Should SPAM be made illegal?
Reading some of the tech news I get from the linux users group I'm a member of suggests that lobbyists make SPAM a crime punishable by prison time and or a hefty fine.
Although this nation already has laws regarding deceptive false offers in using SPAM to defraud (one guy got 11 years in prison for it) there are no laws for SPAM in general.
Its tragic really because AOL and Southern Bell among many others limit the email sent to their networks to only a few hundred per sender in a given period of time.
This isn't really intelligent considering some forums could easily send out post notifications to several hundred registered members who have AOL accounts resulting in some not getting their emails.
Furthermore SPAM is said to account for the vast majority of all internet traffic and that doesn't include Blog and Forum SPAM which programs are written to automate.
My take on the subject is that SPAM has literally no use, not to marketing, sales, or even legitimate promotion and its only employed by scam artists and frauds deceptively.
I think it should be a crime that if its proven the first few should get a hefty sentence of say 5 - 10 years to make example of them and then as a result of increased court costs and the cost to pursue SPAM offenders the sentences could be set to a mandatory minimum of a year with 5 years of stipulation that they can't have access to the internet.
Extreme? Maybe. But in this forum and the many others I moderate or repair as a result of abuse by SPAM pretty much tells me that if there is NO consequence for the actions then there is no motive to abstain from them.
Your thoughts?
~ Jared
|