At 12:03 AM 2002-05-20 -0700, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
>On 5/19/02 11:16 PM, "kim brooks wei" <kimi@kimbwei.com> wrote:
>
> >> As an extreme example -- if a person wants a "proof of license" to send
> >> child pornography, it's going to be rejected by any authority. But on a
> >> fundamental basis, if you want to avoid censorship or bureaucratic
> biases of
> >> any sort, if the recipient of that e-mail WANTS the kiddie porn
> >
> > Well, at least in the US, it's illegal to handle kid p at all.
> > Sometimes it's great to be an American.
>
>That's exactly why I used it to prove this point. Because the decision to
>grant a "license to send" is cloistered from its content. Or it has to be,
>or it simply becomes a bureaucratically driven censorship bureau, not a
>spam-protection bureau.
And this is something that is well known and which most people on the spam
lists understand. You can talk about the sorts of content that spam
typically has, so that people understand why it is bad. But the difference
between spam and other e-mail has to be defined in terms of behavior.
Spam is a behavior, it is not speech. The spammers, universally, will try
to define it as speech. They did it with junk faxes and got the junk fax
laws overturned in one US district. (wonder why you are suddenly getting so
many Chuq?) The anti-spammers, those who know what they are about, define
it as behavior.
Any attempt to regulate spam has to do so independent of content.
--
War is an ugly thing, but it is not the ugliest of things. The decayed and
degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is
worth war is much worse. A man who has nothing for which he is willing to
fight, nothing he cares about more than his own personal safety, is a
miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made so by the
exertions of better men than himself. -- John Stuart Mill
Nick Simicich - njs@scifi.squawk.com
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