Marty Lyons comments on my answer to the congestion control question raised by Ed Felten.
His comments convey a feeling of urgency. The spam "criminals" are winning, causing the net to collapse. We need to do something about them!
So I would like to take this occasion to propose a solution to the spam problem. I said that already in my book "Grenzen des Patentwesens", but that's in German.
Basically I say there: Just do what the spammers want. Reply to them and pretend wanting to make lots of deals with them. If someone has a great proposal to make your nose larger by several inches, take them up on their offer.
And then, at some point in the process - after stealing 5 minutes of the spammers time - tell them that you changed your mind! If a thousand people do that, the spammer will waste 5000 minutes. This is not fair. But anybody abusing the system in this way has deserved nothing else.
Basically the same strategy can be used to get rid of software patents, which are just another way of abusing the system (that was my main point in the book).
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at March 12, 2003 08:19 PM | TrackBack