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UCC Law Faculty |
The Dublin Legal Workshop in association with
The System Administrators' Guild of Ireland
present
Prof Steve Hedley
What Can The Law Do About Spam?
Tuesday, 2 November 2004
at 8 pm
Davis Lecture Theatre (Room 2043) Arts Building, Trinity College Dublin
The Dublin Legal Workshop is hosted by the Law School to provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of work in progress from different areas of law. The hope is that it will encourage the testing of ideas and generate a culture of lively discussion. For further information, please contact Dr Eoin O'Dell eoin.odell@tcd.ie
The System Administrators' Guild of Ireland is the Irish chapter of the System Administrators' Guild <www.sage.org>. It is the professional body representing technical professionals responsible for the support, maintenance and development of computer systems and the networks that connect them. Its goal is to advance the status of system administration as a profession, and to promote activities that advance the state of the art or the community. SAGE holds regular meetings on the second Tuesday of the month which are open to the general public. For further information, please visit our website at <http://ie.sage.org/>.
About the Lecture and the Speaker
Spam is one of the minor scourges of early 21st century life. In retrospect, it is also one of the most unexpected. Many of the deficiencies of modern computing systems were, after all, entirely predictable. Poor software, hardware and connections that always perform more slowly than is required, and occasional acts of sabotage, were all foreseen from the start. What was not expected, and has not yet lost its power to shock, is that the Internet is trying to bury its users in an avalanche of digital rubbish. In a remarkably short period, the net has become dominated by messages unwanted by their recipients, and known to be such by their senders. Yet the economics of the problem are inescapable. The cost of sending thousands, even millions, of e-mails is trivial; therefore, even a very small expected return is a sufficient reason to do it. And while it was known from the Internet's very beginnings that the origin of e-mails could readily be concealed, the implications for dealing with irresponsible behaviour did not sink in until it was too late. We have created a monster: e-mail is already too useful a tool to be abandoned, but spam seems to be its unavoidable concomitant.
It is often assumed that the law has stood on the side-lines in all of this, that the rising tide of spam is the result of the law's neglect of the problem. This, Prof Hedley argues, has it backwards: while the law has certainly been slow to respond - it always seems to be dealing with the problem as it was a few years ago, not as it is now - it has nonetheless steadily increased the penalty exacted from spammers. To avoid the risk of fines or damages awards, spammers have been forced to adopt ever more devious and illegal methods, and in many cases to move their operations abroad. The number prepared to pay this price has turned out to be unexpectedly large. The perverse effect of labelling spammers as petty criminals has been to push them into the arms of bigger criminals, where they put their computing talents at the bigger criminals' disposal. The days when spammers were genuinely trying to sell you shabby or embarrassing products have almost passed away; today, spammers' motives are rarely so innocent.
There is no simple legal or technical fix for spam, and it seems likely to be with us for a few more years yet. Any comprehensive solution is likely to involve considerable extension of police powers, an unprecedented degree of international co-operation, and some rather loud wake-up calls for those who regard the security of their personal computer as someone else's problem. Professor Hedley sketches out various possible futures for the law, as it struggles to deal with the phenomenon of spam.
Steve Hedley is Professor of Law at University College Cork. He specialises in aspects of common law and commercial law, particularly e-commerce and Internet issues.
