on 5/27/2003 6:24 PM Dean Anderson wrote:
<waffling snipped>
The cost of a fax to a typical organization with bulk purchasing power is
probably on the order of $.02 per page, including the paper and ink used.
Using thermal paper from a retailer averages out to about $.06 per page.
It is very easy to demonstrate per-message costs in that same ballpark for
spam, especially once we get measured-rate circuits involved. That you do
not suffer from these burdens does not mean that nobody should be
protected from them.
No, this isn't true. If you pay $1 per month for email
You have no idea what I pay. As far as you know, I pay $.05 per minute for
ISDN and cellular-data hookups to pull my mail down from my colo server.
Everytime I pull a piece of spam I pay the nickel, which is in the same
ballpark as fax spam costs. Your response to this point was, and I quote
here: "Don't get email on measured rate services, then." which is a limp
way of saying that spam costs people with these links too much money for
them to use email. You have admitted that spam has a cost, and are now
trying to waffle out of that position by claiming that there is no cost.
As has been stated, the junk fax laws are not limited to cost protection,
and also address the usability arguments.
No, the Appeals court didn't find that at all.
I thought you read the opinion:
| We conclude that the Government has demonstrated a substantial
| interest in restricting unsolicited fax advertisements in order to
| prevent the cost shifting and interference such unwanted advertising
| places on the recipient. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
In this particular case, the court cited previous evidence on the issue of
usefulness, in that junk faxes prevented the machine from being used for
its intended purposes. Spam also prevents email from being used for its
intended purposes when (1) their hotmail/yahoo mailbox fills up, (2) a
false-positive in a filter or a blacklist kills a message, or (3) somebody
deletes all of their email because they can't scan it all. All of these
are examples of interference. I don't really care about how you waffle
around this fact.
In both of these examples, the verbiage present in the TCPA is equally
applicable to the problem of spam. Your continued waffling on minor,
irrelevant, non-contributory details and detours does not change that.
--
Eric A. Hall http://www.ehsco.com/
Internet Core Protocols http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/coreprot/