Re: [Asrg] criteria for spam V2 (was: Implicit Consent (was: Another criteria for "what is spam"...))

Re: what is bulk etc

To some extent what we need here is an actual legal scholar.

The law is full of problems like this where a specific act is colored
by intent making it slippery to define.

Not surprisingly, a lot of fraud has this quality. The same exact set
of actions can be a serious criminal fraud in one case and completely
innocent in another, depending upon what can be discerned about
intent.

The legal term is "mens rea", the state of mind of the perpetrator at
the time of the act, what was their goal, could they reasonably
foresee the result of their actions, etc.

This is why we're going round and round on the term "bulk", we're
trying to make the term (or the phrase UBE) describe the mens rea of
the sender.

Potentially difficult, but the law has wrestled with similar
definitional issues for many hundreds of years.

That said, I think the usual framework used by the legal system is to
create a brief set of "tests", essentially a form one might fill out
describing a perp's actions in terms of a set of (one hopes) carefully
constructed questions, usually standardized by some rather broad-based
process like a bunch of law faculty and judges, much like a technical
standard in spirit.

The problem with that approach is it makes for boring press &
soundbites and it takes some experience and discipline to construct
(again, like technical standards.)

Another problem is the clash of disciplines, law in my limited
experience tends to be enumerative and synthetic, give them more
examples they add more clauses (the ten commandments ceased being the
whole of the law a long time ago), while engineering and science tends
to be analytic, there's a goal to reduce all the cases to a simple
rule or two, E=MC^2 and all that (or, for the musically inclined, E=Fb).

-- 
        -Barry Shein

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