Under german law, a message can't be binding if it has not been
sent and received by both a 'person'. Law distinguishes between
'natural' persons (=humans) and 'juristical' persons (=companies,
associations, etc.) which also involves a human. Machines can't
have contracts under german law.
Here in the United States, there are places that things must be posted as a
"public notice" where they in effect become binding as law. For example,
if a piece of land is going to be annexed into another piece of property a
"public notice" must be given (generally in the local newspaper)
announcing the fact so that if anybody has any disputes that they can bring
them forward. If they do not act on the "public notice" that was given
within a certain period of time then they are assumed to have agreed and
complied with it -- even if they did not see the notice in the paper.
There are all sorts of places where public notices come into effect such as
No Trespassing signs. Private property must have no-trespassing signs
posted every N number of feet in order for people to be able to be
prosecuted for trespassing if they come on the property. (They can also be
prosecuted if you tell them personally or have delivered a letter to them
etc.) But the point being is that it is a notice placed in a public place
that everybody assumes that the trespasser (in this case) saw or should
have seen.
A public notice such as I described would serve a similar function. It
would also give legislators something that they can point to.
As far as jurisdiction is concerned, yes, it would be hard for me to sue
someone in Germany for spam. However, those in Germany can sue those in
Germany that spam and I can easily sue those in the U.S. who spam. Because
e-mail addresses are not classified generally by nationality (except for
domain names that end in a country code) we would benefit for our mutual
efforts. People tend to spam the world as a whole rather than by
country. Thus if I can't sue someone in Germany for spamming me, I want a
structure in place where someone else can sue the person in Germany. As
long as somebody does it, it will serve as a deterrent for future spammers.
-Art
--
Art Pollard
http://www.lextek.com/
Suppliers of High Performance Text Retrieval Engines.
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