Public domain software doesn't force you to do a damn thing.
The GPL does.
The QingPL doesn't. Unless you count forcing you to release derivitive works under the QingPL, but really that's forcing you not to do something (sue people), not forcing you to do something.
I don't think that it is the TV station's responsibity if someone else illegally retransmitts their signal
Right, it's the responsibilty of the satellite companies, which are the ones illegally retransmitting the signal.
Local stations are not complaining that their signals are being illegally rebroadcast, but that other affiliate station's signals are availible in their coverage area.
I assume the lawsuit is between the network (NBC, CBS), which own the copyright, at least in part, and the satellite company, which is copying and distributing without permission from the copyright holder. If so, the rest of the details are just tricks by the satellite company to try to get you away from the main issue. Copyright is being infringed, it is not fair use, and there is no law granting a statutory license.
What's illegal is for "Bristol Herald Courier" (my local newspaper) to tell the stores that they can't carry USA Today, New York Times, etc.
Echostar is doing more than just distribution. They are also copying.
They aren't wanting to do it for free, they're wanting to sell the national feeds to anyone who wants them.
Right. So what echostar is doing is not only copyright infringement, it's copyright infringement for commercial purposes. There goes a huge part of the fair use argument.
Local channels aren't available on DSS where I live, so I have to use an antenna to receive the network feeds.
I don't really understand why someone would want to pay installation fees and monthly fees to receive someone they could get for just installation fees, but I guess I'm spoiled with my perfect reception, living only 35 miles from a major city.
Very few T.V. stations mind if their signals are retransmitted outside their service area because more viewers == greater ad revinue.
Local T.V. stations don't own the copyright on all of their content. Are you suggesting that this law somehow bans the copyright holder of a local television show from syndication?
Unlike newspaper distributors, satellite companies are doing more than just distribution. Satellite companies are copying and distributing. Copyright law happens to allow them to do that in certain situations, but not in other situations.
Um, this isn't about sending shows over the internet.
Scan in a newspaper and broadcast it by satellite to the world?
The same tactic in newspapers would be if there was a law stating that it was illegal to sell a newspaper subscription to someone who didn't live in the normal newspaper distribution and newspapers had to ensure that people accessing their websites also lived in the local area of the newspaper.
No, it's completely different. First sale allows people to distribute legally prepared copies of newspapers. The satellite companies are not distributing legally prepared copies. They are receiving, copying and redistributing.
Let me go back to your original point.
Um, this isn't about sending shows over the internet.
Why is it any different to send shows over satellite than it is to send them over the internet?
I understand the desperation that's felt by someone with cancer, but really, what kind of person is going to believe that the miracle cure for cancer is sitting on some shady website and not in the hospitals?
The kind of person who is dying of cancer. And has already been to hospitals, which told him/her that there's nothing they can do.
Except that it'll fail horribly, just like online ads, spyware and other malware.
I completely disagree. Consider Google. They have about 2000 machines. Let's say those machines cost $500/each, amortised over a useful life of 5 years. So thats $100 x 2000 = $200,000/year. Now say google was given the opportunity to replace those 2000 computers with 10,000 running this software. They could pay each person $20/year and now they would have a much more reliable system with much easier expandibility. As Google, I'd certainly consider doing it, at least for half of the machinepower. And as a consumer, I'd definately consider doing it.
But they're not paying money you say? I guarantee you if the demand for computing power exceeds the supply they can get for free they'll start paying. This is only a test run. You find out how many people are comfortable with the idea. You're not going to find many paying customers for an untested idea such as this one, certainly not big customers like google. But if you offer it for free, to smaller clients, after testing it on your own a bit, now you're starting to get to the point where you're ready to roll it out full swing. Once you roll it out full swing, and the revenues start coming in, then you can afford to start paying the people supplying the machine power. And it will snowball from there.
I only wish I had the money and/or time and/or skill to do this myself. I've thought of doing this a couple years ago, and I'm sure many others have as well. It will work, eventually, the only question is who will do it. Actually that's not much of a question. Surely it will be one of the big players, like Microsoft or AOL. But they'll likely buy out a smaller company first.
Watching ads is not a service, nor is it required quid pro quo for watching television. I am free to go into the other room and refuse to watch the advertisements, and I still get the service of television.
