Re: Competition (fwd)

MegaZone (megazone@livingston.com)
Fri, 6 Sep 1996 17:28:15 -0700 (PDT)

Once upon a time Mark Wilson shaped the electrons to say...
>According to my Hayes Century manual; the Communications Act of 1991
>forbids unsolicitated facsimiles. Facimiles are defined as any
>communication that is machine reproducable. Email 'could' fall under that.
>If Hayes put it in the manual I'm sure they had a reason.
>
>I've also had numerous 'spamm' victims quote this to me over the years.

The act refers to facsimile machines. The act defines fascimile machines
as a device for transmitting or receiving data trasmissions over a
telephone line and rendering them to paper.

The logic then follows that hey, a computer can be used to receive a
fax and print it, therefore it is a facsimile machine.

To date the courts have not seen fit to agree with this logic, and don't
define computers as facsimile machines.

Frankly I agree with the courts and think it is very, very weak logic.

I've been backwards and forwards over this one as until recently I was a
USEnet moderator and this was a BIG discussion on the moderators mailing
list. We even had lawyers participating. The end decision was basically,
you could *try* to use this, but odds are your case will either be thrown
out or their defense would shred you into itty bitty pieces - and in any
case it would cost a lot.

-MZ

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