"If spamming really was effective, there would be a lot more legitimate companies doing it, but there aren't, and there's a reason for it."
Actually, there are plenty of legitimate companies using mass email for advertising... the problem is that they play by the rules and are therefore much more easily filtered out by spam-blockers and less often noticed than their shady counterparts. Furthermore, legit companies tend to target the audience better and can therefore send smaller mailing runs, so you don't notice them as 'spam' as much because they aren't completely off the mark if you happen to receive them.
My company generates a large portion of its sales leads from bulk email that some might call 'spam'. I can guarantee you that if there were a reasonable scheme in place, my bosses would happily pay to continue sending our bulk emails 'cause they bring in business.
The bottom line though is that we need a new, secure email standard that allows the sender to be reliably identified. We can keep it all free if there's a method in place for enforcing the current laws.
Spamhaus is no better than the others. Our company sends out legitimate advertising email from time to time. A couple of our customers decided they didn't want our ads anymore and reported us to SPEWS and Spamhaus (rather than using the provided 'remove' link in the mail). Now we have large swaths of customers that we can only support via expensive long distance phone calls because they can't receive email from our domains anymore. We also have customers who use our ASP servers who can no longer contact their customers because another customer on the same server sent out a bulk email that got tagged as spam. The whole system is rediculous.
Not really... they only pay you if you get up to $25 (not likely) and they don't have any information anywhere on the site as to what their catalog contains, so a former MP3.com artist can't even tell if their music is there, much less whether it's being sold to anyone. It would be really easy for them to sell your stuff to someone without telling you... heck, the contact info in your MP3.com page may have been changed since then and they wouldn't even know where to send a check!
I opted out of all of that stuff myself while MP3.com was still online. They didn't pay the artists (or even inform them) when they sold our music for corporate use then, and they certainly aren't now. It was pretty clear to artists who paid attention at the time, but apparently not many people read what they sign... there was a big fat checkbox for this whenever you uploaded a song.
Kind of shitty for them to be selling this stuff to anyone when they no longer have an agreement with the artists though... I'm sure there will be a lawsuit sometime...
For poop's sake... who wants to read or type on something that small? I don't know which I'd lose first... the whole unit itself because it's so small, my eyesight from looking at that screen, or my mind from typing on those little keys!
Don't know if that's the solution either... there's already a lot of people out of work without taking away a major stream of revenue from legitimate businesses.
Don't forget, not all email ads are 'shotgun approach'. My company sells software and we are very careful and specific about who we send email ads to, and therefore have a high rate of positive responses. If it were suddenly illegal to advertise by email we'd lose a big chunk of our sales leads, and therefore have to fire employees.
The CAN-SPAM law makes some sense in that it makes it illegal to send an unsolicited mail without a clear subject and a clear statement that it's an advertisement. Basically it makes it easier for people who don't want ads to block them. The problem is that the spam which people hate the most is already tough to block, and making it illegal doesn't help technology to block it.
On one hand, I think the law takes the right approach. It's an attempt to kill off the worst of the spammers... those who obfuscate, spoof, mislead, and generally piss people off, while still leaving room for legit businesses to send legit advertisements within certain limits. If it were enforceable, it'd be a perfect law.
The problem is that it's a law that only applies to people that are already almost impossible to track down. It's sort of like a law against prank calling from a payphone... unless you watch every payphone and trace every call, you'll never catch anyone.
I think the thought behind the act was pretty solid, but the framers obviously have no clue about the technology they're ruling on. They've passed a law with no teeth at all.
Blacklists don't block anyone's mail. Its users do, and those users have the full rights to decide who gets to make use of their property or the services they pay for.
I mentioned this above, but I'll repeat myself... the end user often has no clue what their ISP or company's anti-spam service is doing. I can't count the number of customers that we are no longer able to support via email at my office because their office's mail service bounces our mail as spam... we have to support them by phone now, costing us money and time.
Subscribing to a blacklist service is sort of like hiring a bouncer for your party. He probably does a good job of keeping out anyone uninvited. But what happens when you order a pizza and he punches the pizza guy in the face? No pizza for you!!! And you may not even find out that the pizza guy showed up until his employer calls to ask why you didn't pay for the pizza...
The unfortunate truth is that the end user, if they are on an ISP or a corporate server, often doesn't even know that their service is subscribed to a blacklist.
I got a very irate call from a customer of my company's the other day who wanted a full refund due to "lack of customer support"... turns out that his company's ISP was subscribed to Spamhaus, who have us listed as spammers, and it was killing all of our replies to his support questions. His company had signed up with the anti-spam service, thereby interfering with our contractual obligation to support our product. We don't take kindly to that. And the response from Spamhaus? "Stop spamming." We don't. Great, that really solves the problem...
