ACLU on spam (fwd)

[David Barts]

What's next?  An argument that the First Amendment protects my right to
take a spare telephone over to the Network Interface Unit on the side
of my neighbor's house, plug it in, and exercise my free speech rights
in an hour-long phone call to Botswana?

Seriously, this is an almost exact analogy of junk E-mail.  The
*recipient* is *paying* to store the junk mail on his/her machine.
Even on SCN, most mailboxes have limited storage capacity, and Web
pages count against that: a spammer's E-mail is imposing costs on
others.  This is totally different from either incoming phone calls or
incoming paper mail, which both come at no cost.

I generally agree with the ACLU but they screwed up big time on this
one.

-- 
         David W. Barts (davidb at scn.org) / http://www.scn.org/~davidb
     The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom
                   they oppress.  -- Frederick Douglass
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