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Do you accuse someone of theft when they breathe the air inside your home? There is no less air for you to breathe and there is no less available phone service for you.

The telemarketers use of your phone service does not diminish the use of your service so it is no more a 'taking' than some one who knocks on your door or breathes the air in your home.

While any jurisdiction may fall to the feds, do you have to run to the feds to solve a minor problem?

And think about this:

While they could get it anyway, when you sign up for this service, you save the feds a lot of time and energy by giving them your name, address, phone number, and email address all in one neat little package.

Do you accuse someone of theft when they breathe the air inside your home? There is no less air for you to breathe and there is no less available phone service for you.

Incorrect. When a telemarketer calls, my phone service is tied up dealing with that telemarketer. I can not receive or make calls while they are on the line. A 'little bit' of theft is still theft, there is a victim to the crime (myself) and unlike the argument about the theft of pirated music off the Internet, I have a direct and demonstratable loss.

While any jurisdiction may fall to the feds, do you have to run to the feds to solve a minor problem?

We disagree that it is a minor problem. With an average of ten telemarketer calls per day, I loose about an hour and a half of productive work time. I work in an industry that requires creative concentration, the flow of my writing can easily be disturbed by these calls. I can't just shunt the calls to an answering machine because when calls are returned from press contacts, political office holders, etc, it wastes their time as well as mine. The calls come from rather varied areas of the country, numbers that change depending upon where they are. This, for me, is no minor problem.

While they could get it anyway, when you sign up for this service, you save the feds a lot of time and energy by giving them your name, address, phone number, and email address all in one neat little package.

They already have all that and more. Congressional press pool credentialling is rather detailed in inspection of a person. But rather than resulting to rather intriguing tin-foil suggestions, how about answering a more serious question:

By what right do you believe telemarketers have to call random people? What is the justification for their existence? Half of the phone calls I get are for re-financing, a quarter for inquiries if I want to sell my home, and the remainder are scattered from home improvements to 'free vacations', etc.

75% of these calls are demonstratable as being from companies who charge unusually high fees, interest rates and conduct business practices that frequently end up on page 8 in a report about the latest action in a wire fraud case. Why are you trying so hard to defend an industry that preys on people?