denbeste@bbn.com (Steven Den Beste) (04/07/89)
The following was posted originally to news.admin and comp.org.ieee, and was quoted in comp.risks, from whence I stole it: "California Assembly Bill AB576 (not yet passed into law) states that a person who uses a machine that electronically transmits messages or facsimiles of documents through connection with a telephone network to transmit unsolicited material for the sale of any realty, goods, or services is guilty of a misdemeanor. "The IEEE San Diego Section Bulletin (from which the above is excerpted) states that the SD-IEEE propose supporting that Bill "Apparently this is an attempt to control FAX junkmail." The original poster then goes on to conjecture that it might also affect product announcements on the net here. I think not. The key word here is "unsolicited". If a headline prompt says that the article is advertising, and you type "y" to read it, then it is no longer unsolicited. Nonetheless, some of youse guys better watch yourselves. You may get extradited to California to face charges.
page%rishathra@Sun.COM (Bob Page) (04/07/89)
[this followup restricted to usa, and should probably be in another group] denbeste@BBN.COM (Steven Den Beste) wrote: >The key word here is "unsolicited". If a headline prompt says that >the article is advertising, and you type "y" to read it, then it is no >longer unsolicited. Similarly, if you send me advertising via FAX, with the top page being "advertisement -- ignore if you're not interested" followed by six pages of solicitation, I'd say you were guilty, since I had to pay for the materials to print your ad, as well as having to keep my fax line unavailable while you transmitted it, and probably the manpower needed to deliver the ad to my desk or mailbox. This is what the bill is trying to prevent. Similarly, every time Marco or Perry or anyone else advertises via comp.sys.amiga, many sites have to pay for the cost of the call, the cost of disk storage, cpu time to process the message, possibly back it up to tape (which probably entails operator time) for those that back up news, and the cpu time to expire it later. It also takes away the phone, cpu and disk resources that could have been used for other, presumably more important, but certainly less commercial, items. Other argumemts can be made, like the fragmentation the add/delete causes, and how that impacts system response time, which reduces productivity, etc. Remember, you can get a lawyer to say anything, whether it's boloney or not. I agree that an informative posting about a new product or service that helps the community is a whole lot better than another round of Atari ST or Byte bashing, but people who write laws and bills do so with a wide brush, in a knee-jerk kind of reaction, and worry about the particulars later (after tying up the courts for years). My point is that solicitation via fax and USENET could amount to the same thing in the eyes of the law. Prosecution will require cooperation from the party infringed upon, of course, and it seems unlikely to me that people will complain about the kinds of ads we've grown used to seeing. But it could happen. The solution is to post new product announcements to the newsgroup called comp.newprod. Its purpose is well-defined. Those sites not wishing to receive it can choose not to, and those users that have access to it can also choose. It a site chooses to accept it and a user chooses to read it, it can hardly be called unsolicited, thus 'advertisers' have some ground to stand on. These are only my opinions; i'm just a software grunt. ..bob Bob Page page@sun.com sun!page 415/336-2745