>What happens if someone takes the telephone and does the equivalent of a
>spam?  What if they hooked the phone to their pc, and had it dial number
>after number, and play some kind of recording to each person that answered?
>To promote whatever drivel they have.  What if they targetted a specific
>group, like Jews (for example if they got a phone number list from a
>local synagogue) and send them all voice calls about how the holocaust never
>happened... what are the consequences there?  It seems to me that if the
>situations are similar, the results should be similar.  I don't know much
>about these kind of laws but there ought to be some kind of harrassment
>laws out there...
>
>Kevin
>
As they say, "there ought to be a law."  The telecommunications laws have
come a long way in the last few years specifically to control telemarketing
and computerized dialing.  And there are various specific regulations under
those laws.  For example, if I answer such a call, and then hang up, the
equipment on the other end needs to promptly hang up and release my line.
And they can only call between 8:00 AM and 9:00 PM.  Etc.  But I don't
think there are any regulations on where they would have gotten my phone
number in the first place, and in the example above, unless the synagogue
ran some kind of x.500 server which listed members' phone numbers, they
would need to buy the membership list somewhere.  Because they would
probably have to pay to acquire the list, they would have to be really rich
to do something like that just for the hell of it, which is what the 'net
spammers are doing.
 
And the point is that, while the analogy to the telephone is often a good
one for thinking thru how e-mail should work, the same laws clearly don't
cover it.  It's pretty clear that, at this point in time, maintaining some
order depends on the ISP's using common sense to defend their own business
interests by going after their own subscribers, and that their best tool
today appears to be contract law.  That may not be very satisfying to us,
because it's a very piecemeal approach, and the spammers keep finding new
ISP's, but most of the ISP's do seem pretty quick to respond once notified.
 
 
Chuck
 
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* Chuck McClenon                  (512) 471-0011                         *
* Assistant Director                                                     *
 
* Data Processing Department                                             *
* The University of Texas at Austin                                      *
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