How Other Companies Can Help

ISPs · Service Organizations · Translation · (Proxy Server Servers)

An old-fashioned idea: give consumers something they want

Opportunities to help us, yourself, and consumers

We're a small new company, and many of our key functions are outsourced to other companies. We also hope that the publication of large numbers of DECLARATIONs will create business opportunities for other companies. These need not involve us directly, web companies that offer a proxy server server. Here's another idea; you can probably think of more.

How ISPs can help

Many Internet Service Providers provide their clients with instructions on how to set up their home pages. One difficulty facing consumers who are just starting with web publishing is that they have to learn a lot of HTML before getting anything substantial of their own to publish. So we hope that ISPs will tell their clients in their instruction pages that they can easily use JUNKBUSTERS SPAMOFF or JUNKBUSTERS DECLARE to build tailored HTML pages to use as their first links to from their templated home page.

Will list generation become a cottage industry?

The task of ``list generation'' is currently an arcane craft practiced by anonymous analysts in the direct marketing industry, who fuse data from a variety of sources to decide who is worth mailing or calling. If large numbers of consumers publish DECLARATIONs, direct marketers may be able put aside some of this wizardry and start asking a simpler question: ``Who has actually said they want to hear about the kind of stuff we sell?''

Some large companies will want to look through all the DECLARATIONs themselves, but many smaller companies may want to get a list of, for example, people who are willing to receive mail about the Arts. Anyone can create such a list, but before you sign a contract to supply it to XYZ Corp, notice that the GNU General Public License under which you obtained the DECLARATIONs prohibits you from imposing any barrier to XYZ's redistribution of derivative works (such as your list). So you can take XYZ's money, but once they have your list, they will have the right to resell it, and you cannot deny them this right.

The decision to place JUNKBUSTERS DECLARATIONs under the GPL may seem like a scorched earth policy: yes, you can have it, but it'll never be a cash cow, so you might as well not try. This isn't entirely true; we think creative entrepreneurs will find many ways to use DECLARATIONs to benefit both themselves and consumers. But we do hope that the GPL will make the list trade more open, rather than let it remain institutional gossip out of the hearing of the consumers concerned.

Opportunities for service organizations worldwide

Although the U.S. is clearly the country whose citizens most desperately need a way of controlling the junk that's sent to them, we want to make these services available to everyone in the world. We obviously can't do all this by ourselves, so we're seeking expressions of interest from groups with local presence and experience who can demonstrate that they would be able to carry out one or more of the following functions with diligence, efficiency and integrity.

Client services: Establish and maintain local Web servers; update, translate, and adapt content; provide services to assist clients in tasks such as the setup and maintenance of their DECLARATIONs.
Independent verification: After our client base grows to an economical size, we hope to be able to pay one or more independent companies (which we will here call IVCs) to verify the DECLARATIONs we have received. This will probably be done by the IVC writing a letter to each client containing a copy of his or her DECLARATION, requesting the client to confirm the instructions by signing and returning the letter in a prepaid reply envelope. The IVC would store these replies (possibly on microfilm) in a way that allows them to be retrieved individually if necessary. It would also report to Junkbusters on which DECLARATIONs have been verified to their satisfaction.
Corporate services: This bureau would work with local companies involved in direct marketing to promote use of JUNKBUSTERS DECLARATIONs and compliance with them.
Dual services: Especially in less populous nations, the roles of client and corporate services (but not independent verification) may both be performed by a ``dual service'' organization.

Initial contact should be a notification of the URL of a brief expressions of interest specifying the functions and geographical areas of interest. In the large countries such as the US, responsibilities might be further split, for example by dividing corporate services along industry lines.

Opportunities for translation companies

The idea of a DECLARATION of permissions is independent of language and country: all consumers and companies in the world can use it to exchange permissions. But since most of the world speaks languages other than English, we wish to make all our materials available in as many languages as practicable. We invite translation firms to develop and donate translations of our pages. You can begin translating without asking us for specific permission, because all the pages are made available under the GPL, which specifically anticipates translation as a kind of modification (though they had computer languages in mind when they used the term). Of course under the GPL you will not own the copyright of your translation, but it will be covered by the GPL. As you complete each page of translation, please use our notification form to tell us about it; we may decide to publish a link to your translation or to place copies of part or all of it on our site.

We prefer each translation to include an HTML comment in English in the header section indicating that it is accurate and complete (possibly with exceptions indicated). (However, we realize no translation can ever be perfectly satisfactory, and we would actually prefer translations that are natural and lucid in the target language and culture rather than slavishly literal. If in doubt you can annotate using HTML comments, but we'll leave it to your professional judgment.)

We ask that no material be added to the body except for a statement of the form ``[Traduction donneé par] (translation donated by) [Firm's name]'', where the firm's name has a hypertext link to their home page. (The example statement above assumes French was the target language; for other languages it would be appear in the target language without [square brackets].) We offer no payment to firms for this service; we hope that they will do it for the opportunity to serve their fellow native speakers and perhaps obtain some referrals.

We would suggest the following priority for translations: first the home page, summary page and legal page, then the form that creates DECLARATIONs, then the files called variety, sample, precre, comply, faqs, and us. The links page might be omitted as the content of what is described is in English. Files addressed primarily to organizations are all of lower priority than the ones addressed to consumers. Some files may not be worth translating at all, such as those relating to U.S. legislation, which are probably of little interest to anyone in any language other than English. Content that relates only to the U.S. could be truncated to a phrase flagging the omission and a pointer to the English version. Many of these suggestions are embedded in the HTML text as flagged comments.

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