From: zerkle@krakatoa.cs.ucdavis.edu (Dan Zerkle)
Newsgroups: news.admin.net-abuse.email
Subject: Good editorial from Sacramento Bee
Date: 1 Oct 1997 20:59:28 GMT

The following editorial appeared in today's (October 1's)
edition of the Sacramento Bee.  Rarely do mass-media
journalists get everything exactly right when they write
about the Internet.  In this case, one did.

This is reprinted with permission of the author of the
piece, editor Howard Weaver.  To reprint it, the
conditions he gave me are:

* Attribute it properly.

* Don't edit it.

* Plug their Web site:  http://www.sacbee.com/ .  I've looked
  at it.  It really is a great site.

---start of editorial---

STOP SPAM

Time for Congress to restrict unsolicited e-mail ads

Remember the early days of the fax?  After the machines were installed
in most offices, it wasn't rare to come in first thing in the morning
and find that "junk fax" advertising messages had run through the
entire supply of fax paper and spooled up on the floor in a big pile
of unsolicited mess.

Congress fixed that problem with and anti-junk fax law that has worked
well in shutting down the junk fax industry, survived numerous court
tests and cleaned up that pile of unwanted junk from the office floor.
Now it's time to do the same thing about junk e-mail -- "spam," as
Internet users know it.

Several bills are pending in Congress to do that, but the best of the
lot by far is HR 1748 by Rep. Christopher Smith of New Jersey.  It
simply amends the junk fax law to give e-mail consumers a private
right of action against the purveyors of spam.  In essence, it allows
you to sue the advertiser for $500 for every piece of unsolicited
e-mail you receive; if the court finds the smapper willfully or
knowingly violated the law, the total triples to $1,500.

Because the law directly targets the advertiser -- who is, after all,
the one trying to make money on this deal -- it creates a powerful
disincentive against spamming.  You won't need to track down the
mysterious return address from which the spam was sent, or sort
through the routing to find out who handled the e-mail.  If there's a
post office box, 800 number or other identifier for the product,
that's enough.

The Supreme Court has ruled in Rowan vs. Post Office that there is no
First Amendment right to send people unsolicited messages.  "Nothing
in the Constitution compels us to listen to or to view and unwanted
communication, whatever its merit....  We therefore categorically
reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution
or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another....
We repeat, the right of the mailer stops at the outer boundary of
every person's domain."

The Smith bill would give computer users the tools they need to attack
the spam epidemic at its roots:  money.  Without creating a clumsy
regulatory scheme, it empowers them to take matters into their own
hands and creates powerful incentives again [sic] unsolicited
e-mail.  It deserves passage.