AnarchoCyphertopian technologies (wasRE: [extropy-chat]Reccommendations for a mailing list)

[Adrian Tymes]

--- "kevinfreels.com" <kevin at kevinfreels.com> wrote:
> I agree that viruses are vandalism, but I never
> recall anyone referring to
> physical junk mail in the mailbox as theft. How is
> SPAM any different?

Because the recipient pays to receive spam.  Physical
mailboxes can hold large amounts of mail, and the
sender has to (literally) pay the postage.  In
contrast, email is nominally free, but inboxes are
sometimes too small to contain large messages - and
when it's not, the expense of providing large disks
to store all the junk (until it's IDed as junk and
deleted), or of providing (often developing) good
enough spam deletion tools that they can be trusted to
delete stuff without storing it for human review,
falls squarely on the recipient's ISP (and thus
usually on the recipient).

It's the same reason why telemarketing calls to cell
phones are flat-out illegal: recipient pays to be
marketed to.  (Which might be okay in many cases if
there was usually a very good match to the recipient's
interests, but in practice, there is almost never a
good match according to the recipient.)