it just gets worser and worser

Posted on June 20, 2003 by Lessig

Dan Gillmor nicely captures the truth around the emerging spam consensus in DC: A spam bill that will make it (1) harder to decline UCE from companies with famous logos, and (2) impossible to block UCE from spammers.

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1 Response to it just gets worser and worser

  1. Chip says:
    June 22, 2003 at 3:19 pm

    Thanks for noting this. When HB 1282 was going through the Texas legislature, people were aghast to learn the horrible pro-spam provisions in this legislation (such as mandatory opt-out but with a 90-day grace period to continue spamming). They were even more surprised to find that the strongest support for this flawed legislation was coming from Microsoft and AOL.

    Big Internet is trying to push through spam laws that eliminate private right of action, so that they get to call all the shots (and eliminate any risk of action from their marketing efforts). The slickest trick they are using in the state legislations is putting in a low per-message penalty (say, $10), and declaring penalty limits like: for ISPS, the per-message penalty or $25,000 whichever is more, and for individuals, the per-message penalty or $25,000 whichever is less.

    This ensures big Internet can collect big damages, but individuals won’t even get enough to cover their filing costs.

    (The 90-day license to spam got struck in committee, but the laughable penalties remained intact. )

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