Anyway, I think end-user spam blocking programs are the safest way to go. If you aren't getting mail that you were expecting, you can see if it was blocked in your filter, refine your rules, and retrieve the message. By using massive blacklists and ISP-side filters, you run a much bigger risk of losing wanted mail with the crap.
And yet none of the news stories nor the manufacturer's website have any video clips of what the product does. It would seem to me that the best way to sell a device like this would be to provide samples of what it can do... I mean, are people expected to buy it just because the still photos of the player look neato?
Assuming this digital radio thing takes off, I wonder if they'll continue to compress the crap out of the music like they do now? With analog radio, they have to keep everything in a very strict amplitude range so that it doesn't get them in trouble with the FCC. I interned at a radio station where you could grab the volume and wiggle it three inches in either direction with no discernable difference in sound. If the audio is all digital, maybe they won't have to keep crushing the life out of the music like they do now...
Of course, what it still comes down to is that as long as corporations program the music, radio will be a waste of time for true music lovers, no matter how good it sounds. You can only polish a turd so much, and then you're just getting crap on your rag.
The law is aptly named... it means that you CAN SPAM all you want really, as long as you don't hide who you are. I work for a company that sends bulk advertising email and was asked by my boss to read the new law from end to end. Basically nothing has changed. Companies like us who clearly identify themselves, clearly mark the email as an ad, clearly state the subject and content, and always remove people who opt out will simply be easier to filter. The asshats who spoof IPs, provide false addresses and hack machines to blast Viagra ads to a million people will still be nearly impossible to track down or stop. The whole law is a sham in my opinion... doesn't change the way anyone does business except those who are legitimately trying to not be a pain in the rear. It's just there so lawmakers can claim that they're trying. In fact, it negates much more effective state regulations as well. Gotta love the government.
I still prefer my $120 CD-RW/CD-R based mp3/wma player. It's portable, easy to use, and can hold an infinite number of tracks because I've got a nice CD case in my car. Plus if it breaks or gets stolen, I'm not out half a grand.:)
I wouldn't consider "Mac IE" a choice really... as far as I'm concerned, if the developer has dropped the application and isn't ever going to fix it or update it, then it's not a valid option. Unless of course it's already perfect, but we're talking about Microsoft here...
According to the Library of Congress, under the fair use doctrine of the U.S. copyright statute, it is permissible to use limited portions of a work including quotes, for purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports. I don't think that sound effect use in a movie falls under any of these categories. Furthermore, there are no legal rules permitting the use of a specific number of words, a certain number of musical notes, or percentage of a work. Whether a particular use qualifies as fair use depends on all the circumstances.
Here's the actual "Fair Use Doctrine" as it appears in section 107 of copyright law...
107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include --
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
So, in short, the use of this scream has nothing to do with fair use.:)
No, that's a myth. Fair use says nothing about the amount of the sound used... it's just that if you're using less than 5 seconds, your chances of the original owner noticing are smaller. But they can totally sue your ass if they can prove it's their sound.
The difference is that if I listen to hours and hours of MP3s on my player in the car, I never hear anything I don't already know. The great thing about radio is that it's where you get exposed to new music. CDs don't do that for you.
Anyway, for my personal listening pleasure, it's NPR in the car and Live365 on the computer.:)
How does passing a law about something suddenly make it stop happening? Offshore spammers... header forgers... people who send 20,000 emails from ufb892y3h0ebf@yahoo.com... they're not going to be deterred by this.
As for 'legitimate advertising email' sent with real subject lines, valid contact info and working opt-out addresses... this law simply lays out guidelines, thereby removing the gray areas for those who haven't been doing it yet because they thought it might be illegal. I say if this law has any effect, you'll see more unsolicited mail than you did before because now it's been made legally acceptable if you follow the right rules.
Do not spam registry?? Hahaha... riiiiiight.... and how do they propose to administer that?
Well, I think some of the reason why rights extend 70 years beyond the creator's death is that it can benefit their heirs. I mean, if you were say, Margaret Mitchell's kid, wouldn't you be a tad pissed off if "Gone With The Wind" became public domain the day your mom passed on, thereby denying you any earnings from it?
Yes... Gimli carries seven axes, and collects each of them after throwing them, just like Legoloas spends his spare time hand-whitling the hundreds of arrows he uses when fighting 50 orcs.:)
I agree with you on this... either the person is safe to be released into society, or he is not. You can't set someone free with a 'scarlet letter' and expect them to reintegrate into society... they should be left to rebuild their lives. If they are so dangerous that their neighbors must be warned, then we should re-write the laws and not let them out.
If anything, they need to make some clarification as to whose names get listed. If the guy who just moved in next door was convicted of kidnapping and raping 5 year olds (and somehow is now free), then yeah, I think I should know. But if it's just an idiot who gave a copy of "Penthouse" to a 12-year old, I don't think he's as much of a threat, do you? 'Sex offender' is a pretty broad term.
