[anti-abuse-wg] Legal concerns, was Manual vs automated reports

On Tue 31/Jul/2012 11:32:11 -0700 Tobias Knecht wrote:
> 
>>> That would mean that the a user has to click 50 times the spam
>>> button, than 50 times "Yes I want to report this message!" and than
>>> 50 times "I'm okay that this message will be sent to X!"
>>
>> And that, of course, does not leave you anything that a court would
>> consider a proof that consent was granted.  For contractual issues, I
>> see telcos hire call-center staff in order to ask for user's consent
>> at the phone, taping a formal question-and-answer sequence that can be
>> kept as a proof.
> 
> And now you have to answer only one question. Why should an ISP spend
> tenth of thousands of Euros to give data away for free to institutions
> that earn millions with it and not paying for it?
> 
> I think we all know that there are ways to do it, but the questions is
> more about how practical it is. And in this case it would even be
> enough to call everybody and ask for consensus. With every new FBL
> subscriber ISPs would have to call every customer and ask if the new
> subscriber is okay for them.
> 
> I'm always happy about new ideas, but on the other hand we are working
> on this issue with ISPs, ESPs, legal institutions and all other
> involved parties for more than 4 years now and we made good progress.
> But as it is typically in politics it's taking time.

Don't get me wrong, I was not suggesting that call-centers are the way
to the future.  I exemplified them as abnormal ways of conducts, which
are the (possibly unintended) consequences of jurisprudential rules
about privacy.  Among their results, enterprises have powerful
databases of private user data, while users have no aid whatsoever to
remember when, if ever, did they grant their consent to a specific
enterprise.

>> If laws can be interpreted, it is not acceptable that interpretations
>> only favor spammers :-/
> 
> And that is not the case. As already mentioned US legal frameworks is
> fundamentally different from the European legal framework and in
> reality it is not as spammer friendly as the US system.

Yet, as far as I'd tell by casual news reading, spammers collect more
sentences in the US than in the EU.