If use of CPU and storage space is required quid pro quo for use of the Kazaa network, you have a much different situation from television advertisement. If it's voluntary, a gift in exchange for a gift, with no requirements, then it's not barter. But in that case, I also believe it will not work, in the end (when others catch on, for instance).
So Brilliant Digital is providing me with a service, the Kazaa network, in return for another service, use of my computer's storage and spare CPU cycles... First of all, it's a great idea. But I wonder whether or not users of this service will be legally required to pay taxes on their barter income, and more importantly, whether Brilliant will have to mail out 10,000,000 1099-Bs (along with collecting 10,000,000 social security numbers).
The ninth ammendment merely says that fair use might be a right. The first and tenth, combined with the copyright clause, say that fair use is a right. None of them, incidently, say that distribution of devices which allow fair use is a right, or that perfect lossless digital copying is a right.
The First and Tenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution provide for things that were not originally in the Constitution. Hence, the word amendment [dictionary.com].
Are you suggesting that free speech is not a constitutional right?
Free Speech does not cover freely distributing copyrighted works without cost, in mass quantities.
Nor does fair use.
It is something new that needs to laws to govern its ramifications. It is just a matter of if one industry is going to be given the power to regulate others (hardware manufacturers etc.).
I'm sorry, I really don't understand what you're getting at...
As mentioned in the article, the doctrine of fair use came about originally through the courts, and only later was codified in U.S. law. If fair use were only a defense to infringement as defined by the law, and not a constitutional right, then we would expect the reverse: that fair use would have been created first by Congress, and only later recognized by the courts. But this is not what happened.
The fair use provisions of the 1976 copyright law are based on supreme court rulings made before 1976. Fair use is a constitutional right due to both the first ammendment and the tenth ammendment (when you consider that congress has the power only to pass copyright law in order "To promote the progress of science and useful arts"). An important supreme court case on this issue, Eldred v. Ashcroft, is coming up. This case should directly answer the question of whether or not congress has the power to enact copyright law which does not promote the progress of science as well as whether or not copyright law is "categorically immune from challenge under the First Amendment", but the current precedent is that they do not, and they are not.
I figured out a solution: I'm voting for Congressional representatives that recognize junk e-mail, fax, etc. as theft and pass legislation against it. Then they will spend tax dollars, including your, prosecuting those who violate the law. Your taxes just aren't so precious that the government should turn a blind eye to spam.
Unfortunately your "solution" will not succeed, and I will fight against it.
So what? The mail server is inside my house. I don't want random people entering my house physically or electronically.
Then don't let random people enter your house electronically! How hard is that? It's really simple. Block incoming connections.
And my mail server is my private property. This is an established legal fact and one recognized by numerous state laws and court cases. If you want to read, then search for "trespass to chattels" and learn about it. AOL has won lawsuits against several spammers based on that legal principle.
So why do we need a new law? Could it be because "trespass to chattels" requires intentional infliction of harm?
Protecting people from spammers who will, given enough time, consume all available bandwidth and storage on the net, is not protecting people from themselves.
Hyperbole.
It's protecting them against those who would exploit weaknesses in the SMTP protocol to force their almost universally unwanted e-mail on others. You also ignore the fact that 99%+ of the people on the net don't run their own mail servers.
Therefore 99%+ of the people on the net do not have their personal property invaded, even electronically, by your definition.
ISPs are choking under the onslaught of spam.
Nonsense.
They are having to pay for more hardware, bandwidth, and personnel to deal with the spam. Those costs are all passed on to all of their subscribers. And that's a tax, too. Just not one imposed by the government.
99.9999% of the costs of spam are the costs of dealing with the legal issues surrounding it. Besides, I don't have a problem with "taxes" that are optional payments for a service. If email costs so much money, then ISPs should start charging to accept email. I would have no problem with that.
If you can't afford the fraction of a cent that it would cost out of your taxes to prosecute spammers, then you certainly can't afford to pay Verio a premium every month to cover their spam-associated costs.
A technical solution to spam would be 10,000,000 times cheaper than a legal solution. If the cost of the solution is cheaper than the cost of not solving the problem, then it will happen.
Normal people need to provide e-mail addresses to friends, colleagues, businesses, and potential employers. They don't know the addresses of everyone that might write to them (not spam them) and can't afford the time to create filters that only let a predefined list of people reach them. Nor do they want to risk bouncing important e-mails. It's more important to pass legislation that protects the vast majority of the public than it is to let you hoarde your pennies and not pay taxes.
