Not to drag us into an extended legal debate, but
At 10:36 PM 3/19/03 -0400, Ian Wilson wrote:
<snip>
I'm not sure *anonymous speech* is worth protecting. I'm not saying Free
Speech isn't worth protecting, but I should not have the protection to say
whatever I want, and the protection of doing it under cover.
Lots and lots of anonymous speech is very valuable and some important
speech would not take place without anonymity (we can discuss that more
off-list if desired). But there are lots of situations in which anonymity
will fall to other interests, and courts will likely agree that false
return addresses and headers in UCE will not be protected.
While I'm no
lawyer isn't there a distinction between *Free Speech* and *Freedom of the
Press* and what the framers of the Constitution wanted to protect was my
right to get on my soapbox down on the corner and launch into a diatribe on
the government, or any other topic I wanted to. Seems to me that what I
write on the Internet isn't *Speech*
In the US, FWIW, the opposite of this is true. A key conclusion of the US
Supreme Court's decision in 1997 in Reno v. ACLU, is that in fact the
Internet is the modern day embodiment of the soap box of old. When the
First Amendment was written, the town commons was important in community
life and a soapbox was an effective way to raise a public concern. By the
late 20th Century, an actual soapbox in a park had become absolutely
irrelevant. Internet communications are definitely viewed as protected
speech by US courts.
The bottom line for this group is that (at least in the US) the First
Amendment is likely to impose some constraints on anti-spam legislation,
making technical approaches to reduce spam all the more important.
John
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