120GB drive, but then I'm mostly ripping to lossless codecs now)
It doesn't have to be MPEG 2.
What's needed is a prior art reference indicating that there are various ways of storing video, all more or less substitutes for one another, and another reference or references that deal with the important aspects of the Tivo functionality, and lastly a reason to combine them.
The novelty requirement, remember, is where someone already invented the same thing. The nonobviousness requirement is where no one already invented the same thing, but the pieces are sufficiently in place that to combine them is not worth any reward.
The canonical example of nonobviousness is where people had been making doorknobs out of metal, and someone realized that they could make the doorknobs out of clay. No one had ever done that before, so it was a novel invention, but it was an obvious invention which anyone might have done, and which didn't deserve a patent.
But you are right that we can't use hindsight; it has to have been obvious at the time.
Well, you forget that it also must be a nonobvious invention as well. A VCR that was novel, yet not really an improvement over the prior art, isn't worthy of a patent.
It describes using MPEG2 technology to replace the tape mechanism in a VCR.
And that's a fairly obvious thing to do, meaning that it's not patentable. Tivo may have done that first, but that's merely because it's long been impractical. Nowadays people are using all manner of codecs for this, which isn't nonobvious either.
Not in that it's unconstitutional in and of itself (though perhaps it does violate the Ohio Constitution) but rather because it's preempted by federal law.
17 USC 301 makes void any state law that is equivalent to any of the federally created copyrights. This Ohio statute sounds as though it pertains to duplication -- which is already covered in 17 USC 106, making it void, at least in regards to that portion of it.
Honestly, you'd really think that someone would've checked that sort of thing in advance.
Well, technically, the Macintosh begat the Lisa, but took considerably longer to be completed. There was a huge amount of cross-polinization between the two projects, but the Mac was the first UI-oriented project.
I think that Hiro would be born around 1970ish, putting the book at 2000, only because Hiro is an Army brat, and went to school with other Army kids all through high school. He wouldn't've been able to do that once his dad left the Army, so he must have been at least 18 sometime in the late '80s.
Probably Stephenson just didn't pay a huge amount of attention to this.
Still, excellent analysis.
It's been a while since I've read Snow Crash, but I'm pretty sure that it takes place, well, basically now. Somewhere between 2000-2010 for sure, and I think it was '05.
I'm fairly sure there are some dates dropped in the book someplace, though.
As we don't live in a socialist utopia, of course anyone who produces, for want of a better word, intangiable products has the right to be able to make a living from them.
You still haven't supported your argument.
America was not a socialist utopia in 1790 either, but they didn't give copyrights to anyone other than Americans that wrote books or drew maps. Painters, musicians, sculptors, choreographers, so forth, were screwed. How could that possibly be, if your so far unfounded premise is correct?
It definitely can be argued that the artist's lifetime + 70 years (or whatever it stands at now) is way to long
Why is it too long? First you say artists have a right to make a living off their works, and now you're saying that it's not too much. Your statements so far seem to lack rhyme or reason.
I'm looking for you to back up your wild ass claims with some sort of overarching theory. It should explain WHY artists should have a right to make money from their works via copyright, why it might apply to some artists and not to others, why we would make some rights exclusive to the artist and not others, why we'd choose certain term lengths, etc.
Besides, I don't see this as the Copyright Wars. The RIAA and artists have the right to protect their livelihoods, just as I would have the right to go after anyone copying software that I wrote.
But should they have these rights? It's not as though they're self-evident. I'm willing to say that there may be a good reason to permit it, but that means there'll be other factors to consider that might weigh against such a right, and that in the final analysis we might want to limit the extent of the right.
Yeah, I also wondered about that. It seems like it's got to be renting British Lords, but given how few of them there are compared to the number of people celebrating Christmas, I'd expect the price to be much higher.
No, there is protection for trade secrets, just not how you think.
Trade secret law really isn't about the protection of the secret, per se. It is a branch of unfair competition law. It's designed to prevent corporate espionage, because you can get in trouble not for discovering the secret, but for HOW you discover the secret.
Reverse engineering or independent creation are fine.
Sneaking in in the middle of the night and stealing the plans from the competitor is not.
I didn't say copying, I said infringing.
There are many ways to infringe, and copying is just one of them. Importation can be infringement too.
For example, in the Tick comics, the Caped Wonder disguises himself as Clark Oppenheimer, thanks to his glasses. At one point, after the Tick breaks them, Clark has to curl his fingers around on his face (like the glasses frame) to preserve his secret identity.