Slashdot Mirror
"If spamming really was effective, there would be a lot more legitimate companies doing it, but there aren't, and there's a reason for it."
Actually, there are plenty of legitimate companies using mass email for advertising... the problem is that they play by the rules and are therefore much more easily filtered out by spam-blockers and less often noticed than their shady counterparts. Furthermore, legit companies tend to target the audience better and can therefore send smaller mailing runs, so you don't notice them as 'spam' as much because they aren't completely off the mark if you happen to receive them.
My company generates a large portion of its sales leads from bulk email that some might call 'spam'. I can guarantee you that if there were a reasonable scheme in place, my bosses would happily pay to continue sending our bulk emails 'cause they bring in business.
The bottom line though is that we need a new, secure email standard that allows the sender to be reliably identified. We can keep it all free if there's a method in place for enforcing the current laws.
The only reason? Surely you're not forgetting the everpresent hotness of Keira Knightley?
Spamhaus is no better than the others. Our company sends out legitimate advertising email from time to time. A couple of our customers decided they didn't want our ads anymore and reported us to SPEWS and Spamhaus (rather than using the provided 'remove' link in the mail). Now we have large swaths of customers that we can only support via expensive long distance phone calls because they can't receive email from our domains anymore. We also have customers who use our ASP servers who can no longer contact their customers because another customer on the same server sent out a bulk email that got tagged as spam. The whole system is rediculous.
Not really... they only pay you if you get up to $25 (not likely) and they don't have any information anywhere on the site as to what their catalog contains, so a former MP3.com artist can't even tell if their music is there, much less whether it's being sold to anyone. It would be really easy for them to sell your stuff to someone without telling you... heck, the contact info in your MP3.com page may have been changed since then and they wouldn't even know where to send a check!
I opted out of all of that stuff myself while MP3.com was still online. They didn't pay the artists (or even inform them) when they sold our music for corporate use then, and they certainly aren't now. It was pretty clear to artists who paid attention at the time, but apparently not many people read what they sign... there was a big fat checkbox for this whenever you uploaded a song.
Kind of shitty for them to be selling this stuff to anyone when they no longer have an agreement with the artists though... I'm sure there will be a lawsuit sometime...
I wonder how long it would take an implanted monkey connected to a computer running MS Word to type up the script for "Hamlet"?
For poop's sake... who wants to read or type on something that small? I don't know which I'd lose first... the whole unit itself because it's so small, my eyesight from looking at that screen, or my mind from typing on those little keys!
Don't know if that's the solution either... there's already a lot of people out of work without taking away a major stream of revenue from legitimate businesses.
Don't forget, not all email ads are 'shotgun approach'. My company sells software and we are very careful and specific about who we send email ads to, and therefore have a high rate of positive responses. If it were suddenly illegal to advertise by email we'd lose a big chunk of our sales leads, and therefore have to fire employees.
The CAN-SPAM law makes some sense in that it makes it illegal to send an unsolicited mail without a clear subject and a clear statement that it's an advertisement. Basically it makes it easier for people who don't want ads to block them. The problem is that the spam which people hate the most is already tough to block, and making it illegal doesn't help technology to block it.
On one hand, I think the law takes the right approach. It's an attempt to kill off the worst of the spammers ... those who obfuscate, spoof, mislead, and generally piss people off, while still leaving room for legit businesses to send legit advertisements within certain limits. If it were enforceable, it'd be a perfect law.
The problem is that it's a law that only applies to people that are already almost impossible to track down. It's sort of like a law against prank calling from a payphone... unless you watch every payphone and trace every call, you'll never catch anyone.
I think the thought behind the act was pretty solid, but the framers obviously have no clue about the technology they're ruling on. They've passed a law with no teeth at all.
I mentioned this above, but I'll repeat myself... the end user often has no clue what their ISP or company's anti-spam service is doing. I can't count the number of customers that we are no longer able to support via email at my office because their office's mail service bounces our mail as spam... we have to support them by phone now, costing us money and time.
Subscribing to a blacklist service is sort of like hiring a bouncer for your party. He probably does a good job of keeping out anyone uninvited. But what happens when you order a pizza and he punches the pizza guy in the face? No pizza for you!!! And you may not even find out that the pizza guy showed up until his employer calls to ask why you didn't pay for the pizza...
The unfortunate truth is that the end user, if they are on an ISP or a corporate server, often doesn't even know that their service is subscribed to a blacklist.
I got a very irate call from a customer of my company's the other day who wanted a full refund due to "lack of customer support"... turns out that his company's ISP was subscribed to Spamhaus, who have us listed as spammers, and it was killing all of our replies to his support questions. His company had signed up with the anti-spam service, thereby interfering with our contractual obligation to support our product. We don't take kindly to that. And the response from Spamhaus? "Stop spamming." We don't. Great, that really solves the problem...
