[9566] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Inmac, junk mail, and the death of the net...
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Stephen D Crocker)
Tue Jan 11 01:22:57 1994
To: lyndon@world.std.com (Lyndon Nerenberg)
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Tue, 11 Jan 94 04:53:26 GMT."
Date: Tue, 11 Jan 94 01:21:07 -0500
From: Stephen D Crocker <crocker@tis.com>
Lyndon,
You wrote:
> Looking at it in an overall context I don't see how someone fingering
> our site and building a database would be doing anything different than
> if they requested a copy of our campus directory and mass mailed everyone
> in that instead.
I'm not sure whether you meant the analogy to mean it's ok,
unstoppable or that the world already has figured out how to deal with
this kind of abuse. In case you meant that it's either ok or
unstoppable, that's not really true. It's not uncommon for companies
to label their phone books as proprietary. I once worked at such a
company. It took a very dim view of anyone using a purloined copy of
the phone book for mass mailings, telephone solicitations, etc. If
they were able to trace the source of the abuse, they were usually
able to get it cease. I haven't looked at a college directory
recently, but the directory for my kids' grade school and high school
is also marked similarly.
Steve
