On Sun, Mar 30, 2003 at 03:26:33PM +1000, Troy Rollo wrote:
At 20:33 29/03/03 -0800, Brad Templeton wrote:
c. What can reasonably be inferred by the actions of
the possessor of the property.
You make a number of good points, so let me drop to the other problem
I pointed out with consent issues, which is the difficult technical
challenge of finding a way to figure out consent when we have all sorts
of vague definitions of implied consent, and so many different preferences
among individuals as to what consents they wish to give.
Even in this group we have seen many people express different views over
what they think is spam, vs. mail they think they have implicitly consented
to receive. Just this week we've debated the suggestion that if you post
to a mailing list you consent to replies to your messages from others, but
not to automatic replies from broken bots, and possibly not to off-topic
replies -- for example most would say that posting here doesn't allow me to
reply to them to offer them cheap blue sex pills.
I see it as intractable to define a mechanism for definition of advance
consent. As in, "I don't know who you are or what your message is about but
I rescind consent in advance if it meets criteria X." If we could come up
with a language that workably described all the "X" people are interested
in which could also be handled well by people mailing material that might
meet criteria X, that would be interesting but I don't hold much hope for
such a language.
that SMTP as a protocol demonstrates a design centred on person to person
messages and another protocol (NNTP) demonstrates a design centred on
broadcast messages (even having substantially the same message format)
Unfortunately bulk mail has a long history, predating even newsgroups by
many years. I have gone down this course before, but I can't escape the
conclusion that bulk mail is considered one of the legitimate uses of
mail. How can we as we discuss it on a mailing list? However, it is definitely
secondary.
This is clearly within the scope of implied consent, because it is (a)
necessary, (b) accepted, and (c) reasonably inferred by the actions in
putting up a web site.
Unfortunately it is not so "clear" as there are many court cases about this,
about issues such as deep linking, inlining and spidering in various forms.
People want to give consent to some (google) but not to others (shopping bots
or deep linkers) and so on.
If only this were clear.
Person to person email is clearly within the scope of implied consent and
testing against the three criteria clearly indicates that this would be so.
I thinks so but again, I have seen many in the anti-spam community offer
extreme definitions which include person to person mail. CAUCE, a fairly
major organization in the anti-spam community, has pushed its lobbying
efforts around single e-mails from the start, and so have many others.
It is alas, not clear.
This one is a little more difficult. Arguments on the "necessity" of this
could go either way. It is probable that inference from conduct would go
against, since most people don't like to be flamed. The acceptance test
would suggest that society accepts the need to infer implied consent for
flames, although this may vary depending on the free speech beliefs of the
particular society.
I think you aptly demonstrate the technological impossiblity of making a
protocol based way to define advance consent.
Rescinded consent is of course much easer (and implementable at the endpoint)
A blacklist is rescinded consent -- if only blacklists didn't have all their
other problems.
"No trespassing" is probably insufficient for this purpose. The sign would
have to make it clear that implied consent is withdrawn, or withdrawn for a
particular class. For example, "No hawking" clearly withdraws consent for
door-to-door salespeople, but "No trespassing" per se is redundant, since
if there is consent (even implied consent) there is no trespass.
These signs rely on being in human natural languages. So people have a wide
scope on what they can put on the sign, and it is handled by another natural
intelligence. No such luck in SMTP.
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