From Msnbc

By Mike Brunker

With no indication that a six-month-old federal spam law is lowering the tide of unwanted commercial e-mail, the Federal Trade Commission is considering a new approach that would put spammers in the same category as coyotes, rats and nutria by putting a bounty on their heads.

The prize for a spammer's virtual pelt? A hefty percentage of whatever civil penalty the FTC is eventually able to collect based on the information. And with the agency likely to seek multimillion-dollar penalties against egregious violators, such as those who "hijack" other people's computers and use them to distribute spam, that's not chump change.
While CAN-Spam, which took effect on Jan. 1, doesn't bar unsolicited e-mail, it does require e-mail marketers to use accurate headers and subject lines, label adult content and provide consumers with the ability to "opt out" of future mailings.

As outlined in CAN-Spam, the bounty system would offer a person who first identifies someone violating the law's provisions a reward of “not less than 20 percent of the total civil penalty collected” by the FTC.

The FTC is compiling and reviewing expert testimony on the bounty plan and will report back to Congress by September on whether the idea is viable. The study was mandated by a little-noticed 11th-hour addition to the law by Sen. Jon Corzine, D-N.J., and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif.

Approval far from certain
The idea of a bounty system was popularized by Stanford Law School professor and Internet visionary Lawrence Lessig as a way of harnessing the vast volunteer anti-spam community that already exists online.

“If the vigilantes who are working so hard to keep lists of offending e-mail servers were to turn their energy to identifying and tracking down spammers, then this passion to rid the world of spam might actually begin to pay off -- both for the public and for the bounty hunters,” Lessig wrote in a Sept. 16, 2002 column.

But the plan has come under criticism from both sides of the spam spectrum, and it is unclear whether the FTC staff will recommend that it should be implemented. Last month, the commission staff said another plan aimed at strengthening CAN-Spam -- creation of a do-not-spam registry similar to the do-not-call list for telemarketers –- would fail without a system in place to authenticate the origin of e-mail messages and could even result in an increase in the amount of spam received by consumers.

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