Mr. May wrote:
At 11:40 AM -0600 2/15/97, snow wrote:
Mr. Bell wrote:
However, you connect that fax machine to a phone line, when you know full well that should it be enabled to do so, it will automatically pick up the phone when it "hears" a ring, and will print out a fax based on information provided. It isn't clear why sending a fax is any "wronger" than mailing junk mail, or making a (voice) phone call to somebody. That is a ridiculous argument. The door to my home is connected to the street,m and I know full well that that makes it easy for anyone to come wandering in to my home. Is it legal, just because I have my home hooked to the street, for someone to come in and help themselves to a beer out of my fridge?
The proper parallel is to _knocking on the door_. Talking about "unwanted phone calls" or "unwanted faxes" as being equivalent to entering a house and wandering around is incorrect.
With phone calls, yes. With unwanted faxes no. With Phone Calls, and knocks on the door I have the option of simply not answering. Faxes (in certain enviroments) you can't do that with.
Our society fairly reasonably allows tort relief for, say, having one's doorbell rung frequently or at odd hours. On the fax issue, similar tort relief could be obtained if a person or business was truly "under attack." (Purists, like me, would probably prefer technological solutions even in these cases. Leave a phone on answering machine mode, only switch on the fax mode when a fax is expected, etc.)
Or simply a societal acceptance of retaliation(sp?) Someone who constantly wakes you up in the middle of the night, well you just arrange it so they get no sleep.
These tort actions are a far cry from proposals that anyone whose knock on the door, or phonecall, or e-mail, or fax is subject to criminal prosecution under proposed new laws. (I think the courts are already clogged enough, and I have faith that no court in the land will accept a case where no real harm was done. A friend of mine got mailbombed with 25,000 e-mail messages in one day, shutting down his account until the mess could be cleaned up, and it's not even likely he'll ever get any relief.)
I (I think like you) feel that almost no one will get convicted of these "crimes" unless the attacker simply goes too far.
What CompuServe did was quite different, as CompuServe decided that some e-mail would not be delivered. This is essentially comparable to the Postal Service deciding that mail from the National Rifle Association is, to them, "junk," or to the phone company deciding that phone calls from Libya or Iraq or some other unfavored nation will be fed to a dead number.
Not really. The US Postal service is a regulated monopoly, and is the only game in town. If they weren't a regulated monopoly, I wouldn't care if they refused to carry certain peices of mail, the mailer would have the option of simply using a different service. Thus with compuserve, they have the right (as a private company) to refuse to deliver what ever they wish. And their users have the right to go elsewhere.
Getting the courts and the regulators involved in deciding what speech is junk and what is not junk is unconstitutional, which was my earlier point.
Which I argee with.