[LEMONS] 10.23.2003
Bad Ideas
I was in Santa Clara on Monday and Tuesday at ISPCON. One of the big topics and the subject of one of the stories I wrote was how to stop spam.In light of the (allegedly) anti-spam bill passed yesterday in the Senate, I felt that some of it was worth repeating here:
All of the panelists except Huseman, who said the FTC does not take stances on pending legislation, agreed that three anti-spam bills before Congress -- S. 1293 in the Senate, and H.R. 1933 and H.R. 2214 in the House -- would lead to more spam by providing spammers with a legitimate avenue to transmit unsolicited e-mail.Another hot topic was the idea of a federal "do not spam" list, which is now part of the Burns-Wyden legislation. The FTC representative, several techies in attendance, and all the legal folks were utterly dismisssive of this idea as a preposterous waste of time and resources; an utterly unenforceable idea which would be impossible to implement and would most likely serve to provide spammers with more resources and more valid email addresses. The bill passed yesterday in the Senate shows Washington's fundamental failure to grasp technology issues.
The best piece of anti-spam legislation, the only anti-spam legislation that has any teeth whatosoever, is California's SB 186, which was to go into effect in January but will be null and void if this (bad) national legislation becomes law. SB 186 makes it illegal for anyone to send spam to or from an email address registered in California, and more importantly, provides for damages from $1,000 upwards. In other words, as the law stands now and assuming the new legislation doesn't make it through the House before the new year, if you get a piece of spam after January 1 and you live in California, and you can track down the spammer or the third-party advertiser, you can take them to small claims court. It's the first law with any teeth that's ever come on the books. It's the first law to specifically make spam illegal.
Several years ago, when I was in Atlanta working at my first job out of college, I wrote a press release for a client who had just won a court case against Cyberpromotions (Sanford Wallace). The attorney was a guy named Pete Wellborn (nickname: "The Spammer Hammer"), who (to my great surprise) was one of the panelists at ISPCON (at a different session than the one referenced above).
Pete wasn't rah-rah sis-boom-bah over SB 186. He takes the view that, based on trespass laws, spam is already illegal and he had something really interesting to say, something worth repeating:
"A spam-specific law is a luxury, not necessity," said Wellborn. "The necessity is that we do not have bad legislation. Current spam bills [before the US Congress] are thinly-designed pro spam bills."Call your congressperson. Email the White House. Write nasty things about it on your blog. Stop this bad idea before it becomes law.
- l i n k -