True, but I don't see any facts as to whether it was coming straight from other countries, or whether there was a US-based intermediary importing and reselling domestically. The EFF response might've been useful -- had /. linked to it, since I don't have time to go looking for it.
Good catch though.
Yeah, but that was importation of products that had been made in the US by the US rightsholder, exported abroad, then reimported back into the US again.
It wasn't a win for importation generally.
IIRC there's a concurrence that makes this a little more clear.
spam was illegal before this, it was just illegal under various trespass laws
Only if it was in fact trespass. Trespass is more or less an unauthorized crossing onto someone else's property.
If it is authorized then, it's not trespass.
Authorization can be express or implied. It might also be presumed to be implied in the absence of express language to the contrary.
For example, there is a presumed implied authorization for people to come up to your door and try to sell you stuff, at least to some degree. You'd have a hard time suing door to door solicitors for trespass.
But if you revoke that authorization, by actually giving them notice they're not authorized anymore (e.g. 'get the hell out of here') or constructively giving them notice (e.g. placing a 'no solicitors' sign on the gate so that it's reasonable for us to expect solicitors to be aware of it, even if they might happen not to be), then you could turn it back into trespass.
If that's how things work with your front door, why would it not be how things work with your mailbox, your telephone, or your email account?
By having these things, you're presumed to be allowing people to use them to communicate with you. You can always rebut that presumption with the slightest effort.
Providing it in the mail addess has been done for years, or have you never seen mail addresses with 'NOSPAM' in them. It didn't work.
You don't understand. I think it works fine as a form of notice, since either spammers will see it there and it becomes actual notice, or will have to have tools remove it for them (since the address doesn't work otherwise) in which case they have constructive notice, I'm sure.
I didn't say it was a magical talisman that would get rid of spammers. Anyone can ignore a 'no solicitors' sign as well.
The trick is that if they proceed despite the notice -- THEN I agree that there should be a cause of action against them, perhaps for something like trespass, or some other anti spam law.
As for providing it in the protocol, that won't work for half a dozen reasons, the last of which is that mail clients do not connect to your server, they connect to other servers which pass the mail on, and then don't know if it's spam or not, so don't know to stop sending it when they get the 'I do not accept spam.'
Well I never pretended to know how email works. I had just hoped that something could be done at that level.
Well, you can worry about thaty all you want, but I fail to see how I cannot use prior restraint against someone contacting me. That's something the government can't do. The internet is not government property.
The government's facilitation and involvement in it, such as via 'do not spam list' is where I see posible issues of prior restraint.
the 'reasonable assumption' someone wants spam? And complaining that people might want spam is idiotic. I'm sorry, it really is. If they wnated spam, they'd have to go with some email provider that promised not to block or filter it, and, guess what? There aren't any. It's too expensive to provide a mailbox big enough to handle spam.
Funny. I have three mail accounts and they're big enough to handle spam intake. They are of course finite in size, but then so are all mail accounts, and there always is some degree of pruning that has to be done.
I bet lots of people's accounts are too small to keep copies of mailing lists for long periods of time either, and they must've wanted those if they signed up for 'em.
Anyway, the values of the First Amendment are to favor speech. Even unpopular speech. We have to assume that, in the absence of anything else, people want to communicate and be communicated with.
It is highly paternalistic to assume that people should be protected from lawful advertisements. (unlawful, that is to say basically, deceptive spam isn't the same thing though) Commercial speech is often protected by the First
I'd like to see some basis for your assumption that a company owning the copyright to something prevents people from buying or importing from another country.
The relevant laws are 17 USC 106 (the right to distribute), 109 (first sale), and 602 (importation).
The relevant case is Quality King v. Lanza Research, 523 US 135 (1998).
"[The prohibition] encompasses copies that are not subject to the first sale doctrine-e.g., copies that are lawfully made under the law of another country...."
The importation is direct infringement -- the linking is likely contributory infringement, as there is an underlying direct infringement, probably constructive knowledge of infringement, and material contribution to the infringement.
Keep in mind that these are not knockoffs or illegal versions, they are 100% legit for their country of origin.
Of course -- 602 doesn't _just_ apply to piratical copies though; it applies to copies that were lawfully made, just not lawfully made under US law. If Miramax owns the rights under US law, only it can lawfully make, or cause to be made, copies. The fact that it was lawfully made in DVDistan is basically irrelevant.
