Or you can just go here:

yellowpagesoptout.com

That doesn't work, but it would if there was a law requiring it, with penalties and enforcement.

If Scam Adams can make a big deal out of plastic bags, surely you'd think he'd do something about phone books.

PD, he's probably getting a cut. Phonebooks are like weekly newspapers: the advertisers are paying their rates on the inflated promises by the publishers that the final product will reach x number of potential customers. Phonebook publishers don't give a damn about what happens to the product after it's dumped off on your front doorstep, but they really, really care about any effort that prevents them from being able to deliver in the first place. If an opt-out system were to be instituted, then nobody would receive a phonebook other than those unfamiliar with the system, and then the advertisers start asking "So WHY should I pay this kind of money if the only audience I reach consists of elderly shut-ins?"

your friends to the north are showing the way to a large lawsuit...

Yellow page police. Great idea.

"Yellow page publishers have threatened to sue, complaining that the law doesn't apply to other forms of media."

And here's where it gets interesting, because it should. Out here, the Dallas Morning News was regularly polluting neighborhoods with a regular English for rich neighborhoods and a Spanish freebie for all the others. It was possible to opt out of deliveries of Briefing, but only after jumping through hoops on the DMN Web site, as well as repeated follow-up calls from reps to inform you that you wouldn't get certain coupons unless you kept taking Briefing. Nothing, and I mean nothing, would stop the Spanish freebie deliveries, and its delivery reps were notorious for piling up copies out front of abandoned houses and in vacant lots.

Well, things got interesting. A friend of mine started gathering up copies that he sure as hell wasn't going to read and dumping them out in front of the Dallas Morning News building, and the meme spread from there. What really killed the whole game, though, was when people receiving both unwanted freebies started calling up the businesses advertising in them and stating for the record that they would NEVER do any transactions with those businesses so long as they were running ads in those freebies. A few calls from advertisers to the DMN, and the whole program stopped as if it had never existed.

your friends to the north are showing the way to a large lawsuit...

Sometimes you have to get sued to do the right thing.

These little gems have started replicating themselves. Not only do we get the full-sized Yellowbooks thrown in our driveway, we started getting a pint sized version of the same book in our PO Box. The post office is left to deal with a mass of useless material as people leave them on the counters (thinking someone else might want it?). The stacks of these mini-books gets rediculously high. The janitor then comes along with his rolling dumpster and tosses them in the trash. I'm sure the Post Office loved the postage paid but not the left over refuse littering the place.

I think you may mean strict opt-in, rather than opt-out.

Nitpicks aside, it seems like littering to me. $500 per incident, anyone? :-)

Opt-in only, please. Fine of $1000 per complaint. Dedicate fine revenue to placing and tipping sidewalk recycling barrels.

Of course Portland wouldn't do something so smart and yet so environmentally friendly.

But when Portland gets around to it (in about ten years) it'll claim that it pioneered the law and took it light years beyond what Seattle and other cities did.

Phone Books should be an opt-in matter; put a little flier in with a phone bill once or twice a year and those who want the phone books can return the completed flier back with their payment to the phone company. Or, just make it a check-box on the remittance stub with the payment. "Check here if you would like to receive a hard copy telephone directory in the next 90 days."

I'd be happy with true opt-out, mandatory and enforced. It would help a lot.