I am not proposing to involve any new technology laws into this lawsuit.
I'm proposing to stick to laws that the lawyers and courts understand. A
spam is an unsolicited advertisement. When you get an unsolicited
advertisement, you have the right to ask the sender to take you off the
bulk mail list (the fact that you pay for the delivery is just icing on
the cake - even if THEY pay, you have the right to ask them to stop). I'm
proposing for hundreds of organizations totalling thousands of mailing
lists to collectively demand not to receive further ads on the mailing
lists they operate, through a carefully crafted legal procedure that
formally delegates this authority to a central clearinghouse. If the
spammer persists in sending ads to your lists, you can sue him, unless
the relevant laws happen to say that this does not work when the ad is
carried using IP datagrams. The last time I was in the US, I heard on TV
that a woman sued some used car joint that kept sending her ads for
whatever the current special deal of a lifetime was. She asked them to
stop several times, but they just went on. She got $2,500, which may not
be much, but if you multiply by the number of lists (or even just
organizations) it's serious money. Besides, I imagine that the spammers
or their clients would be in a worse situation. The used car joint can at
least plead negligence. After all, the woman had told them she wasn't
interested in buying anything from them. There wasn't much of a reason,
other than laziness and/or obstination, to keep sending her ads. A
spammer on the other hand would be making a serious cut to his "audience"
by obeying the clearinghouse's order. Complying means losing money,
because in the advertising business clients generally pay according to
the number of people who will see the message. It's not negligence when
you forget to remove, say, 10,000 lists from your mailing list of 15,000;
it's plain and simple refusal to comply.
Eric
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