From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: From: David Presotto To: 9fans@cse.psu.edu Subject: Re: [9fans] ISP filtering - update In-Reply-To: <3F7314CE.241884EE@null.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2003 13:28:12 -0400 Topicbox-Message-UUID: 4b422de8-eacc-11e9-9e20-41e7f4b1d025 As far as I can tell, using laws to stop spammers is not very effective. Spam is essentially a nuisance. There are indeed many local nuisance laws. However, an attempt to injunct someone in another state from bothering you is pretty hard. Local laws against bulk faxing got passed partially with the support of businesses that claimed the fax spam was wasting their paper and losing them business when their fax machines didn't have paper to take orders. Similar argument may work with spam but only once the problem gets much worse than it is. Read HR 2515 for a fairly reasoned description of the problem, though the solution wouldn't really help much. They request that each sender (not transmitter) of spam have an opt-out mechanism and that they have valid reply info so that you can opt out. However, you get into the same problem as opting out of telemarketing calls. If you have to opt-out with each spammer, you could easily spend your whole life opting out. A opt-out registry would be nice, but look what's happening with the FTC's do-not-call registry.