Your phone yourself is your property. You are paying for access to use your phone on wires that belong to someone else. Other people who are paying their phone companies are paying for access to those very same wires. You can do whatever you want to your phone, as your property. You cannot do whatever you want to the wires that connect callers to your phone. Just as you can call anyone in the world then anyone in the world can call you. However, you can use your property (your phone) to prevent hearing from those people. You can disconnect the phone, you can let a machine answer, you can turn off the ringer, etc. Your property is in your control. The phone lines, not being your property, are not in your control. The telemarketer, who pays for access, has as much right as you to use them.
If someone doesn’t want to get pestered by phone calls, then there are a variety of options availale. Being a dick and wishing death on someone should not be an option any rational person should consider.
This “public network” argument, if accepted as valid, proves that obscene phone callers have every right to act on their predilection (as long as their phone bill is paid up).
Since this conclusion is absurd, and follows inescapably from the argument, the argument is clearly invalid.
Refusing to respect a potential customer’s wishes to not be called isn’t rational, either. Especially, when they have made it so very obvious. So, there you go.
They do indeed have the right to make obscene phone calls. If one person continually harasses someone with obscene calls, however, then it becomes a legal issue. Since we are talking about telemarketing and not phone harassment (and harassment is illegal regardless of what medium you use to accomplish it), I don’t think your analogy holds water.
Most of the available options for avoiding telemarketing costs money to set up. Caller ID, Call Blocking, screening calls through an answering machine, etc., all cost extra. Why do we have to pay extra to avoid being annoyed by telemarketers?
At least putting yourself on the Do Not Call registry is free.
And, for that matter, why do telemarketers keep trying to get around the efforts we go through to avoid them? Could it be that they KNOW we don’t want to talk to them, and they’re doing their best to make sure that we don’t have a choice about it?
Being a dick and wishing death on them… well, at least it’s free and they haven’t yet found a workaround for THAT.
Yet.
By the way, unless you’re willing to post your phone number here for the Teeming Millions to call, any argument you present for the rights of the telemarketers is null and void. Put up or shut the fuck up, davenportavenger. Until you post your number, we’re gonna take any argument you present with a grain of salt.
You are the one who wants to avoid the annoyance so you should have to pay for it. That’s the way life works. When something bothers you, you pay to avoid it. I’m annoyed by roaches in my apartment. I pay for roach traps and Raid to take care of the problem.
How would opening myself up to calls from random people on the Internet compare with receiving telemarketing calls? This isn’t as clever a ploy as you think it is.
You would not be getting paid to “harass” me. You would be doing it out of sheer glee. Lord, do you think these people WANT to call you up? Fucking paranoids.
LHoD said it best. If you have a problem with telemarketers, take it up with their supervisors or the companies that oversee the entire operation. Don’t buy from companies that use telemarketing. There’s a whole range of things you can do that do not include terrorizing the wage slave on the other side of the phone.
So because telemarketers are being paid to do it, it’s all good? How about if I pay everyone who calls you one penny for each call, wherein they try to get you to buy some of my old crap? Willing to post your number now? I’m sure all the other dopers have old crap they’d like to dump on you as well.
