Spam Prevention Bill

Dear Senator Murkowski,

Your spam prevention bill looks pretty good; the idea is certainly necessary.

One problem, though, in the implementation;

    quoting from Sec. 10 Definitions, 1(C):

"contains a list of one or more Internet sites that contain an
advertisement referred to in subparagraph (A) or a solicitation referred to in subparagraph (B)."

This would make illegal certain kinds of perfectly legitimate unsolicited e-mail.

I run a major and completely non-commercial Internet resource,
"RomanSites-L", which is a distribution-only mailinglist that indexes
websites related to Roman antiquity; currently about 700 subscribers.

   The resources of this list consist in listings of websites, partially indexed & annotated. Some of these websites are commercial: usually coin dealers.

   In sending these listings to my subscribers, I would be covered, because you must voluntarily subscribe to RomanSites-L.

But there are frequently times when, during the course of discussions on some of the scholarly malinglists (such as Classics-L, ROMARCH-L, etc.) a point arises that can be cleared up by sending, either to the list as a whole, or offlist to just one individual, a listing of one or more sites from the archives of RomanSites-L; --> which may occasionally contain commercial sites. Such a mailing by me is, strictly speaking, unsolicited.

For example, in response to a recent query on Classics-L about a painting by Alma Tadema entitled "Roses of Heliogabulus", I posted the URL of a website that showed related paintings by Alma Tadema, and implicitly suggested people go to it.

   That page is part of a commercial site. I have nothing to do with the site and no financial interest in it, but was merely noting a resource.

   Under S. 771 as currently written, I would have been doing something illegal? Nor of course am I the only person to disseminate resources this way: members of the ancient & medieval numismatics list NUMISM-L, for example, frequently post unsolicited information of this type offlist; similar examples can easily be multplied.

Sincerely,

William P. Thayer
1708 W. Arthur Avenue
Chicago, Illinois 60626

ListOwner, RomanSites-L
petworth[_at_]suba.com Received on Tue May 27 1997 - 16:30:24 GMT