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By David Rothman

Barbed wireI live in Virginia, one of the nastier states toward e-mail spammers.

Now I want to see if we can get some heavy-duty laws against blog-spammers. And then why not some test cases? Same concept could apply eventually to interactive e-books. Do you really want V@i$a^g(r*a ads to sneak into the novel you may be reading?

I’d love to hear from big law firms or anyone else with the resources for the job, including media organizations with an interest in interactivity. Spam “ads”–in the form of self-promoting comments and links–will increasingly steal money and time from legitimate media, not just time from independent bloggers. Can we get some serious jail time for U.S.-based comment-spammers? And if nothing else, is there a way to force domain registrars and a dysfunctional ICANN to act effectively against the scumbags outside the States?

Not so coincidentaly, many of the disguised ads are for drug and sex sites. Any religious groups with an interest in this? Hey, I’d differ with you on many censorship questions, but here we are talking about the freedom to run an interactive blog without X-rated remarks sprinkled throughout, like fly droppings.

The numbers at the TeleBlog: We’re talking about thousands of spam-style comments received in a typical month. While I’m runnning antispam software, it is impossible to keep out all the dreck. Meanwhile legitmate commenters find themselves thwarted by the TeleBlog’s eDobermans, given the need for sufficiently strong antispam settings.

And a message to those greedsters from sleazy commercial sites who handcraft comments just to get a link in this blog: I don’t know if the antispam laws can apply to you as well, but you can bet I’ll keep zapping your remarks.

(Photo via Slyvar on FlickR. CreativeCommons-licensed.)

 
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