Spammers Lose Court Battle Against Univ. of Texas 288
voma writes "The University of Texas didn't violate the constitutional rights of an online dating service when it blocked thousands of unsolicited e-mails, a federal appeals court panel ruled Tuesday. White Buffalo Ventures, which operates LonghornSingles.com, had appealed to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, saying it had complied with all anti-spam laws."
right to your machine (Score:3, Insightful)
Devil's Advocate (Score:5, Insightful)
When and where (Score:4, Insightful)
do "online dating services" have constitutional rights?
I need to speak with a corporate lawyer to find out what is required of me to incorporate myself so I can get some of these rights that the constitution alludes to.
1st Amendment = Free SPEECH (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because you say it doesn't mean everyone (or anyone) has to listen to you.
constitutional rights? (Score:5, Insightful)
Since when do dating services have constitutional rights? Isn't it convenient that corporations can cherry pick when they want to be corporations and when they want to be individuals?
Looks perfectly legit to me... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well DUH. (Score:2, Insightful)
Just because you put your turn signal on, and following all the road rules correctly you turned into my driveway, it doesn't mean that you have the right to park on my property.
Right on! (Score:4, Insightful)
(Yes, I'm a hopeless optimist...)
Re:Devil's Advocate (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see anywhere in that article that says anything about the university selling addresses. "Legally obtained" could mean many other things...
Re:Devil's Advocate (Score:3, Insightful)
My god those people make me angry, the Air Force kept sending me stuff and calling me all the time even after I got to college (and I'd told them several times to leave me alone). When they finally called my dorm at college I told them that if they called me again I would file a complaint and make sure that someone paid attention to it - and then they finally left me alone. Can these people not take no for an answer? Why must they continue to pester everyone under the sun even after they've gone to college?
But anyway, on topic: What right does any spammer think they have to send unsolicited email through someone's system? As far as I'm concerned email is much more like the fax system in that it wastes time and money for servers to process those messages that no-one wants anyway.
Re:Constitutional questionability (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Constitutional questionability (Score:3, Insightful)
The mail servers were crashing and their users were specifically complaining about the mails in question.
Spam is getting to be such a problem, that real protected speech is becoming hindered. Keep in mind that this is a mass mail that was on order of 59,000 mails. I'm under the illusion that I am entitled to have free speech, but I don't feel as though whatever I feel like saying should be sent to every inbox in the world every time I think of something.
I post to slashdot instead
Re:Constitutional questionability (Score:3, Insightful)
Free speech is being able to stand on the street corner and shout that our government sucks*. It is not being able to stand in the middle of the intersection, blocking traffic, shouting that our government sucks.
Spam is the latter -- forcing the message upon the masses and causing them problems in the meantime.
*: Yes yes aside from all the other laws that would probably be involved there, like disturbing the peace, loitering, or whatever else they'd think up to shut you up or move you elsewhere. Call it "talking in a normal voice to other people in the park or on the street about the unfortunate failures in the government" instead and the analogy still goes.
Blocking ears, not mouth (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Devil's Advocate (Score:4, Insightful)
Still don't believe me? Try going to UB's Directory [buffalo.edu]. You can do wildcard searchs. Search by last name, type in "a*". Repeat for all 26 letters of the alphabet. Get a spider to do it. It's scary how easy it is to access personal data -- the first link contains all sorts of information about a student: mailing address, phone number, etc. If you were intent on stealing an identity you'd be 90% on the way there.
Re:right to your machine : Wrong analysis (Score:3, Insightful)
It certainly isn't true that because it is "your machine" you have the right to block anything that comes to it. A phone company may own the phone network and switching equipment, but that doesn't give them the right to block, particularly selectively, what they choose to block. A university may own the student's mailboxes, but that doesn't mean that the university has the right to selectively filter the student's incoming mail.
I'm not saying that the decision is wrong, on the contrary, its great that the university blocks spam. But I do not think your analysis is the right basis for the decision.
Re:constitutional rights? (Score:3, Insightful)
So the dating service, if incorporated, has the same rights as anyone.
And far fewer of the responsibilities. Corporations regularly get away with acts (e.g., Union Carbide's Bhopal leak [wikipedia.org]) that would see an individual locked up for life.
