Lawrence Lessig and Rep. Zoe Lofgren are looking for digital bounty hunters to track down spammers:
- Perhaps it was only coincidence that Stanford law professor Larry Lessig chose last week, the opening week of hunting season on wild turkeys, to propose legislation that would pay a bounty to private citizens who hunt down spammers.
Lessig, who persuaded California Representative Zoe Lofgren to pitch the idea to Congress last Thursday, imagines a world in which white hat hackers put their skills to good use, revealing the names and address of marketers who spew the unwanted messages that now constitute 40 percent of all e-mail. After tracking down the source of the spam, Lessig suggests, the hunters should alert the Federal Trade Commission, which would investigate, fine the culprits and reward the hunter with 20 percent of that fine.
"It's like bounty hunters in the old West," Lessig reportedly told a gathering of Stanford law students. "You bring 'em in and get the bounty."
Sounds simple. And the law professor is so confident that the bounty system will work that he offered to quit his job if the bill is passed and fails to substantially reduce spam.
Lofgren's bill has several promising provisions, such as requiring bulk unsolicited e-mail to include the tag "ADV:" in its subject line and requiring marketers to include a way for recipients to opt out, but the bounty proposal may the most promising.
There is little dispute that the government lacks the resources to hunt down and prosecute spammers, but with the tech economy stuck in park, many thousands of graduating computer science majors should have plenty of free time.
....last Friday, when the two participants in an FTC forum on spam, a Florida lawyer and an anti-spam activist, went at each other and had to be forcibly separated by FTC Commissioner Orson Swindle.
Article comments
1 - guitry
Big deal! All the little techies and fawing politicians are so upset over spam.My mailbox (my real one on the street) is stuffed everyday with unsolicited junk which I must physically sort carefully in order not to throw out a real mail, and then carry it to the recycle bin. Spam, I get rid of in less that two seconds. Enough allready with the spam hunting.Get a life. As far as Lessing is concerned, he is the big hero who took on microsoft. If that is the best you can do for a cause, you need help.