Problems With Shortcodes Could Harm SMS Revenues

California Spam Law: Won't Stop Spam, Will Increase Lawsuits

from the fun-fun-fun dept

Fri, Nov 14th 2003 3:27pm — Mike Masnick

I hate spam and would like nothing better than to see an effective anti-spam law put on the books. However, as I've said before, the California anti-spam law is not the right law. Plenty of others seem to agree, and everyone believes that the law won't stand up if tested in court. The problem is what do people do until it's been tested? The other question is who is going to take on this law. Luckily, it won't be the Direct Marketing Association, who I don't trust in the slightest. They say they've burned up all their resources fighting the "Do Not Call" list. At a conference among email marketers, some were suggesting that they should file their own lawsuits under the bill in order to purposely clog the court system with such lawsuits. This seems like typical bad marketing thinking that overburdening a system somehow gets extra attention. The right response is that someone who gets sued for doing something that clearly is not spam is going to have to go to court and get the law overturned. Maybe (and this would be the best) it happens to someone who is not associated with an "email marketing" company, but just someone who sends a perfectly reasonable email and gets hit with a lawsuit.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

2 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Billy J. West Jr., 14 Nov 2003 @ 7:23pm

Holding the responsible party accoutnable.
I think the company/business/whatever who's advertisement is being dispersed via spam should be held responsible. It is, after all, their marketing department (directly or indirectly) who are hiring the spamers to send spam.

Cut off the roots, and you kill the plant.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Mike (profile), 14 Nov 2003 @ 8:40pm

Re: Holding the responsible party accoutnable.
If you do that, the spammers will start sending spam for random companies just to get them in trouble.... They'll especially focus on anyone who's an anti-spammer.
[ link to this | view in thread ]