The companies have no right whatsoever to restrict buyers from purchasing foreign versions, or selling those foreign versions in North America. Sending out a C&D is just legalspeak to frighten people off.
No, they've got this right. It's not often used, and it's not well known, but they have got it. It's pretty stupid though, I admit.
Ah! But copyright is a strict liability statute. Intent rarely matters at all. If you infringe, even innocently, you're still infringing. It might lessen damages, or help in a fair use defense, but it generally doesn't matter what you intended.
The relevant laws are 17 USC 106 (the right to distribute), 109 (first sale), and 602 (importation).
The relevant case is Quality King v. Lanza Research, 523 US 135 (1998).
"[The prohibition] encompasses copies that are not subject to the first sale doctrine-e.g., copies that are lawfully made under the law of another country...."
Why do we have to reduce it to all businesses that are using spam?
Well, that's easy enough. You said: How many businesses do you think are in the United States? How many in the world? How much time does it take to opt-out from all of their mailing lists?
I said that you cannot count all of those businesses. Only those that are in fact using spam pose a problem in the first place! There's no need to opt out of nonexistant spam. Thus the number of businesses overall is irrelevant; what's relevant is the number of businesses using spam.
Spam, until this law was passed, was illegal.
Well, I cannot speak for the UK, not knowing about their laws. But in the US at least, things aren't illegal until they're made illegal. Some things are difficult to make illegal. I suspect that spam is one of these.
As for giving notice, with a per domain opt out list...that will never happen, at least not in the next ten years.
Well, 1) just to be clear, the sort of opt-out list I'm talking about is one where you provide constructive notice to the world. Provided it's prominent enough that spammers are reasonably likely to see it in the course of their actions (which to me implies that it'll be in the email address itself, or perhaps in the mail protocols) it's sufficient. 2) It is possible that there does not need to be a law permitting such opt out, though the government could perhaps help it along. Even if done privately, so long as the notice is prominent enough, I think it ought to be enough. Actual notice -- i.e. notice a specific spammer is in fact aware of as opposed to having knowledge imputed to him, is also good of course.
At least, that's assuming that there are no issues of prior restraint, which I'm growing a little bit worried about.
Basically, the concept of a 'no solicitors' sign on the gate to your door is long-established, widely honored, and usually can be backed up through means such as suits or prosecution for trespassing. I'm merely advocating an equivalent.
But do note that in the absence of such a sign, people are deemed to have consented to solicitation at least to some degree. I would argue that the same applies for email -- if you've got it, it's up to you to tell people not to send you ads. This protects spammers First Amendment rights (and they have them, at least for _some_ spam), as well as those of people who want to recieve spam and who shouldn't be burdened to have to explicitly invite communication that they wouldn't know existed if it was banned by default.
That is, more speech is generally better than less speech, even if we don't like some or even most of what's spoken. A restraint on speech should be the product of long and serious thought and absolutely no more expansive than absolutely necessary, if we're to have any restriction at all.
Plus of course there's always other private solutions, such as filtering or deleting spam, which is not terribly burdensome, being on par with having to sort snail mail so as to throw out the junk mail, or hang up on telemarketers, or tell door-to-door solicitors to go to hell.
That seems okay, I guess, but what's wrong with a good old-fashioned game of Pokethulhu?
Except you forget to a) reduce it to just the businesses that are using spam, b) you forget that constructive notice may be viable as a way of opting out of ALL legitimate spam with a single act.
There are innumerable door-to-door solicitors out there too, but you only need to put up one 'no solicitors' sign to get rid of them, or have a good cause of action for trespassing against any that dare ignore it. Provided of course that the sign was reasonably readable to them; it can't just be in your closet.
I think it's pretty easy, once the fraudulent spammers are removed from the equation. You don't need to opt out of fraudulent spam -- it's already wrongful.
Anti-spam laws just have to do with the honest spammers. They're the only ones who are newly affected.
Well, what I meant was that some weapons might make space fighters rather useless. If there's a wave of KKVs that the Battlestar can't dodge, and which are going so fast that they'd only be in fighter range for a few seconds or minutes (that is, within the area reachable by fighters; not necessarily engagable by comparatively slow-moving thinly-spread fighters), that's bad. And if that's the threat, and it's a realistic sort of weapon to use in space, then you're really going to want to have a different means of defending yourself.
Basically I'm trying to point out that space combat is not going to be very much like existing air or naval combat at all, unless laws of physics are bent so that things like fighters are actually useful.