At 01:45 AM 22/05/2002 +0200, Alfredo G�mez Grande wrote:
>About SPAM it is legal as far as the company provides you with the tools to
>remove your address and they delete it when you require it.
This is by no means certain, but the question of present legality is more
on-topic for suespammers than spamcon-general.
> Other thing is
>when you say that you don't want to receive more publicity and they keep on
>sending it. If you have followed their instructions to delete your address
>and they don't pay attention to you,
Following the instructions is impossible when you get more than a handful
of spams a day - my own volume of spam is now such that I physically could
not respond and unsubscribe to it all.
>To send unsolicited publicity is as legal as to turn the TV on and received
>it. If you don't want to receive publicity, you tune a private channel or
>don't buy a newspaper or listen to a public radio.
I'm fairly sure people have pointed out to you before, repeatedly, why
analogies with TV and radio, where the advertiser pays, are inappropriate.
There is, however, a much more straight-forward legal reason why the TV
analogy is entirely inapplicable. With mass media, the broadcaster puts the
ads in. By watching the programming of that broadcaster, you have consented
to the service provider (the broadcaster) also transmitting those ads. In
the case of spam, the service provider is not sending the ads - the sender
has no relationship, and no agreement with the recipient.
Spam is more like somebody starting up a high-powered pirate television
station that broadcasts ads over the same frequencies as another television
station, drowning out the communication from the licensed station.
>But in the case of the Internet, if I publish my email address in a web
>site, this can be interpreted that you want anybody who visits your web to
>write to you.
Only for personal messages.
> Another thing is to say "write to me if you only want to buy,
>not to sell", but companies don't do that but they do complain about SPAM.
A great many people who put their email address on their web page say "this
is not for spam" on the same page. It is irrelevant since the spammers do
not read the pages - they use spiders that grab the email address and
nothing else.
>So, summarizing, if you receive an email from somebody and you don't want
>it, you have to ask for an unsubscription.
This is exactly backwards. It's like saying "if somebody punches you and
you don't want it, you have to ask them to stop". It is the party who
inflicts themself on another that has obligations, not the victim who was
going about their business without bothering anybody.
>If you receive many from many people, install an Anti-SPAM software.
This ignores the network costs.
>If this
>doesn't work, try to remind where you left your email address and ask the
>webmaster to delete your email address. If he/she/it doesn't do it, then sue
>(whatever). If you have thousands of emails, then change your email address
>and send a letter to your contacts informing them that your email address.
>Next time, take more care where you leave your email address and see if the
>site has Privacy Rules.
So you're saying that spammers shouldn't be required to adjust their
practices to fit with the expectations of society, but that the rest of
society has to organise their lives around hiding from spam, making it hard
for people to find them, not participating, and generally reordering
everything to suit the spammers?
In your view, it is not the spammers, who take deliberate actions with the
positive intention of affecting everybody else, whose behaviour is
unacceptable. You are saying that it is the behaviour of other people going
peacefully about their business without forcing themselves onto anybody,
that is unacceptable.
There is no possible justification for such an approach. It is fundamental
to principles of natural law that a person who is going about their own
business without affecting others is entitled to be left alone. It is when
a person chooses to interact that the choice binds them to the rules of
society. The person making that choice is bound by principles of natural
law to consider the impact of their behaviour, and where their behaviour is
self-serving, to consider the impact of everybody adopting the same mode of
behaviour.
Spammers reach out and impact on people going peacefully about their
business. They create the interaction that causes the problems, and
principles of natural law clearly and unambiguously demand that they not
spam. To say that there is no positive law against it is not to the point -
and possibly wrong to begin with - the absence of a positive law against it
merely highlights the presence of a defect in the positive law that is in
urgent need of rectification.
It is unacceptable for somebody to go about punching people until they say
"stop". It is unacceptable for somebody to go about stealing until the
victims say "stop". It is unacceptable to spray-paint an advertisement to
the wall of somebody's house until they say "stop". And it is equally
unacceptable to take the positive step of spamming, a step that is entirely
in the nature of taking conscious, voluntary, unnecessary and self-serving
actions that directly and unavoidably impacts on others, until the victims
say "stop".
__________________________________________________________________________
Troy Rollo, Sydney, Australasia IANALY,TINLA [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fight spam in Australia - Join CAUBE.AU - http://www.caube.org.au/
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