« Great service from Antec | Main | Print screen smoke screen »
Why no legal remedy for spam?
I'm writing with reference to the letter from Nigel Johnston, published in the August 2005 issue of PCW and regarding spam etc. I am also perplexed as to why no legal remedy can be made available.
I too know of instances where IT specialists have been called in by companies whose operations have been brought to a halt due to the fact their computers have been rendered inoperable due to both malicious (virus) infections and legal, but no by no means benign, installations such as spam and spyware. Mr Johnston makes the point that if he were to go on a wrecking spree in the local supermarket he would be brought to book toot sweet. However, there would be mens rea in that case and therefore subject to criminal proceedings.
Sending spam and spyware has no criminal intent and would have to be dealt with in the civil courts. One could make the point that we cannot sue individuals or organisations that send junk mail to the home, and the same applies junk emails and spam/spyware. But, that is a mere inconvenience and the mail can be binned, you don't have to hire an IT expert to rid your home of it.
A colleague of mine recently had to pay £680.00 to deal with such a problem. He winced at the cost, though it took 2 highly qualified and skilled people the best part of the day to get his computers running again, although he, as an Independant Financial Advisor charges a minimum £120.00 for an intial 1 hour consultation, but that's another story. Surely, there must some enterprising lawyer who can bring a class action, or a collective action whereby several organisations can bring an action against the offender.
As Mr Johnston suggests, a high profile precedent whereby those responsible were stung and stung hard is needed. Meantime, I've posted this query before but as yet, no reply. Is it possible to include mail rules where the mail client will only accept mails from enumerated sources, such as .co.uk?
Michael Bowker
November 4, 2005 in Vent your spleen! | Permalink
TrackBack
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/t/trackback/24766/3515122
Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Why no legal remedy for spam?:
Comments
Mail rules won't help until all SMTP servers use authentication. I can send an email from anyone to anyone with information in the public domain and five lines of code. We are in a crazy situation where we need usernames and passwords to collect our mail ( which is basically public anyway as it passes from server to server ) but sending an email usually needs no username/password!
Posted by: adrian | 4 Nov 2005 21:28:48