Re:Devil's Advocate (Score:3, Insightful)
Spammers are delusional... (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not a great shock that spammers are trying to argue that following anti-spam laws gives them a RIGHT to your mailbox.
But it's malignant frippery.
That's like saying having a driver's license gives me a right to use your car whenever I want.
As to the University's filtering, within reasonable guidelines we are talking about the university's property (i.e., network facilties.) They're stuck with the responsibility of managing it for tens of thousands of students. Spammers are so vicious and abusive that their behavior is often indistinguishable from a denial-of-service attack.
The important point is that spammers are dangerous, deceptive, criminals, plain and simple. They belong in cages.Re:Devil's Advocate (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Devil's Advocate (Score:2, Insightful)
The federalist system of government, as envisioned by our founders (the founders that Conservatives love to talk about but rarely ever embrace, ideologically) had a strict delination between state and national governments. The states took care of things in their state while the government saw to things like defense, interstate commerece, international policy, etc. Thanks to Congress and favorable rulings from the SCOTUS, as well as the federal income tax, the federal government can literally confiscate billions of dollars from individuals and businesses (even those who do their business only within one state), leaving little left for the state governments to suck up for basic things like roads, schools, police, etc. The original intent of the composition of the government in the US has drastically changed from "layer cake federalism" to "marble slab federalism".
This allows the federal government to basically recycle the citizens of each state's tax money, tie it to a string, and dangle it over the heads of the state legislatures, municipal governments, etc. This is how we get retarded things like seatbelt laws, mandatory speed limits, just to name a few. Just about anything funded with federal money (even if the money came straight from the state's citizens and businesses) has some sort of new string attached.
So when I hear this BS about "accepting the government's money", its just total garbage. Its not the government's money.
Secondly, lets assume for a minute that your reasoning is sound. Does that mean that each and every one of us have to bear the brunt of that punishment? If I instruct my school to not release my records to ANYONE, I sure damn well expect that to apply to EVERYONE.
Re:FoIA is only part of it - FERPA is the rest (Score:3, Insightful)
E-mail addresses are considered directory information.
Here are lists and explanations of what is and isn't considered directory information.
http://www.colin.edu/ADMISSIONS/FERPA.htm [colin.edu]
http://www.clarkson.edu/sas/ferpa/directory_info.
Re:vaporware (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, it's not far off.
It certainly isn't true that because it is "your machine" you have the right to block anything that comes to it.
Really? Then why do I have a firewall (block network traffic selectively)? Why do I have "spam filters" on my e-mail?
A phone company may own the phone network and switching equipment, but that doesn't give them the right to block, particularly selectively, what they choose to block.
As a public carrier (as defined by the FCC), no, you're right. But they sure can set so-called Quality of Service metrics, etc. There is nothing stopping them from providing less through bandwidth for traffic and requests originating or terminating outside of their network. What will happen when SBC (or Telestra, BT, DT, et al) decide that they need to hop on the VoIP bandwagon, and, well, their stuff just works better than Vonage, Cisco, etc. VoIP hardware with non-SBC-registered MAC addresses? Hmm..."Quality of Service".
A university may own the student's mailboxes, but that doesn't mean that the university has the right to selectively filter the student's incoming mail.
It may not have the right to filter a particular student's e-mail, but it sure does have the right to filter *all* e-mail messages equally, just like it has the right to filter all employee e-mail, etc. It even has the right to segment off the dorms, student network, etc. from employee/staff/research networks, and deal with them separately. It's the University's network, they can define how it gets used.
My ISP filters my e-mail through its antispam/antivirus software, in addition to my e-mail provider, etc. and Grisoft AV on my computer.
Notice how no university got sued when they started blocking Napster, KaZaa, etc. on the dorm networks. Just like no ISP has gotten sued by a user because their e-mail gets spam-filtered (but they probably do get a non-zero amount of hate mail because either their mailing lists they subscribe to have had their domain black-listed or otherwise determined to be "spam", and have quite a battle not getting them filtered out).
I only wish I could pay the post office to do the same thing to my physical mail box.