On Tue, 27 May 2003, Eric A. Hall wrote:
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.
So what? That is no reason to ban spam.
Everytime I pull a piece of spam I pay the nickel, which is in the same
ballpark as fax spam costs.
To who? Do you have receipts for this? Anyway, I don't, and no one else
does, either. So it doesn't justify anything to Congress.
If you mean it costs you a nickle to press delete, then the cost of
hauling out the trash would be an issue for Junk Mail, and Junk Faxes, and
the cost of listening to a telemarketer would be a factor there, too. This
isn't an issue. No one said your life would be free from trash.
Furthermore, there are do-not-send lists. If anti-spammers abuse those
lists, that isn't a justification to ban spam.
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.
No, I'm saying that spam has insignificantly small cost, and that trying
to inflate the cost somehow isn't a valid reason for banning spam. YOu
could have spam gold-plated, and transported around the world by police
motorcade and armored car, and it would cost a fortune, but it still would
make the case for banning spam.
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. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I read that. By interference, the court is refering to the fact that the
recipient runs out of paper, and can't receive other faxes. This doesn't
happen with spam.
And if you read the text of the decision, and not just the conclusion,
you'll see that the Court spends most of its time with the cost issue.
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.
Point by point:
1) Disks are so cheap that mailboxes shouldn't ever fill up. Perhaps you
should buy services from a better provider. Maybe that provider has been
growing too fast, and is using "spam caused our disks to fill up" as an
excuse for "we can't install servers fast enough to keep up with demand".
I don't sign up users faster than I can deploy servers for them. My signup
software will deny signups when resources are low. It will collect
callbacks, and send email.
2) Our spam filters don't delete spam, they just refile it. If you think
something was misfiled, you can get it back (because disks are so cheap)
3) Thats just stupid and unreasonable behavior. Stupidity and willfull
recklessness aren't either common or justifications for banning spam.
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.
No, it isn't, despite your continued assertions. You have failed to
present a case that spam costs any money, or interferes with any reaonable
person's email.