Danny "NTK" O'Brien, who has always bristled at having the word "journalist" directed at him ("proper journalism involves training and grammar-checking and talking to people on the telephone and selling out to the man in weekly installments"), has decided it's time to be a grown-up. He's got a kid on the way, a giant tax-debt, and he needs to pay the bills.
So he's started writing up his blog entries as though they were actual, no-foolin' journalism. His first piece is about this completely nutty proposal to stop spam by embedding a copyrighted haiku in real mail, then suing spammers who try to out-smart filters by including the haiku in their come-ons for copyright violation:
Normal Net users can insert the poem for free. Legitimate bulk mailers (with double opt-in agreements), or other companies whose mail caught in spam filters, can pay Habeas to put the haiku in their headers too, dodging the filtering bullet.
But woe betide any spammer trying the same trick. Habeas say they'll push for prima facie trademark infringement on every mistagged e-mail sent – and maximum damages. They've already teamed up with a collection agency to gather the loot…
Very clever – but will Habeas be able to keep up with those notoriously scofflaw spammers? Mitchell claims they will – and those they can't catch, they'll put on a blacklist of copyright infringing IP addresses…
Danny's done a great job of writing up the Habeas side of the piece, but I think he's missing his normal anti-idiot goggles, which raise some skeptical points, such as:
- Spammers are already engaged in fraud, for the most part. Nigerian letter scams, Ponzi schemes, illegal pornography — they're already illegal! Spam doesn't flourish because we lack the legal framework to attack spammers.
- How will blackholing IP addresses that are temporarily employed by spammers accomplish anything except for turning the Internet into a swiss-cheese network where huge swaths of arbitrary IP-space are off-limits because someone, somewhere once used a network address (or forged it) to send some spam? If that approach worked, MAPS would already have solved the spam problem (instead of turning into a redux of Lord of the Flies).
- How can Habeas possibly police every use of their haiku and ensure that it's being used in "legitimate bulk mail?" Why believe that they will be any better at this than the SpamCop or MAPS people are?
- In the 1980s, Disneyland realized that it could use California law to fine shoplifters on the spot for their crimes. Suddenly, security was transformed from a cost-center into a revenue center. Disney's security staff were given a daily quota of fines they had to collect each day, and within a short period, the security staff were snatching anyone they thought they could squeeze a couple hundred dollars out of. After damaging publicity and civil suits, Disneyland decided to pursue shoplifters in court instead of in the park, and things returned to normal. Habeas will employ a Hong Kong strong-arm collection agency to collect on infringers — why should we believe that adding the ability to profit from overly broad enforcement will reduce abuses and errors? Why should we believe that a net.clueless collection agency will be better at policing itself than the leet sysadmins at MAPS were?
(Thanks, Danny!)
