It took spammers much longer to grab the address from my site, but they did.

So… how do I collect my money? 😉
Sandy

Very smart post — your argument makes a lot of sense. In fact, Lessig’s apparent belief that spammers should be bound by the terms of the contract, even though the address was simply harvested by a program, would seem to result in fairly restrictive uses of the web. Don’t we want to allow machines to be able to harvest information (even if the harvesting, in this case, has unpleasant consequences)?

To say that every person whose computer speaks to another computer, is held to have constructively assented to the terms of the contract, would seem to be an anti-innovation position to take.

I’d be interested to hear Lessig’s response to your argument.

It seems like the posting of this address on a site that is frequented is likely a downfall of any potential litigation. It is entirely possible that I, or any other visitor, could have taken your address and signed you up for any number of mailings. I’m pretty sure that all of this is done tounge-in-cheek, but if you are really hoping to succeed in collecting on the claim, I’d suggest you place a similar message on a site that is not so busy…perhaps one that is not even obviously linked to your page, such that people are far less likely to see it, but spambots can still access it.

-kd

Ari.

California senate passes antispam bill
(By Carly Suppa, IDG News Service)

Not waiting for the U.S. Congress to take action against spam, the California State Senate passed a bill Thursday that would turn spam from a misdemeanor to a felony offense and cost spammers an estimated US$500 per unsolicited e-mail sent….

you don’t think that there’s something wrong with saying that email harvesting bots for the sole purpose of sending spam is “commonly” done ? and without human intervention ? while it’s not illegal to screen-scrape email addresses from web pages, such as Professor Lessig’s blog here, it is becoming more and more illegal to send unsolicited email *TO* that address.

your analogy of visiting a web page with an encoded terms of service doesn’t quite apply, either. the visiting of a web page and the protocols involved with such a transaction doesn’t impose any inconvenience to the owner of the web page, whereas receiving unsolicited email can be argued to be an inconvenience. (as are receiving junk faxes and telemarketing commercial phone calls, which are becoming illegal as well)

just because the bot can’t read or accept the contract under which email to that address is permitted is no excuse for sending email to it in violation of that contract.

basically, there shouldn’t be any email sent to that address. the burden of reading and/or accepting the contract falls on the individual who is responsible for running the email harvesting robot, and if he/she doesn’t read the contract, it’s not Mr. Lessig’s fault.

-kd