I don't receive any spam on MSN messenger, yet I give my MSN messenger address out freely to friends, colleagues, businesses, and potential employers. Seems to me that what we need is a better protocol, not better laws. The laws aren't going to change anything anyway: if you don't know the identity of the sender, you can't exactly sue him/her, can you?
If you want to argue there's an implict authorization when connecting to an open port, yes, there is, just like there is to walk up to a door and knock on it. But I stuck a sign on the door that said 'come in if you're not selling something', and given my own terms for accessing that computer on that port, and I've clearly printed them out where everyone who connects can see them.
You did not stick a sign on the door that said "come in if you're not selling something". That's not how the SMTP protocol works.
It's not my fault if your software decided to not inform you of these condition. You're in charge of your computer, you shouldn't be using software that hides the fact I'm denying you permission to enter. Your problem, not mine.
I guess you support click-through licenses as well. Actually, click-through licenses that you don't even have to click on, merely that some computer somewhere has the capibility of possibly showing to you.
What you basically claim is there is no way to tell someone they're illegally in a computer system, and that is clearly legally nonsensical. People have to make a reasonable effort to check if they're trespassing or not. You can't walk up to a door past a sign telling you not to enter and then claim you 'weren't looking that way'.
No, I claim there is no way to tell someone using the SMTP protocol that they're illegally sending email. Reading the HELO line is not reasonable. No one does that.
It's certainly not an excuse to trespass because you hired a guide who stood in front of the sign so you couldn't see it. Your software is an agent of you, and what it does on your command, you do.
By the same token so is your software, so when your software accepts the email I guess you have accepted it. But that's not what I'm arguing. I'm saying the SMTP protocol is well defined, and it is expected that computers will be the ones connecting, and it's expected that unacceptable emails will be rejected.
The mere fact you continued communications with me shows you got the message.
No, it shows that my computer got the message. Actually, it doesn't even show that. It shows that my computer received the first 4 characters of the message.
And that makes it trespassing, plain and simple, or the computer equivilent, often referred to as 'hacking'.
So you agree that we don't need any new laws, then?
Explain to me how it's not trespassing to do the same thing to a mail server.
Well, first of all, it's not "trespassing" because nothing has physically entered your property. Besides, "trespassing" is illegal. We don't need to pass any new laws for that.
But I assume you want to know why it's not something equally illegal. That's because your "sign" is not in a place where it is easily read by the "trespasser". If you put a "No solicitors" sign on your back door in 1 inch high type, that doesn't allow you to arrest solicitors who come to your front door and have no reasonable expectation of seeing the sign.
So I'm supposed to know any and all telephone numbers from which anyone I may wish to talk with may call from? How am I supposed to know whether the "Unknown Caller" is a friend in trouble or a telemarketer?
That's not my problem. It's your problem. By making a law against it you force me to pay my tax money to solve your problem? Sorry, I'm not willing to do that. Figure out your own solution.
Absolutely untrue. My e-mail address is is private property like my home address. It is not like a public store. When I provide the address of my home, it does not mean that anyone is welcome to step inside, uninvited, to sell something to me.
No, but it does mean that anyone is welcome to come up to your front porch and knock on your door. If they're selling something, and you don't want it, you can't sue them for trespassing, even though they are standing on your property.
No, what I am asking for is legislation that forces everyone's e-mail address to be treated the way that I described. Besides, you don't need to be a mind reader to figure out that people don't want you stealing their time, bandwidth, and storage for your ads.
I disagree. I think you do.
Nor did I. But the addresses are forged, nonetheless, making it impossible for me to block mail from a given spammer. If Investigations2002@yahoo.com sends me spam and I block it that sender, the same low-life will send something else "from" michelle92348@aol.com next time.
I have no problem with an opt out system where you tell the spammer to stop emailing you, and they are required by law to comply. But you're talking about having an opt-in only system, and I'm saying that that opt-in is already available to you. Simply don't accept emails from those people you haven't opted to receive email from.
That's like arguing that you weren't trespassing because the door opened when you turned the knob.
No. There is a key difference. Without a door, private property is still private property. The purpose of a door is to keep people out. The purpose of an email server, on the other hand, is to let people in. There is a well established protocol, and the basis of that protocol is that anyone can email anyone else for any reason without permission. The well established protocol for private property is that you must knock on the door, and then only enter if you have permission.
