Subject: Re: [Asrg] Thoughts so far

From: "Doug Phillips" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 10:39:30 -0500

This is exactly right.  Look at piracy.  Laws alone don't work, but neither 
does copy-protection technology.  The stongest approach to piracy is to back 
up copy-protection technology with anti-circumvention laws.  When it comes 
to spam, the trick, at least under U.S. law, is to make sure the law won't 
be struck down as violating free speech rights.

>Every legal restriction requires a technical solution too - breaking
>into houses is illegal, but you don't leave your windows and doors
>open. But you wouldn't want them to make it *legal* to break into houses. 
>The law is there as a deterrent, not as a perfect means of stopping the 
>crime.

>Criminalising spam would have the effect of stopping the mainsleaze 
> >spammers, while giving you an extra weapon in your battle against the 
>underground spammers. It would by no means stop spam, but then neither do 
>any of the current workable solutions either.

>Matt.

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From: Art Pollard <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 18 Mar 2003 17:43:14 -0700

>
>Except that Utah's law was just resounding defeated in its first test in 
>court and
>the written judgement makes it difficult to ever collect from sleazy 
>spammer and impossible from a 'honest' (or at least open) one

Yes.  But I am sure that they will be updating the spam laws here in 
Utah.  (In fact, I know they are.)

Anyway, this case was defeated partly because the person had "opted-in" to 
a list that was then sold to Sprint.  The judge simply said that since he 
had opted-in that Sprint had  the right to send him e-mail.  So, while this 
person was defeated, it wasn't a real test of the law.

I am working with the legislators here and attempting to try to get some 
guidelines put into the legislation. For example, all opt-in lists must 
contain information about when/how the person opted in and it must be 
contained in the e-mail and if someone opts out from the originating list 
then the person with the list must contact all those that they sold it to 
and notify them that you opted out.

-Art
-- 
Art Pollard
http://www.lextek.com/
Suppliers of High Performance Text Retrieval Engines.