At 11:09 PM -0500 3/16/03, John R Levine wrote:
A couple of years ago Paul Hoffman and I worked out a scheme of SMTP
banner tags that server owners could use to publish their spam policies.
Laws about bulk mail could then require that mailers obey the tags.
The U.S. courts have already ruled that there is an assumption of
knowledge by the spammer. They are expected to understand that the
recipient's AUP does not allow spamming--even if they have not read
it. This has been instrumental in a number of spammer court cases.
For more details, see the legal talk by Jon Praed at the MIT Spam
Conference (http://www.spamconference.org/praed.pdf) or better yet,
watch the video
http://web.mit.edu/webcast/spamconf03/mit-spamconf-s4-26100-17jan03-1600-80k.ram
(34 minutes into the webcast).
Spamming is already illegal (at least from the standpoint of the
ISP/Spammer relationship it constitutes trespassing--an illegal use
of property). Unfortunately I suspect it costs more to bring a case
to suit than you get in return. The existing cases I think have been
prosecuted mainly as a deterrent. (I asked Jon Praed what an average
suit cost, but he wouldn't give me a direct answer.)
--
Kee Hinckley
http://www.puremessaging.com/ Junk-Free Email Filtering
http://commons.somewhere.com/buzz/ Writings on Technology and Society
I'm not sure which upsets me more: that people are so unwilling to accept
responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate
everyone else's.
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