The bottom line is that I don't want my tax money spent protecting you from yourself. If you want random pseudonymous people putting arbitrary files on your machine, be my guest, but don't cry to me when they put on your machine files which you don't want.
That's absurdly twisted logic. That's like saying that simply having a cell phone means that you are volunteering to receive calls at your expense from anyone that wants to sell you something.
No, it like saying that by looking at your caller ID and answering the phone you are volunteering to receive calls at your expense from anyone that wants to sell you something.
My having an e-mail address is not an invitation for random people to contact me.
Your setting up a server to accept emails from random email addresses is... It's no different from a store owner suing people for trespassing just because they offer to sell him something. The store owner can tell that person to leave, and if the person doesn't leave, then it's trespassing, but the store owner is implicitly allowing anyone to enter the store. S/he can explicitly revoke that implicit permission, but not retroactively.
It is so that people and companies can reply to me when I contact them.
You can't force people to read your mind. That's what you're asking for.
If I choose to post it on a web page about turkey vulture watching, then I am inviting contacts from people about that particular subject -- and no other.
And if you wrote that on your web page, and the person sending you the email read it, then you have a point. Otherwise you're talking about mind reading again.
And how do you propose doing that when the spammers forge the from address and use subjects that sound legitimate?
I've never - not once - had a spammer forge a from address to an address of a friend or a company with which I wanted to receive mail. If a spammer did such a thing, then you'd have a case that that spammer was knowingly trespassing on your system. But I've never heard of such a case.
I already block blind-copied mail from untrusted senders, all mail from China, Brazil, Korea, and Taiwan. I have a huge list of keywords from the subject and body that get blocked. I use mail-forwarding accounts so that I can give out different addresses based on the level of trust I have for the entity I'm giving the address to. I then filter accordingly. And I still get spam.
That doesn't change the fact that every single one of those pieces of spam were accepted by your computer.
Slashdot Mirror
Un implementable idea, it's open fucking source
I think the point is that if you take the time and have the knowledge to remove the timebomb, you might as well just download the upgrade.
Public domain software doesn't force you to do a damn thing.
The GPL does.
The QingPL doesn't. Unless you count forcing you to release derivitive works under the QingPL, but really that's forcing you not to do something (sue people), not forcing you to do something.
I don't think that it is the TV station's responsibity if someone else illegally retransmitts their signal
Right, it's the responsibilty of the satellite companies, which are the ones illegally retransmitting the signal.
Local stations are not complaining that their signals are being illegally rebroadcast, but that other affiliate station's signals are availible in their coverage area.
I assume the lawsuit is between the network (NBC, CBS), which own the copyright, at least in part, and the satellite company, which is copying and distributing without permission from the copyright holder. If so, the rest of the details are just tricks by the satellite company to try to get you away from the main issue. Copyright is being infringed, it is not fair use, and there is no law granting a statutory license.
What's illegal is for "Bristol Herald Courier" (my local newspaper) to tell the stores that they can't carry USA Today, New York Times, etc.
Echostar is doing more than just distribution. They are also copying.
They aren't wanting to do it for free, they're wanting to sell the national feeds to anyone who wants them.
Right. So what echostar is doing is not only copyright infringement, it's copyright infringement for commercial purposes. There goes a huge part of the fair use argument.
Local channels aren't available on DSS where I live, so I have to use an antenna to receive the network feeds.
I don't really understand why someone would want to pay installation fees and monthly fees to receive someone they could get for just installation fees, but I guess I'm spoiled with my perfect reception, living only 35 miles from a major city.
Very few T.V. stations mind if their signals are retransmitted outside their service area because more viewers == greater ad revinue.
Local T.V. stations don't own the copyright on all of their content. Are you suggesting that this law somehow bans the copyright holder of a local television show from syndication?
Unlike newspaper distributors, satellite companies are doing more than just distribution. Satellite companies are copying and distributing. Copyright law happens to allow them to do that in certain situations, but not in other situations.
Um, this isn't about sending shows over the internet.
Scan in a newspaper and broadcast it by satellite to the world?
The same tactic in newspapers would be if there was a law stating that it was illegal to sell a newspaper subscription to someone who didn't live in the normal newspaper distribution and newspapers had to ensure that people accessing their websites also lived in the local area of the newspaper.
