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

[Sunder]

On Sun, 3 Aug 2003 mindfuq at comcast.net wrote:

> * John Kozubik <john at kozubik.com> [2003-08-02 19:27]:
> > 
> > That is incorrect.  AOL owns their network, and they can respond to your
> > arbitrary communications on their network in any way they see fit.
> 
> Unfortunately, you're correct.

What the fuck do you mean unfortunately?

> Yes, this is the problem I'm trying to address.  Normally when Alice
> tries to transmit information to Bob, if Mallory decides to sabotage
> the communication, this is a denial of service attack, forbidden by
> criminal law.  

Why is it forbidden by law?  Bob signed a contract with Mallory waiving
certain rights in exchange for the service provided by Mallory. Mallory
provided full disclosure of it's rights to Bob along with Bob's
responsabilities, etc.  Bob chose to accept those terms, how is this
illegal again?

If the service Mallory provides Bob is inadequate, that's between Mallory
and Bob, not between Alice and Bob.  Alice and Mallory have no contract
what-so-ever.  It's upto you, Alice, to convince Bob of this fact.  If you
can't, that's Bob's choice, not yours.  And you have no business to
interfere between Bob and Mallory.
 
> However, if the communication passes through Mallory's back yard, we
> can let the attack happen because it's on Mallory's property.  

Wrong.  Bob agreed to those terms of service, it's not a denial of
service, it's part of Bob's agreement with Mallory.

> At the
> same time, if I sabotage the city water line that passes through my
> property, I can be held accountable.  And rightly so.  

No.  Either you have agreed to live in said house by purchasing it, and
have therefore become a citizen of said city, and by such actions agreed
to abide by it's laws, or pre-existing laws allowed the city to run such
water services through your propery.  This too is by contract.

Where, Ms. Alice, is your contract with Mallory again?

> Mallory should
> also be held accountable for blocking communications.  
> This is what
> needs to change.

No, it does not.  Please take this to
alt.dumb.law.questions.asked.by.clueless.morons.  This has nothing to do
with cypherpunks.

> AOL isn't even a human, so to put the private property rights of AOL
> above the well-being of any human is a silly mistake.

So, in that case if you need a red stapler, you should be able to break
into AOL's offices and steal one?????  Since fucking when?

> In my particular case, AOL is blocking me from talking to friends and
> family.  

That's the choice of your friends and family, not yours.  Take it up with
them, not AOL.

> I suppose I could argue that the packets I create and send
> are created with my private property and resources, so those packets
> are my property, 

This is true - utpto the point where you place said packets on the
internet.  From that point on, while you may retain copyright (even that
is questionable), you have explicity caused an automated action that takes
said packets and puts them into the machine that is the internet, for it
to do what it does.  If some of the members of that machine do things
differently than you expect, it sucks to be you, but that's your problem,
not theirs.  You decided to place those packets on that network, not the
members of that network.

If you put a book you wrote into a shredder, well, who are you going to
sue?  The shredder company? Or yourself?


> and AOL is vandalizing my property by destroying
> these packets.  

No, dumbass, you placed those packets on said network repeatedly after you
have discovered that they will be dropped in the bit bucket, that's too
bad for you.  You've vandalized your own packets.

> You can argue that how you want, but the bottom line
> is that AOL is using their property to gain power to control who may
> talk to who.  

And that is their right, as contractually agreed to by their customers -
your friends and family members included.  You have no stake in this, nor
any relationship with AOL.

> This is clearly an abusive use of property, and I have
> no tolarance for it.  

No, you abused your own property knowing full well it would be dropped
into the bit bucket right after the 1st time you tried it.  And since
you've got no contractual agreement with AOL, you have no expected
reasonable expectation that AOL would forward your packets to your f&f,
especially if AOL deems your packets to be harmful to it's network for
whatever reason.

> They need to be removed from power, and the
> consumers who contributed to the purchasing of their property need to
> be given some rights.
> 
> So if you're saying that AOL's private property rights are supporting
> their effort to stop me from talking to my family, then of course I
> have very little respect for private property rights.  I often see
> people using their private property to cause damage to others, so it's
> not real top on my list in these cases.
> 

Your idiocy is showing.



----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos---------------------------
 + ^ + :25Kliters anthrax, 38K liters botulinum toxin, 500 tons of   /|\
  \|/  :sarin, mustard and VX gas, mobile bio-weapons labs, nukular /\|/\
<--*-->:weapons.. Reasons for war on Iraq - GWB 2003-01-28 speech.  \/|\/
  /|\  :Found to date: 0.  Cost of war: $800,000,000,000 USD.        \|/
 + v + :           The look on Sadam's face - priceless!       
--------_sunder_ at _sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------