Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Laws apply within jurisdictions
: Laws of a country apply
within that country, and laws of a state or province apply only
within those areas. With the international dimensions of the
Internet, laws passed in one geographical region often cannot
be enforced if the offenders are located elsewhere. Thus, even
if the United States passed a law with stiff penalties for unso
licited, mass email campaigns, the law would not be enforce
able for spammers located in other countries. Further, if spam
mers were living in the United States when the law was passed,
there would be little preventing them from continuing their ac
tivities from another country. A full ban would require inter
national agreements covering
all
countries, because any ab
staining country could become a haven for commercial
spammers. Realistically, such a widereaching international
agreement would be most difficult to obtain.
Variations in laws and technology
: By their nature, laws must
be specific in identifying what constitutes a problem or viola
tion; therefore, courts would require a precise definition of
spam that clarifies the boundaries between spam and legiti
mate mailings in order to consider a potential law. Courts of
ten throw out vague laws that are not being sufficiently clear
in guiding behaviors. Also, laws typically address specific tech
nologies and approaches. Because spam is an invention of
technology, and because technology continues to advance,
laws often lag behind practices. When a law addresses one be
havior, folks find new ways to operate, and laws that once
would have been effective no longer resolve the problem they
were designed to address. Thus, there is a constant tension be
tween laws and behaviors. This is not to say that laws related
to the Internet cannot be helpful in reducing some types of be
haviors. However, with the international dimensions of the
Internet and spam, it may not be reasonable to expect resolu
tion of technical problems and behaviors through legal means.
All computer applications depend upon algorithms to specify
the steps computers must follow to accomplish their work. Web
search engines organize this work into several steps. Search engines
constantly utilize programs or employ indexers to store and tabu
