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Re: [Asrg] Thoughts so far

2003-03-17 23:57:06

On Monday, March 17, 2003, at 08:12  PM, John Rumpelein wrote:

I live in Washington State, where we have already passed the legislation you propose. I can tell you, unfortunately, that I don't receive any less spam than you do. We can theoretically pursue lawsuits against spammers in small claims court to the tune of $500 per offense, but I have not heard of one single spammer (not one) who has actually been forced to pay under this law.

it's a problem of jurisdiction. Washington is simply too small.

To me, it has to be national legislation to be useful, for that very reason: the chance of both you and the spammer being in washington jurisdiction is tiny, and even if you get washington small claims to issue a judgement, collection is problematic.

But with a national law, we can do two things: we can finally stop the argument about whether spam is legal or not (yes, I know about trespass and other hacks, they're hacks, like getting someone for driving without a license when they ran over someone becuase manslaughter isn't provable), and give the national ISPs a good hook to go after the domestic spammers. But it also does something else: it sets an example and model legislation that the US can then use to influence other countries to adopt. Eventually, I see the spam issue as one that's resolved internationally in a way similar to the way copyright has been, but someone has to start the process and to me, that means starting at home. it's hard to argue with a straight face that Korea or china needs to fix their spam problem if we aren't dealing with ours here.

One questions the usefulness of a legal solution to the problem, and even whether the court system is designed to handle this volume of lawsuits. (Do
we need spammers clogging up our court system also?)


I don't think there need be a huge number of small lawsuits, although there will be some. I think the big thing is enabling the big ISPs and the justice department to deal with this on a criminal basis, and not on the civil suit basis they have to try now. some of the US spammers will likely move offshore, but others will move into other lines of business once the line is drawn in the sand, and until we get started cleaning up our own house, we have little hope of really making a dent on international spam.


--
Chuq Von Rospach, Architech
chuqui(_at_)plaidworks(_dot_)com -- http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/


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