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[Eric Hughes]

   From: Brian Beattie <beattie at CSOS.ORST.EDU>

   I disagree, one can use e-mail to steal.  E-mail consumes resources,
   resources for which the sender may have no right to use.  

It's not theft if there's no direct benefit to the actor.  It does
consume resources, there's no argument about that.  Note, however,
that the scope of any such resource use is with the message as a bit
sequence; no meaning or interpretation of the content is even
relevant.  That is, the resource use does not relate to the email as
communication, merely as a technical operation.

The question remains whether such resource use can ever be considered
unauthorized.  Certainly it's impolite; that's not at issue.

I argue that if you hook your machine up to the Internet, you've
implicitly authorized people to send you packets -- as many as they
want and of whatever nature as they want.  No service provision I've
ever seen gives any recourse to the end user against the provider for
"bad" packets.

I also think this is the one great flaw in the design of the Internet;
namely, that the sender has all the control over what packets flow
over the net.  A receiver can ask for a slowdown or cessation, but
there's no obligation to do so.  This will be, if anything, the
limiting factor in scalability of the internet.

Eric