On Thu, May 22, 1997 at 03:07:14PM -0500, Willaim H. Geiger III wrote: -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- [...]
I as the owner of certain computer equipment have the right to determin who uses such equipment and how. It should be no different that my right to determin who can enter my house and who can not.
Your analogy is flawed in many ways. 1) The entities entering your house have an identity; what is actually entering your computer equipment is just bits, which have no identity. Spamfords bits are no different than anyone elses. 2) By the very act of connecting to the network you agree to recieve any bits that are automatically routed to you.
If I inform Spamford that he is not welcome in my house and he still insists on comming in I should have some recource to stop him.
You are perfectly free to disconnect your computer from the net. You are free to try to find a provider that guarantees not to pass any spam on to you. But unless you have some contract with your provider that specifies special rights, when you sign up you implicitly agree to accept the bits aimed at you -- otherwise you couldn't receive any email at all. What you get on the wire is a function of explicit and implicit contractual obligations. This is true whether you are UUNET peering with ANS or whether you are a PC on a dialup line.
IMHO this can be taking care of through civil courts hitting the spamers where it counts in the wallet. As far as identification this is quite simple to do without the above measure.
Identification isn't the problem at all. The problem is that you have no grounds on which to base a suit. Just as you can't sue me for sending this mail -- it's an exchange you entered into of your own free will. Even if Spamford uses tricks to
cover his tracks his clients are known as they tell you who they are in their spam. Traceing back to Cyber-Momo is trivial once his clients are known. IMHO when Compu$erve suied Spamford thay should have listed all of his customers in the lawsuit.
Yeah but he didn't kick anything in, he just used something which was setup to be used for free, in an unmetered fashion, where no contracts were agreed to before hand.
No it was not. Just because you leave a door unlocked does not mean that anyone has the right to enter. If you run into the store and forget to lock the doors on your car does that mean that anyone has the right to drive off in your car? If you leave the front door unlocked on your house does that mean that anyone can walk in and help themselfs to the contents of your house?
All flawed analogies. You *did* agree to recieve mail -- in fact, that is one of the primary uses of your computer -- and you did *not* place any restrictions on that connection. Furthermore, you can't -- no one will sell you an internet connection at any level where they will accept a contractual obligation to keep spam from getting to you. [...]
I never have argued for more legislation of the internet for any reason. I just think that creative use of current laws can put an end to this pestilance. I don't see remailers being hurt in this as the whole purpose of spam is to be non-anonymous (you can't sell anything if they don't know where to send the money to). I do think that litigation can be used effectivly to put an end to Spamford without changing the current structure of the internet.
I don't see any legal basis for it. -- Kent Crispin "No reason to get excited", kent@songbird.com the thief he kindly spoke... PGP fingerprint: B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44 61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55 http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html