Re: German District Council allows UCE

[Anders Andersson <]

"Nipper, Arnold" <arnold.nipper@localhost wrote:
>http://heise.de/newsticker/data/hod-25.07.01-000/
>
>To put it in nutshell: the council says that UCE does *not* cause damage.
>Hence you can not claim for damages.

That council is a district court, isn't it?  My German isn't too
good, so I had the Alta Vista Babelfish translate the page for me.

I would be wary of overinterpreting this, as the ruling doesn't
appear to apply to spamming in general.  According to Shamrock
(the UCE victim), the message they got wasn't even sent in bulk,
but specifically sent to them only.  If that is indeed the case,
then the resources consumed at the receiving end would be roughly
equivalent to those consumed at the sender's end, and even though
I think it's still wrong to send large PDF files unasked for, I
wouldn't drag the sender to court for a single blunder.  It would
be sufficient to complain to his ISP, to have them improve their
AUP and other instructional material for their subscribers.

Therefore, I think we can disregard this ruling as irrelevant to
spam fighting, even within Germany (the ruling of a German court
has of course no legal power abroad, unless that Convention on
Civil Litigation-and-what's-its-title gets past draft status).
If we can't, I would be happy to blacklist anybody who invoked it
in defense of sending _any_ unwanted e-mail to anybody, whether
from Germany or elsewhere, bulk or not, PDF or not.

	- You can't block me!  I have the _right_ to
	  send you e-mail _even_ if you don't want it!
	- I have heard that.  Now, try to say `Please'.

--
Anders Andersson, Dept. of Computer Systems, Uppsala University
Paper Mail: Box 325, S-751 05 UPPSALA, Sweden
Phone: +46 18 4713170   EMail: andersa@localhost