At 07:37 PM 29/11/2001 +0000, Chris Barker wrote:
I like it Mark! You see, the Land of the Free can be a little too free
sometimes n'est-ce pas?
Luckily my student son's junk mail comes to us so we can recycle it and
keep him from temptation's door ;-).
I am pretty sure that there is a law in this country against such
harassment and that this company would be sorted by the Office of Fair
Trading. Come to think of it, most of the credit card junk mail comes
from US-based companies like MBNA.
A friend of mine has an acquaintance who lives out in the wilds of Alberta
in a cabin heated by a rather old-fashioned furnace that you burn wood (or
whatever) in. This gent actually ENCOURAGED the delivery of junk mail to
his address for the sole purpose of burning it as free fuel; he'd purchased
a hand-cranked device that rolls paper into "logs" which burn quite
nicely. After a while, he was quite literally getting several large mail
bags of junk mail per day, at which point Canada Post tried to force him to
come and pick the mail up at a regional sorting centre rather than deliver
it to his address.
He took them to court.
A few years previously, Canada Post had successfully argued in court that
they could not stop the delivery of junk mail to an address at the request
of the receiver/victim, because there really was no objective criteria by
which they could determine what constituted "junk" mail (on the theory that
"one person's junk is another person's information"), although the argument
was widely perceived as a shallow pretext to protect a rather lucrative
source of revenue for the Post Office (bulk mail).
Now, of course, they were trying to argue the opposite. The judge wouldn't
go for it, and the deliveries of bags and bags of junk mail resumed forthwith.
And he still has a free source of fuel. ;-)
Garth
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