As I reported here, last year's American spam legislation required the Federal Trade Commission to prepare a report about a system of labelling spam and having bounties paid out to people hunting down offenders, as proposed by Lessig here.
Now that report has been released on the FTC website, along with two reports by experts consulted by the FTC.
They express no opinion on whether a bounty system would be a good idea. However, contrary to Lessig's views which they cite on page 23 of the report, they think that bounties would make only sense to attract insider whistleblowing and would need to be set very high (at least $100.000) for that purpose.
They also note that the bounty system already in place at the SEC since 1988 was actually used only three times since then (page 28 of the report).
I think the reservations in that report about the Lessig proposal have some merit and agree with the FTC that the original Lessig proposal would be likely to fail.
Link found at Slashdot.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at September 18, 2004 06:14 PM | TrackBack