IP: Rep. Bob Goodlatte wants to make this email message illegal

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

>Date: Sat, 24 Mar 2001 12:31:16 -0500
>From: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
>To: politech@politechbot.com
>
>
>http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,42599,00.html
>
>    Use a Spam, Go to Prison
>    by Declan McCullagh (declan@wired.com)
>    2:00 a.m. Mar. 24, 2001 PST
>
>    WASHINGTON -- Rep. Bob Goodlatte does not want you to read this
>    article.
>
>    The conservative Virginia Republican, who is co-chairman of the
>    Congressional Internet Caucus, hopes to punish the publication or
>    redistribution of columns such as this with a $15,000 fine and up to
>    one year in federal prison.
>
>    Why? Because I've included a short Perl program that could be used to
>    spam -- and it seems certain to be banned under a bill that Goodlatte
>    has recently introduced.
>
>    Goodlatte's Anti-Spamming Act of 2001 allows the Secret Service to
>    police software that "is designed or produced primarily for the
>    purpose of concealing the source or routing information of bulk
>    unsolicited electronic mail messages."
>
>    It's part of a knee-jerk reaction against unsolicited e-mail on
>    Capitol Hill, and it follows in the footsteps of the Digital
>    Millennium Copyright Act, which movie studios have used in an
>    unsuccessful bid to rid the Net of a DVD-descrambling program.
>
>    Goodlatte -- who is chairman of the House Republican High Technology
>    Working Group -- has spent years lobbying to make it easier to export
>    encryption products, but also was a vocal supporter of the DMCA and
>    the Communications Decency Act.
>
>    This time around, instead of making it a crime to spam, Goodlatte has
>    decided to amend existing law to ban spamware, but since the bill is
>    worded so broadly, it might imperil other programmers instead. That's
>    not a surprise: Software is flexible stuff, and it's tricky to ban
>    some applications without going too far. Other potential problems
>    include that Goodlatte's bill can't remove spamware hosted overseas
>    and could run afoul of the First Amendment.
>
>    A second section of his anti-spam measure says it's illegal to
>    distribute software that "has only limited commercially significant
>    purpose or use other than to conceal such source or routing
>    information."
>
>    That could cover utilities like the Perl script below. It's been
>    slightly altered, but it was originally written as a legitimate
>    autoresponder CGI script that worked by forging the From: line of an
>    e-mail message:
>
>         #!/usr/bin/perl
>         open (MAIL,"| /usr/lib/sendmail -t -oi");
>         print MAIL <<END;
>         To: newsfeedback\@wired.com
>         From: spammer\@spammer.com
>         Subject: MAKE MONEY FAST!
>
>         $1000 a Week, a FREE Car, and FREE Leads!!!
>         Rule #1 PUT YOUR FRIENDS ON HOLD... do not sell to people you know
>         until you are making money...
>         I will give you more FREE leads than you can CALL...
>         END
>         close MAIL;
>
>
>
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