No, it's completely different. First sale allows people to distribute legally prepared copies of newspapers. The satellite companies are not distributing legally prepared copies. They are receiving, copying and redistributing.
Let me go back to your original point.
Um, this isn't about sending shows over the internet.
Why is it any different to send shows over satellite than it is to send them over the internet?
The same tactics with Newspapers would be obviously illegal.
Since when is it legal to scan in a newspaper and broadcast it for free over the internet?
I understand the desperation that's felt by someone with cancer, but really, what kind of person is going to believe that the miracle cure for cancer is sitting on some shady website and not in the hospitals?
The kind of person who is dying of cancer. And has already been to hospitals, which told him/her that there's nothing they can do.
Note that you go to jail or pay big fines for evading taxes. You don't go to jail or pay fines for not using IE.
No, you don't have to pay income tax if you don't earn more than $7450/year.
97.4% of slashdot users, the popular Microsoft bashing site, are using Internet Explorer.
And 99.9% of visitors to the Libertarian Party website, the popular income tax bashing site, pay income tax.
Except that it'll fail horribly, just like online ads, spyware and other malware.
I completely disagree. Consider Google. They have about 2000 machines. Let's say those machines cost $500/each, amortised over a useful life of 5 years. So thats $100 x 2000 = $200,000/year. Now say google was given the opportunity to replace those 2000 computers with 10,000 running this software. They could pay each person $20/year and now they would have a much more reliable system with much easier expandibility. As Google, I'd certainly consider doing it, at least for half of the machinepower. And as a consumer, I'd definately consider doing it.
But they're not paying money you say? I guarantee you if the demand for computing power exceeds the supply they can get for free they'll start paying. This is only a test run. You find out how many people are comfortable with the idea. You're not going to find many paying customers for an untested idea such as this one, certainly not big customers like google. But if you offer it for free, to smaller clients, after testing it on your own a bit, now you're starting to get to the point where you're ready to roll it out full swing. Once you roll it out full swing, and the revenues start coming in, then you can afford to start paying the people supplying the machine power. And it will snowball from there.
I only wish I had the money and/or time and/or skill to do this myself. I've thought of doing this a couple years ago, and I'm sure many others have as well. It will work, eventually, the only question is who will do it. Actually that's not much of a question. Surely it will be one of the big players, like Microsoft or AOL. But they'll likely buy out a smaller company first.
Watching ads is not a service, nor is it required quid pro quo for watching television. I am free to go into the other room and refuse to watch the advertisements, and I still get the service of television.
If use of CPU and storage space is required quid pro quo for use of the Kazaa network, you have a much different situation from television advertisement. If it's voluntary, a gift in exchange for a gift, with no requirements, then it's not barter. But in that case, I also believe it will not work, in the end (when others catch on, for instance).
So Brilliant Digital is providing me with a service, the Kazaa network, in return for another service, use of my computer's storage and spare CPU cycles... First of all, it's a great idea. But I wonder whether or not users of this service will be legally required to pay taxes on their barter income, and more importantly, whether Brilliant will have to mail out 10,000,000 1099-Bs (along with collecting 10,000,000 social security numbers).
One con I've noticed is that the number of posts with +1 bonus has about quadrupled...
I guess you're voluntarily allowing me to come over and try to sell you something for a few hours every day, OK?
OK
In a related story, VA Software (LNUX) reaches a new high.
The ninth ammendment merely says that fair use might be a right. The first and tenth, combined with the copyright clause, say that fair use is a right. None of them, incidently, say that distribution of devices which allow fair use is a right, or that perfect lossless digital copying is a right.
The First and Tenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution provide for things that were not originally in the Constitution. Hence, the word amendment [dictionary.com].
Are you suggesting that free speech is not a constitutional right?
Free Speech does not cover freely distributing copyrighted works without cost, in mass quantities.
Nor does fair use.
It is something new that needs to laws to govern its ramifications. It is just a matter of if one industry is going to be given the power to regulate others (hardware manufacturers etc.).
I'm sorry, I really don't understand what you're getting at...
The fair use provisions of the 1976 copyright law are based on supreme court rulings made before 1976. Fair use is a constitutional right due to both the first ammendment and the tenth ammendment (when you consider that congress has the power only to pass copyright law in order "To promote the progress of science and useful arts"). An important supreme court case on this issue, Eldred v. Ashcroft, is coming up. This case should directly answer the question of whether or not congress has the power to enact copyright law which does not promote the progress of science as well as whether or not copyright law is "categorically immune from challenge under the First Amendment", but the current precedent is that they do not, and they are not.
