>Any form of unsolicited advertising in which the recipient incurs an
>expense is simply wrong.
That would be *all* of it. Receiving any kind of message, whether it's an ad
on the checkstand at the grocery store, a fax, whatever, creates an expense,
even though sometimes the expense is more tangible than others. Isn't it a
bit of a waste of time to try to figure out where to draw this line?
In the U.S., the 1st Amendment can be interpreted to direct that when
there's a gray line between free speech and protecting people from harm, the
error should be on the side of free speech. This is why, for example, even
if you can prove that a newspaper is going to publish something libelous
about you, you cannot stop it, you can only seek redress afterwards (the
only exception is the thoroughly vague notion of "national security"). This
principle of banning prior restraint could be argued to extend to
"publishers" who broadcast junk mail on the net.
Isn't it much more in the spirit of cooperation on the net to encourage
development of technologies that solve the problem, instead of hoping that
the law will do so?
There is tremendous economic incentive for companies to develop smarter and
smarter e-mail filtering to cope with the junk mail; we're just in a
temporary gap when the filtering agents haven't caught up with the brute
force of junk e-mail. A law that cut off the flow would stop the beneficial
unsolicited e-mail (there are such things!), which one might imagine is the
baby that's in the bathwater. (To stretch the metaphor unduly, one might
argue that the baby is drowning in water polluted by spam, but ...)
To bring us back to robots, I think that the implication is that any system
of making information available for robots and other agents should assume
that they are going to be able to utilize increasingly sophisticated
filtering data.
Nick Arnett
---------------------------------------
Product Manager, Advanced Technology
Verity Inc.
408-542-2164; home office 408-369-1233
http://www.verity.com
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