From: Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Date: Thu Feb 04 1999 - 17:19:34 MST
> Legislation is one part of the solution to ending
> unsolicited commercial/bulk email.
Ironically, most of the "anti-spam" legislation being
currently debated in state houses is in fact decidedly
/pro/-spam, much of it lobbied for by the DMA (the
Deceitful--er, Direct--Marketing Association, who has
a much bigger lobby than the ISP industry. Most of it
outlaws things like forged headers or mandates use of
remove lists while explicitly allowing the act itself,
which might otherwise be prosecuted as a tort (either
harassment of the recipient or usurpation of thousands
of dollars worth of badwidth and disk space for a
large ISP).
Let us not make the mistake of thinking that the
definitions of trespass in cyberspace are easy to define
by analogy to old-world technologies like gates, locks,
signs, and such. ALL definitions of tortious acts--
from assault to theft and many more--are matters of
degree with lines drawn by consensus, no matter how
much we would like there to exist objective definitions
for them. Legislation is an appropriate way to codify
consensus in matters like this (for example, "no hunting"
signs must be a certain size and frequency around a
property to have legal effect; certain advertisements
are considered a binding offer of contract; noises and
smells have to reach a certain level to be considered
a nuisance to neighbors; etc.) Without such ways to
codify nebulous boundaries, we reach the absurd and
well-known "breathing is a trespass" problem of rigid
libertarian doctrine.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC
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