Anyway, I think end-user spam blocking programs are the safest way to go. If you aren't getting mail that you were expecting, you can see if it was blocked in your filter, refine your rules, and retrieve the message. By using massive blacklists and ISP-side filters, you run a much bigger risk of losing wanted mail with the crap.
And yet none of the news stories nor the manufacturer's website have any video clips of what the product does. It would seem to me that the best way to sell a device like this would be to provide samples of what it can do... I mean, are people expected to buy it just because the still photos of the player look neato?
Assuming this digital radio thing takes off, I wonder if they'll continue to compress the crap out of the music like they do now? With analog radio, they have to keep everything in a very strict amplitude range so that it doesn't get them in trouble with the FCC. I interned at a radio station where you could grab the volume and wiggle it three inches in either direction with no discernable difference in sound. If the audio is all digital, maybe they won't have to keep crushing the life out of the music like they do now...
Of course, what it still comes down to is that as long as corporations program the music, radio will be a waste of time for true music lovers, no matter how good it sounds. You can only polish a turd so much, and then you're just getting crap on your rag.
Drew
The law is aptly named... it means that you CAN SPAM all you want really, as long as you don't hide who you are. I work for a company that sends bulk advertising email and was asked by my boss to read the new law from end to end. Basically nothing has changed. Companies like us who clearly identify themselves, clearly mark the email as an ad, clearly state the subject and content, and always remove people who opt out will simply be easier to filter. The asshats who spoof IPs, provide false addresses and hack machines to blast Viagra ads to a million people will still be nearly impossible to track down or stop. The whole law is a sham in my opinion... doesn't change the way anyone does business except those who are legitimately trying to not be a pain in the rear. It's just there so lawmakers can claim that they're trying. In fact, it negates much more effective state regulations as well. Gotta love the government.
I still prefer my $120 CD-RW/CD-R based mp3/wma player. It's portable, easy to use, and can hold an infinite number of tracks because I've got a nice CD case in my car. Plus if it breaks or gets stolen, I'm not out half a grand. :)
I wouldn't consider "Mac IE" a choice really... as far as I'm concerned, if the developer has dropped the application and isn't ever going to fix it or update it, then it's not a valid option. Unless of course it's already perfect, but we're talking about Microsoft here...
Here's the actual "Fair Use Doctrine" as it appears in section 107 of copyright law... So, in short, the use of this scream has nothing to do with fair use.
No, that's a myth. Fair use says nothing about the amount of the sound used... it's just that if you're using less than 5 seconds, your chances of the original owner noticing are smaller. But they can totally sue your ass if they can prove it's their sound.
The difference is that if I listen to hours and hours of MP3s on my player in the car, I never hear anything I don't already know. The great thing about radio is that it's where you get exposed to new music. CDs don't do that for you.
:)
Anyway, for my personal listening pleasure, it's NPR in the car and Live365 on the computer.
And since it's WM9-based and therefor Mac-incompatible, they don't have to worry about competing with iTunes at all!
How does passing a law about something suddenly make it stop happening? Offshore spammers... header forgers... people who send 20,000 emails from ufb892y3h0ebf@yahoo.com... they're not going to be deterred by this.
As for 'legitimate advertising email' sent with real subject lines, valid contact info and working opt-out addresses... this law simply lays out guidelines, thereby removing the gray areas for those who haven't been doing it yet because they thought it might be illegal. I say if this law has any effect, you'll see more unsolicited mail than you did before because now it's been made legally acceptable if you follow the right rules.
Do not spam registry?? Hahaha... riiiiiight.... and how do they propose to administer that?
Well, I think some of the reason why rights extend 70 years beyond the creator's death is that it can benefit their heirs. I mean, if you were say, Margaret Mitchell's kid, wouldn't you be a tad pissed off if "Gone With The Wind" became public domain the day your mom passed on, thereby denying you any earnings from it?
Man, I had nightmares about a rollercoaster hiding in my closet for years because of that movie.
:)
Hehe... penis enlarger.
Yes... Gimli carries seven axes, and collects each of them after throwing them, just like Legoloas spends his spare time hand-whitling the hundreds of arrows he uses when fighting 50 orcs. :)
I agree with you on this... either the person is safe to be released into society, or he is not. You can't set someone free with a 'scarlet letter' and expect them to reintegrate into society... they should be left to rebuild their lives. If they are so dangerous that their neighbors must be warned, then we should re-write the laws and not let them out.
If anything, they need to make some clarification as to whose names get listed. If the guy who just moved in next door was convicted of kidnapping and raping 5 year olds (and somehow is now free), then yeah, I think I should know. But if it's just an idiot who gave a copy of "Penthouse" to a 12-year old, I don't think he's as much of a threat, do you? 'Sex offender' is a pretty broad term.