From: "Mike Jackson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Well, I was off on Vancouver Island for nearly a week, and didn't take a
laptop with me... Clearly it caused some major trauma because I had the
following hallucinatory idea:
I was thinking about the issue in which sending spam isn't a crime in a
lot
of countries, or if it is that it's poorly enforced.
Then I thought of SPF, Domain-Keys, and ways to enforce authenticity
using existing laws...
And came up with this idea.
What if we had a TXT Record in the DNS for a domain that looked like:
@ IN TXT "XYZZY 123 456 (C) Copyright 2006 Redfish
Solutions, LLC"
And then had hosts participating in this scheme generate outgoing mail as:
X-Yes-Its-Really-Me: XYZZY 123 456 (C) Copyright 2006 Redfish Solutions,
LLC"
and uses the presence of this copywritten key to match the appropriate
string
in the DNS as proof that the sender is who he says he is.
Then if the scheme were widely adopted (we could have an applet or script
that generated a random string and primed the DNS with it or could be
easily
cut-n-pasted into the DNS configuration... the MTA could of course extract
the string easily, as could anyone else for verification), then it would
be a
leverage point if someone started forging emails.
While sending spam might not be a crime in all civilized countries,
copyright
infringement is.
Is that too "out there?"
IANAL, but I think it would depend on what is copyrightable, and how much
text can be quoted and still be considered fair use. IIRC, you can quote
~250 words under US law, which would be too long and cumbersome for your
suggested system. Then you might run into user problems that would construe
(correctly or incorrectly) that the system is claiming copyright of their
written material. But nice try though :)
Habeas.
{^_^}
