ROFL. I wasn't aware that emails were legally accepted communications between lawyers and people they're threatening, unless the lawyer happens to be Helena Kobrin.
Actually, Bill could stop them. Incitement to violence would take precedence over satire. Think about The American Coalition of Life Advocates, the ones who put abortion doctors up in "wanted criminal" type posters. This aroused the feds' interest, and they actually alerted doctors that their names and pictures were on it. That could be argued as satire.
What's really sad about this is that in 95% of cases, they'll be going after people who haven't the resources to fight this. Satire is protected speech, but only when people want to protect it. Most ISP's will roll over and take it when they get a nastygram, rather than keep the site up while their customer fights it.
It will be interesting to see the first site that moves to rotten.com. My guess is they'll let it stand, knowing they haven't the legal stump of a leg to stand upon to take it any further than nastygrams.
Actually, this question came up in a PGP newsgroup not that long ago... Someone fed in a virgin address and a semi-dirty address. The virgin stayed pure, and there was a marked decrease in spam arriving at the dirty one. From that it was inferred that either they're ignorant of key servers, that even spammers know that scraping keyservers is like Randall Terry busting in on an ACLU roundtable, or that they might even use keyservers to scrub lists. Me, my money is on option one.
Another suggested read, of more recent vintage, is Michael Shermer's _Why_People_Believe_Weird_Things_. Everything from FUNdamentalism to Holocaust deniers, Objectivism to alien abductions. The basic gist of the book is that you should always keep your logical mind about you, and that skepticism != cynicism.
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ROFL. I wasn't aware that emails were legally accepted communications between lawyers and people they're threatening, unless the lawyer happens to be Helena Kobrin.
Actually, Bill could stop them. Incitement to violence would take precedence over satire. Think about The American Coalition of Life Advocates, the ones who put abortion doctors up in "wanted criminal" type posters. This aroused the feds' interest, and they actually alerted doctors that their names and pictures were on it. That could be argued as satire.
What's really sad about this is that in 95% of cases, they'll be going after people who haven't the resources to fight this. Satire is protected speech, but only when people want to protect it. Most ISP's will roll over and take it when they get a nastygram, rather than keep the site up while their customer fights it.
It will be interesting to see the first site that moves to rotten.com. My guess is they'll let it stand, knowing they haven't the legal stump of a leg to stand upon to take it any further than nastygrams.
Actually, this question came up in a PGP newsgroup not that long ago... Someone fed in a virgin address and a semi-dirty address. The virgin stayed pure, and there was a marked decrease in spam arriving at the dirty one. From that it was inferred that either they're ignorant of key servers, that even spammers know that scraping keyservers is like Randall Terry busting in on an ACLU roundtable, or that they might even use keyservers to scrub lists. Me, my money is on option one.
Another suggested read, of more recent vintage, is Michael Shermer's _Why_People_Believe_Weird_Things_. Everything from FUNdamentalism to Holocaust deniers, Objectivism to alien abductions. The basic gist of the book is that you should always keep your logical mind about you, and that skepticism != cynicism.
Mike