Brewed Fresh Daily

"[The] problem, however, is more complex. It speaks to the peculiar economics and politics that have allowed spam to flourish and to a debate that is as fractured and unruly as the Internet itself. When it comes to email marketing, this is the reality: What the good guys want and what the bad guys want are more or less the same thing. J.P. Morgan Chase and Kraft U.S.A. promote credit cards and coffee in ways that aren't so different from the tactics employed by anonymous peddlers of porn and gambling. 'Legitimate' marketers would rather the spammers disappear -- but not if that means quashing the opportunity that both groups enjoy. And so the good guys let the bad guys go. It is an unspoken collusion, a sort of state-sponsored terrorism directed at our inboxes... The economics of email are just too seductive: It's relatively easy and incredibly cheap for anyone to send out millions of messages to anyone with an email account. Unlike any other form of marketing in history, most of the delivery costs are borne by the recipients: by the Internet-service providers (ISPs) and corporations that maintain our mail servers and by us. Anyone who has had to delete dozens of spams on a dial-up connection understands this. It's as if companies were sending us reams of postal junk mail, COD."

On his website he has written a message to any spam 'robot' that visits the page. A robot is a program that trawls through websites and bulletin board postings searching for email addresses to be added to a mailing list. Lessig's page says that he will happily accept and read any e-mail sent to a particular e-mail address, on condition that the sender pays him $500 and accepts that he can sue them in California if they don't pay up. His argument is that the page sets up a contract between him and the spammer, so he can then start to collect.