I figured out a solution: I'm voting for Congressional representatives that recognize junk e-mail, fax, etc. as theft and pass legislation against it. Then they will spend tax dollars, including your, prosecuting those who violate the law. Your taxes just aren't so precious that the government should turn a blind eye to spam.
Unfortunately your "solution" will not succeed, and I will fight against it.
So what? The mail server is inside my house. I don't want random people entering my house physically or electronically.
Then don't let random people enter your house electronically! How hard is that? It's really simple. Block incoming connections.
And my mail server is my private property. This is an established legal fact and one recognized by numerous state laws and court cases. If you want to read, then search for "trespass to chattels" and learn about it. AOL has won lawsuits against several spammers based on that legal principle.
So why do we need a new law? Could it be because "trespass to chattels" requires intentional infliction of harm?
Protecting people from spammers who will, given enough time, consume all available bandwidth and storage on the net, is not protecting people from themselves.
Hyperbole.
It's protecting them against those who would exploit weaknesses in the SMTP protocol to force their almost universally unwanted e-mail on others. You also ignore the fact that 99%+ of the people on the net don't run their own mail servers.
Therefore 99%+ of the people on the net do not have their personal property invaded, even electronically, by your definition.
ISPs are choking under the onslaught of spam.
Nonsense.
They are having to pay for more hardware, bandwidth, and personnel to deal with the spam. Those costs are all passed on to all of their subscribers. And that's a tax, too. Just not one imposed by the government.
99.9999% of the costs of spam are the costs of dealing with the legal issues surrounding it. Besides, I don't have a problem with "taxes" that are optional payments for a service. If email costs so much money, then ISPs should start charging to accept email. I would have no problem with that.
If you can't afford the fraction of a cent that it would cost out of your taxes to prosecute spammers, then you certainly can't afford to pay Verio a premium every month to cover their spam-associated costs.
A technical solution to spam would be 10,000,000 times cheaper than a legal solution. If the cost of the solution is cheaper than the cost of not solving the problem, then it will happen.
Normal people need to provide e-mail addresses to friends, colleagues, businesses, and potential employers. They don't know the addresses of everyone that might write to them (not spam them) and can't afford the time to create filters that only let a predefined list of people reach them. Nor do they want to risk bouncing important e-mails. It's more important to pass legislation that protects the vast majority of the public than it is to let you hoarde your pennies and not pay taxes.
I don't receive any spam on MSN messenger, yet I give my MSN messenger address out freely to friends, colleagues, businesses, and potential employers. Seems to me that what we need is a better protocol, not better laws. The laws aren't going to change anything anyway: if you don't know the identity of the sender, you can't exactly sue him/her, can you?
If you want to argue there's an implict authorization when connecting to an open port, yes, there is, just like there is to walk up to a door and knock on it. But I stuck a sign on the door that said 'come in if you're not selling something', and given my own terms for accessing that computer on that port, and I've clearly printed them out where everyone who connects can see them.
You did not stick a sign on the door that said "come in if you're not selling something". That's not how the SMTP protocol works.
It's not my fault if your software decided to not inform you of these condition. You're in charge of your computer, you shouldn't be using software that hides the fact I'm denying you permission to enter. Your problem, not mine.
I guess you support click-through licenses as well. Actually, click-through licenses that you don't even have to click on, merely that some computer somewhere has the capibility of possibly showing to you.
What you basically claim is there is no way to tell someone they're illegally in a computer system, and that is clearly legally nonsensical. People have to make a reasonable effort to check if they're trespassing or not. You can't walk up to a door past a sign telling you not to enter and then claim you 'weren't looking that way'.
No, I claim there is no way to tell someone using the SMTP protocol that they're illegally sending email. Reading the HELO line is not reasonable. No one does that.
It's certainly not an excuse to trespass because you hired a guide who stood in front of the sign so you couldn't see it. Your software is an agent of you, and what it does on your command, you do.
By the same token so is your software, so when your software accepts the email I guess you have accepted it. But that's not what I'm arguing. I'm saying the SMTP protocol is well defined, and it is expected that computers will be the ones connecting, and it's expected that unacceptable emails will be rejected.
The mere fact you continued communications with me shows you got the message.
