It's interesting how governments try to govern things like fax broadcasting, just faxing etc.

When you get down to the intent of it, it's really hard to prove that somebody sent a junk fax to a company.

Here's a junk fax ?? scenario:
You're in business and you want to prospect a business to sell them some of your products and services. You've been trained over the years to send out some preliminary information to the prospect before contacting them so that they have a better chance of knowing who you are.

You want to make your initial phone contact one that counts. You don't want to contact the prospect, whom you don't really know, to bother him/her with a request to send over a fax. You want your discussion to start with your products and not if you can send over introductory material.

You take the initiative to look up the company's fax number in the phone directory. You then send over your preliminary fax document to your desired prospect with the intentions to contact them in the next few hours.

YOUR PROSPECT CAN SUE YOU?
According to the TCPA and probably the California Law mentioned below, you have just broken the law civilly and can be fined up to $1500 per instance. This action of innocent "junk fax" prospecting can turn in a small court matter, technically.

IT'S COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS
As long as fax machines have existed, sales people , marketing people of all types have used this method of fax marketing. Sending out a preliminary fax advertisement to a prospective client to make them aware of their product. All of these people are breaking the law however because they are sending "unsolicited faxes".

What would happen to sales departments / marketing departments if they had to get written permission to send faxes to their prospects?

WHAT IS THE GOVERNMENT DOING ABOUT IT?
Assuming there are several thousand of these single junk fax infractions taking place each day, what is the Federal government doing about it? What is the Government of California doing about it?

The better questions are:

1. ) What can they do about it?
   
2. ) How can the regulators of junk faxers find all of these sales and marketing professionals who are innocently breaking the law, and prosecute all of them.?
   
3. ) Is it practical to do prosecute all of these junk fax broadcasters? NO!!
   

The person who sends out a single junk fax is just as guilty as the person who sends out multiple junk faxes or a fax broadcast. Yet, the federal and state governments completely over look the single junk fax offenders. IMO the single junk fax offenders probably make up a good portion of the paper wasted each day on companies fax machines.

That's why I find it ridiculous that there are junk fax laws in the first place. Businesses have fax machines to receive offers, invoices, communications of all types etc. They also have fax machines to send out offers, invoices, and communications of all types.

If you don't want to receive junk faxes from fax broadcasts, don't publish your fax number in the first place. Better yet... put your fax machine in a closet somewhere.

Articles from November 2006
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