Spam control again

[sethg at ropine.com (Seth Gordon)]

On Wed, 2003-07-16 at 12:03, josephc at etards.net wrote:
> To those of you that support laws against SPAM as opposed to community 
> initiative amongst ISP's, how do you contend to deal with SPAM that comes 
> from outside of the US borders?
> 
> If I'm not mistaken, MOST spam comes from Asia, which would be unaffected 
> by any law passed by congress.

Simply require that:

(1) The sender of any commercial email message must warrant that the
recipient has a pre-existing business relationship with the sender, or
that the recipient has given permission to receive this kind of email. 
Violation of this warranty is a tort with statutory damages of $5000 per
message sent ... just like junk faxes.

(2) If a commercial email message passes through an American ISP, that
ISP must warrant that the sender is complying with point (1).  If the
sender cannot be located, or if the sender loses a lawsuit to recover
damages but does not pay, then the ISP is liable.

(3) Notwithstanding (2), if a commercial email message passes from one
American ISP to another American ISP to its recipient, the downstream
ISP may pass responsibility to the upstream one, and would only be
responsible for the damages if the upstream ISP is insolvent.

(4) If a commercial email message passes from a non-American ISP to an
American ISP to its recipient, the American ISP is responsible.

Now, if this law were passed, then every American ISP that has
interconnect agreements with foreign ISPs would tell their partners:
"Post a bond so we're insured against spam-related damages coming from
your network, or we're going to block all incoming port 25 traffic from
you."

> 
> -joe
> 
-- 
"You are supposed to figure these things out from the 'context' ... a
German
word meaning 'you're screwed'." --Dan Barrett, "So You Want to Learn
Japanese"
// seth gordon // sethg at ropine.com // http://ropine.com/sethg/cv.html //