No, it shows that my computer got the message. Actually, it doesn't even show that. It shows that my computer received the first 4 characters of the message.
And that makes it trespassing, plain and simple, or the computer equivilent, often referred to as 'hacking'.
So you agree that we don't need any new laws, then?
Explain to me how it's not trespassing to do the same thing to a mail server.
Well, first of all, it's not "trespassing" because nothing has physically entered your property. Besides, "trespassing" is illegal. We don't need to pass any new laws for that.
But I assume you want to know why it's not something equally illegal. That's because your "sign" is not in a place where it is easily read by the "trespasser". If you put a "No solicitors" sign on your back door in 1 inch high type, that doesn't allow you to arrest solicitors who come to your front door and have no reasonable expectation of seeing the sign.
So I'm supposed to know any and all telephone numbers from which anyone I may wish to talk with may call from? How am I supposed to know whether the "Unknown Caller" is a friend in trouble or a telemarketer?
That's not my problem. It's your problem. By making a law against it you force me to pay my tax money to solve your problem? Sorry, I'm not willing to do that. Figure out your own solution.
Absolutely untrue. My e-mail address is is private property like my home address. It is not like a public store. When I provide the address of my home, it does not mean that anyone is welcome to step inside, uninvited, to sell something to me.
No, but it does mean that anyone is welcome to come up to your front porch and knock on your door. If they're selling something, and you don't want it, you can't sue them for trespassing, even though they are standing on your property.
No, what I am asking for is legislation that forces everyone's e-mail address to be treated the way that I described. Besides, you don't need to be a mind reader to figure out that people don't want you stealing their time, bandwidth, and storage for your ads.
I disagree. I think you do.
Nor did I. But the addresses are forged, nonetheless, making it impossible for me to block mail from a given spammer. If Investigations2002@yahoo.com sends me spam and I block it that sender, the same low-life will send something else "from" michelle92348@aol.com next time.
I have no problem with an opt out system where you tell the spammer to stop emailing you, and they are required by law to comply. But you're talking about having an opt-in only system, and I'm saying that that opt-in is already available to you. Simply don't accept emails from those people you haven't opted to receive email from.
That's like arguing that you weren't trespassing because the door opened when you turned the knob.
No. There is a key difference. Without a door, private property is still private property. The purpose of a door is to keep people out. The purpose of an email server, on the other hand, is to let people in. There is a well established protocol, and the basis of that protocol is that anyone can email anyone else for any reason without permission. The well established protocol for private property is that you must knock on the door, and then only enter if you have permission.
The bottom line is that I don't want my tax money spent protecting you from yourself. If you want random pseudonymous people putting arbitrary files on your machine, be my guest, but don't cry to me when they put on your machine files which you don't want.
That's absurdly twisted logic. That's like saying that simply having a cell phone means that you are volunteering to receive calls at your expense from anyone that wants to sell you something.
No, it like saying that by looking at your caller ID and answering the phone you are volunteering to receive calls at your expense from anyone that wants to sell you something.
My having an e-mail address is not an invitation for random people to contact me.
Your setting up a server to accept emails from random email addresses is... It's no different from a store owner suing people for trespassing just because they offer to sell him something. The store owner can tell that person to leave, and if the person doesn't leave, then it's trespassing, but the store owner is implicitly allowing anyone to enter the store. S/he can explicitly revoke that implicit permission, but not retroactively.
It is so that people and companies can reply to me when I contact them.
You can't force people to read your mind. That's what you're asking for.
If I choose to post it on a web page about turkey vulture watching, then I am inviting contacts from people about that particular subject -- and no other.
And if you wrote that on your web page, and the person sending you the email read it, then you have a point. Otherwise you're talking about mind reading again.
And how do you propose doing that when the spammers forge the from address and use subjects that sound legitimate?
I've never - not once - had a spammer forge a from address to an address of a friend or a company with which I wanted to receive mail. If a spammer did such a thing, then you'd have a case that that spammer was knowingly trespassing on your system. But I've never heard of such a case.
I already block blind-copied mail from untrusted senders, all mail from China, Brazil, Korea, and Taiwan. I have a huge list of keywords from the subject and body that get blocked. I use mail-forwarding accounts so that I can give out different addresses based on the level of trust I have for the entity I'm giving the address to. I then filter accordingly. And I still get spam.
That doesn't change the fact that every single one of those pieces of spam were accepted by your computer.