Re: In re: Spam and Gate Crashing

The following is, at best, tangential to the issue of coyright... apologies in advance... it is random musing about legal formalisms and the Internet.

About "spamming a listserv" Brian Yoder <byoder[_at_]netcom.com> and I wrote fairly similar things. Brian wrote

> ... You just contact the people the spammer gets his
> service and have them warn him or boot him. There's no need to bring
> the full force of the legal and police systems to bear on such people.
> This approach works fine, costs next to nothing, and allows for
> differences in experience of users and so on in a way that a gigantic
> scheme of legal definitions courts, and legislation never could. Why
> do you just assume that the only way to deal with spamming is to make
> it illegal?

I agree with Brian's assessment and must add that it has been rather curious for me to see the "legalistic" approaches being proposed. It got me to thinking about how simple the Internet has been in the past -- a set of polite agreements -- and how alien its culture and that of the legal community often are to one another.

All the legal apparatus which exists outside of netland must have come into existence for some historical (though perhaps now obsolete) reason. How does the current mechanism of polite consensus resolve a dispute between the Internet provider and the consumer with regard to, say, a freedom of speech issue? Well it doesn't... if the consumer doesn't like the rules associated with the service they can simply not use it. This of course is likely to change as the Net becomes more regulated. The clearest precedents come, perhaps, from higher education, where a thirty year old history of student discipline cases on computing violations has grown up. These systems generally work and might provide a better model than trying to bend existing federal laws (on dozens of topics including copyright) to cover the net. (This particular set of precedents, however is, of course, proprietary, and could be argued (if higher ed is really a business) to contain trade secrets :)

Some of us in netland have argued for common carrier status for the net. This might insulate the net from such absurdities as sysops being held liable for mischievous bits passing though their systems, but with this would come at least some of this "gigantic scheme." Title 18 Section 342, for example, could land a sysop in jail for 15 years for drinking a shot of tequila while doing routine system backups after hours (I've actually known people who did this), if the Internet were a common carrier.

But electronic annoyance (such as spamming) is extremely slippery to pin-down and can mean no more than saying too much to too many people about something which most of them think is inappropriate (like, perhaps, this particular note).

David Dailey (ddailey[_at_]williams.edu) Received on Fri Oct 20 1995 - 21:32:59 GMT