It's my understanding that case laws has led to obscenity in this context being 100% as defined by the recipient. If you believe content type X is obscene, and someone sends you content type X, you can follow the procedure for reporting obscenity. They are obligated to stop sending you anything.
From the article "Power users also authorized the software to send Facebook messages to other Facebook users for them"
So in your analogy. I created a business of sending snail mail to addresses I already had in my possession on my list of contacts. My contacts might not appreciate my snail mail, but I am not sending snail mail to the Facebook corporate Office -Or- if I am sending to the Facebook Corporate Office, then only though its mail routing department, which was set up to handle these very packages.
The C&D, I think, is equivalent to preventing contacts from communicating with each other, or, Postal Censorship[1], which I suppose is more a policy issue than a legal one. Which I suppose extends FB to be a governing body, which I guess leads us to CFAA...
(In most cases you need my explicit opt-in confirmation that I want your junk mail before you send it to me).
Is there some kind of Europe-wide agreement on unsolicited marketing mail that covers every country?
Not that I necessarily agree with how this case turned out, but Facebook is under no obligation to support the business model of another company...
(For the record, I agree)
Agreed, but neither should they have the ability to destroy a business by the single act of sending out a letter. Pretty much from that point on the company can't legally operate.
If a business is flimsy enough to be destroyed by a letter, it was toast anyway.
Not to mention this argument that someone else's business is this precious thing that can't be destroyed. Its totally bizarre. How often does Apple release features that eat another company's lunch? Better yet, think of all the disruptive SV business models that are purely based on destroying businesses and replacing them with alternatives.
Completely disagree. In the early stages of its life, almost any business is very vulnerable. If Microsoft had irritated IBM just the slightest bit in the early days, they would have been toast, or at best a small niche company, because they were completely dependant on IBM's goodwill. An IBM executive could have decided they preferred the boys at Apple instead. no letter even required. Yet look at Microsoft today. Who is to say that a business starting out using a Facebook API today, could not diversify and be a powerhouse and industry leader, tomorrow?
The point is that this ruling allows one company to make illegal, the business activity of another just by sending out a letter irrespective of whether that company's activity is actually illegal
This is how it should be. If I, as a company, decide I don't want to do business with you, either individually or corporately, barring discrimination rules, why shouldn't I have that right?
In this case they'd already tried some technical measures which he evaded.