White, Sam wrote on 17 April 2003 15:37
I also agree. Legal solutions are already being worked on, but are never
going to be sufficient to adequately solve the problem. The most that a
legal solution can do is bring some measure of uniformity to the law,
making
spam easier to address. The only true, effective solution is going to be a
technical one, IMHO.
I think there is an inherent problem in any purely technical approach: if
something is legal, it may turn out to be illegal to take measures to
prevent it. Obviously this is not going to impact filtering by receivers,
but do we want to waste our time filtering? Technical activity other than
by receivers or those acting explicitly as their agents may fall found of
the law unless it has a clear legal basis.
Surely there are sever problems inherent in any purely technical approach
that ignores the commercial and legal realities that have given rise to the
problem? Shouldn't technical measures be devised bearing in mind the legal
environment in which they will be deployed, and taking into account also the
commercial relaities? While some ISPs are making a lot of money out of
providing services to spammers, they are not going to adopt technical
measures against the spammers unless legally or commercially compelled to do
so (and maybe legal compulsion won't work without commercial penalities on a
scale that outweighs the profit from spammer-support activities).
In the EU at least, spam is (or will shortly be) illegal. ISPs to do not
take action to prevent their systems to be used for spamming will be
negligently enabling an illegal activity, which in at least some EU
jurisdictions will itself be an offence and in most if not all will leave
the ISPs open to civil action by the spammers' victims. I'm not too sure
what the state of US law is, but http://www.camblab.com/nugget/spam_03.pdf
suggests that US law could be used quite effectively to combat US based
spammers (by compelling ISPs and backbone providers to enforce their
contracts).
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