--- Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 09:19:18 -0400 From: "Paul Levy" <PLEVYat_private> To: <declanat_private> Subject: Is it spam? Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline Do these IM's meet the definition of spam offered the anti-spam crowd? Bulk, unsolicited and indeed affirmatively unwanted electronic messages, right? Should they be forbidden? Should the companies that send them and the ISP's who forward them be blackholed? Paul Alan Levy Public Citizen Litigation Group 1600 - 20th Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20009 (202) 588-1000 http://www.citizen.org/litigation/litigation.html >>> Dave Farber <daveat_private> 04/30/03 06:46AM >>> ------ Forwarded Message From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayneat_private> April 30, 2003 Music Swappers Get a Message on PC Screens: Stop It Now By AMY HARMON <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/30/business/30MUSI.html> The record industry started another campaign yesterday aimed at making life more uncomfortable for online music-swapping fans. Thousands of people trading copyrighted music online yesterday saw a message appear unbidden on their computer screens: "When you break the law, you risk legal penalties. There is a simple way to avoid that risk: DON'T STEAL MUSIC." The messages, which seek to turn a chat feature in popular file-trading software to the industry's benefit, reflect the latest effort among record executives to limit digital copying of their products. "People feel invincible when they're doing this in the privacy of their homes," said Cary Sherman, president of the Recording Industry Association of America. "This is a way of letting them know that what they're doing is illegal." The association plans to send at least a million warnings a week to people offering popular songs for others to copy. Operated by a company that industry officials declined to identify, the automated system uses a feature in both KaZaA and Grokster, free software commonly used to share music files, that was designed to let users communicate with one another. A spokeswoman for Sharman Networks, the distributor of KaZaA, said that the tactic violated the company's user agreement, which prohibits making search requests to accumulate information about individual users. Sharman, which is based in Vanuatu, a Pacific island nation, said in a statement, "We strenuously object to efforts outside the law, in violation of user agreements, or in violation of the privacy rights to indiscriminately spam, mislead or confuse" its users. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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