U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., has introduced the “Restrict and Eliminate the Delivery of Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Mail Spam Act,” or the REDUCE Spam Act to Congress. (full-text of Bill) This is the Anti-Spam Bill that offers a bounty of “not less than 20%” of the civil penalty collected from the spammer to the person who
This is also the Bill that Lawrence Lessig has bet his job on. That’s right. He says if a bill like this that offers a bounty on spammers passes and does not “significantly reduce” the amount of spam we all receive, then he will quit his job as Professor of Law at Stanford University. (The folks across the bay at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall should go ahead and start putting together a job offer for him, as I’ll explain.)
There are three problems I have with this Bill.
The first problem I have is that the Bill won’t work.
1) It will be nearly impossible to collect any money from spammers, most of whom operate from locations overseas. I send what little spam I get (see my Spam-avoiding techniques) to SpamCop who looks at the fake header information and determines the true origin of the spam. Almost all of the spam I get comes from Korea or China. You are never going to collect from someone over there and those spammers who are in the U.S. will move operations overseas once this Bill passes.
The next two problems I have are that the Bill will work too well.
2) I do not like vigilante justice. I was opposed to the Coble-Berman Bill intended to stop file-sharers for this very reason. It would have authorized the RIAA to launch a DDS attack on a file-sharer’s computer, possibly creating collateral damage on your internet connection speed. This was a stupid idea. Now, the REDUCE Spam Act is not allowing this exactly. Defenders of the Bill can argue that they are not advocating vigilante justice, but instead are merely increasing the size of law enforcement personnel by deputizing every 18 year old with a computer. Maybe that’s true. But we’ve seen what happens when the Slashdot crowd gets a hold of a Spammer’s regular mail address. In the case of an unrepentant and unrelenting Spam King, I have to admit I find it downright funny. But, whoa be unto us all, if we are falsely accused, or through some case of mistaken identity this wrath were to befall us. Authorizing a legion of young pranksters to go after people and luring them with the promise of financial reward seems to lack the sort of safeguards that we like to see in a society where we (used to) think people are innocent until proven guilty. The potential for abuse looms large.
3) Would we accept a law exactly like this one that targeted copyrighted music file-sharers? Everyone hates spammers. We want to see them suffer, and delight in the idea of them having to pay a bounty hunter a hefty fee for their evil practices. But while most people are not spammers, millions of people are infringing copyrights everyday. But, Copyright Infringement is still a crime. So, suppose the RIAA pushes for a similar bill that places a bounty on the heads of each infringing sharer? Someone out there needs the money bad enough that they’d gladly nail you for sampling that Eminem tune. It doesn’t sound like quite as pleasant a scheme anymore, does it? Many want the RIAA to wake up to the possibilities of a new business model and many want artists to realize that they gain more from having loyal fans than from extracting every last royalty out of every last performance. But, if the RIAA catches wind of the idea behind this Bill, and especially if it is successfull, we just might see the same thing truly put an end to music downloading. This could work where lawsuits are failing, and then the Recording Industry’s motivation to innovate, to stop enslaving their artists, and to stop charging artificially inflated prices all goes away. Uh-oh. Is that what we wanted?