CAUCE NORTH AMERICA NEWS, Vol 11, No 1, October 2009 -- Help pass Canada's anti-spam law
John Levine
October 2009
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Canada's Anti-spam Bill C-27 Electronic Commerce Protection Act - Where
does it stand?
Canada's anti-spam bill, C-27 being considered today in a
clause-by-clause reading in front of the Standing Committee on
Industry, Science & Technology is under attack by groups and
individuals who want to strip out key provisions of the law, and change
it from opt-in to opt-out, along the lines of the ineffective American
CAN SPAM act.
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What you can do
* If you live in Canada, call your Member of Parliament and tell him
or her how important it is to support C-27 with the current opt-in
language, not the opt-out proposed by a few short-sighted business
organizations. (Calling is more effective than e-mail.) If you
don't have your MP's contact info, you can [1]look it up here by
your post code.
* Sign [2]the online petition and encourage your friends and
neighbours to do so.
* Keep up to date with the [3]CAUCE Twitter feed and the [4]CAUCE web
site.
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Letter to Prime Minister Harper in Support of Bill C-27, the Electronic
Commerce Protection Act.
To: Stephen Harper Har...@parl.gc.ca
Cc: Party Leaders
Minister of Industry
Chair & Members, Standing Committee on Industry, Science & Technology
Dear Prime Minister Harper,
These past few weeks have seen a tremendous amount of press coverage
with regard to Bill C-27 currently in from of the Standing Committee on
Industry, Science & Technology.
We have seen parties previously supporting an opt-in r�gime in Canada,
and publicly supporting the bill in the press and to the committee
change their stance.
The Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, with 50,000 members
has not: We encourage you and the committee to stand fast in this
regard. An opt-out regime is what is made legal in America, by way of
the CAN SPAM act, and the United States is by far the main source of
spam on the Internet today.
On the other hand, the drafters have carefully considered the laws of
Australia and New Zealand, and the results are clear: neither of those
countries now has much in the way of a home-grown spam problem after
having adopted opt-in anti-spam laws.
Please do not be mislead by some who are clearly misguided and
wrong-headed: CAUCE has representative email marketers of high
integrity and repute on our board from two of Canada's largest ``email
service providers'' representing companies such as American Express,
air Canada, and literally hundreds of others, small, medium, and large.
They fully support this bill, and would not do so were it to have a
negative impact on their business.
American companies, for example, Return Path have written to you in
support of this bill. Return Path represents over 1,000 email
marketers, again, from the smallest to the largest email marketers on
the planet, as well as maintaining partnerships with the world's
largest receiving sites, Hotmail, Yahoo!, Sympatico, and Rogers and
hundreds of others.
Last week, CAUCE had the occasion to run the draft bill by the top
malware and spyware experts at Google, Microsoft and Hewlett Packard,
at the Anti-spyware Coalition meeting held in Montreal. There again, it
got the nod of approval.
This bill, contrary to the assertions of some, is pro-business and
pro-consumer. We are puzzled by the stance of some, who want to create
loopholes that will undoubtedly be exploited by the criminals who spam
us daily, and distribute spyware and viruses using spam.
Opt-in is fundamental and critical to the broadband support of this
bill; beyond which, it is also a critical, foundational aspect of good
marketing practices and is a paradigm in use each and every day by
savvy marketers. It seems to us that those promoting a change to this
bill are simply not in the game on a daily basis.
Complaints by users are filed daily to receiving sites by consumers
mailed email they did not request, and do not want. That is, after all,
the very definition of spam. Incredibly, that is what some are asking
you to legalize.
It would be foolhardy to make this delicately crafted law useless were
you to allow opt-in to be changed to allow anyone to mail without
permission. We respectfully request that you all consider all email end
users of email before you make such a decision. Think of those who
suffer the onslaught of spam; your friends, your family members, and
your constituents.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Respectfully yours,
Neil Schwartzman Executive Director, CAUCE
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References
1. http://www2.parl.gc.ca/Parlinfo/Compilations/HouseOfCommons/MemberByPostalCode.aspx?Menu=HOC
2. http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/SupportC27/index.html
3. http://www.twitter.com/CAUCE
4. http://www.cauce.org/
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