Re: Proposed EU Directive on Electronic Commerce

[Piet Beertema <]

    	If you have not done so already, please have a look at
    	http://www.ispo.cec.be/Ecommerce/legal.htm#legal
    	which contains text and commentary on a proposed EU Directive.
    Okay, I've now read the whole of the damned thing.
    It's mostly pretty kind to ISPs. There are a number of tweaks that
    are needed; for example, articles 12 to 14 should allow technical
    modifications such as audit information in email headers.
It remains to be seen whether, from a legal point of view,
e-mail headers are part of "the information contained in
the transmission".
    
    As far as article 7 (anti-spam) is concerned, it looks pretty good.
Except for the "as soon as it is received by the recipient",
since this rules out any 'interference' with the transmission
of the message by an ISP and makes it *mandatory* for ISP's
to relay at least the header (since the recipient can decide
to accept or refuse a message based on that, especially when
the X-UCE mechanism is in place). It is probably correct to
assume though that an ISP can take the place of a recipient
when the recipient's mailbox is hosted by the ISP and the ISP
refuses to accept [certain] UCE *on request by* the recipient.

    I think that we can invoke article 16, write an RFC defining an
    anti-UCE header, and have that be the agreed industry standard for
    obeying this article.
Although we're talking about UCE *on the Internet*, it would
probably be a good idea to think of or include other mail
systems too, e.g. X.400.


	Piet