[eff-austin] Antispam Bills: Worse Than Spam?

[mindfuq at comcast.net]

* Thomas Shaddack <shaddack at ns.arachne.cz> [2003-08-01 21:54]:
> 
> > Legitimate email - deliver as intended.   non-legitimate email - block the
> > connection at the server.
> 
> Do we need laws for that? 

We definately need a law making it illegal for an ISP to block
non-spam email.  I cannot email a friend who uses AOL, and wants to
receive my email, because AOL blocks it.  The only law out there to
protect me from this is a denial of service law, but it will be
difficult for me to argue that AOL is doing a DoS attack on me.  I
have no choice but to take actions under the DoS laws, but I would
much rather have a law that makes blocking legitimate communication a
crime.

> Software is easier to upgrade/change than laws, less likely to
> misfire, and easier to deal with when it misfires.

What software are you talking about?  If it's the end user software, I
don't care, because if I cannot email a friend I can motivate them to
fix the problem.  But if you're talking about software that an ISP
would run, you're missing something.  AOL's software is falsely
blocking my email, and even though they could fix the problem, they
are not motivated because I'm a single user.  I've complained several
times.  They just ignore the complaint.  So software is a poor
solution if the people implementing the software are not motivated to
fix false positives.

> Laws won't help in recognizing legitimate and non-legitimate mail.
> Artificial intelligence will be more effective than the Congress. (On the
> other hand, *anything* is usually more effective than the Congress.)

Why would you say this?  It's not difficult to define spam.  You
simply list the charactoristics of spam, and then list exclusions to
ensure legitimate mail doesn't fit the definition.  This has working
beautifully for defining telemarketing phone calls.  There is not a
single math equation in the legal definition for "unsolicited
telemarketing call".  Even if there are imperfections in the
definition, people can at least be aware of the definition and make
sure that they aren't in the grey area.  If an email is in a grey
area, then the sender takes a risk by sending it.  

But to argue that law should not address a particular issue because of
the difficulty of writing a definition is silly.  You just write the
definition such that the law doesn't target email that it doesn't
intend to target, and let go the fact that it may not target
everything we would like it to.

And to say that software can define spam better than laws written in
english is rediculous.  AOL blocks my personal email to a friend, and
I don't use a single spam phrase.  So it goes the other way too.. the
way software can define spam can get pretty stupid, I've seen it too
many times.

> The law in question will be TOO easy to use as a weapon.

What do you mean by this?  One could argue that I'm using the TCPA as
a weapon against all these telemarketers I drag into court.  So what?
Most people see what I do as a service to the community.