[Of course spammers will claim the First Amendment protects *their* behavior, just not anyone else's... --Declan] --- Date: Thu, 24 Apr 2003 23:58:24 -0700 To: Declan McCullagh <declanat_private> From: Mike Masnick <mikeat_private> Subject: threatened by "email marketers" Hi Declan, Not sure if this is interesting to Politech folks, but figured I'd pass it along. Earlier this week, the NY Times ran a story saying that spam was getting worse, and they quoted a couple of "email marketers" in the article complaining that the anti-spam crowd were making it difficult for them to get their emails out. I posted the story and my commentary at Techdirt. NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/22/technology/22SPAM.html?pagewanted=all&position= Techdirt's post: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20030422/020233.shtml We have open forums on Techdirt, and someone there decided to then post the contact information of the email marketing firm the NY Times spoke to in the article. Assuming that it was their business information, which I assumed was public info that they wanted to get out, I left it there. Today, I received a series of angry voice mail messages from one of the "email marketers" profiled in the NY Times article threatening me with lawsuits (he indicated that the Secretary of State of California would be filing the lawsuit against me). He appears to have 2 complaints that he mentioned in the voicemail. First, that I did not properly understand the NY Times article. I was not aware there was a law against misunderstanding newspaper articles. Second, he was upset that his "private info" had been posted - and seemed to think I was responsible for it. It is an open forum and I had nothing to do with the posting of information. My guess, of course, at this point, is someone was trying to pull an Alan Ralsky on him (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20021206/010219.shtml). Considering recent rulings that say there's nothing wrong with posting the contact info of a spammer (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20030407/2340241.shtml) - which is a case where an anti-spam activist posted the info directly to his own website (something I did not do), I don't think there's a real legal basis on which a lawsuit could proceed. However, after some consideration, we decided that *no one* deserves to be spammed if they feel they'd rather not be bothered - even if that person happens to do the same thing to others. With that in mind, we decided to remove the information that had been posted to the site. I've explained the reasoning here: http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20030424/2023243_F.shtml Please note that we did not do this due to the threat of the lawsuit, which we believe is unlikely to actually occur, but because we thought it might set a good example: no one deserves to be spammed without their permission given. Mike Techdirt.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ Like Politech? Make a donation here: http://www.politechbot.com/donate/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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