CA Appeals Court Upholds Spam Law

Joe Wagner writes: "Criminal penalties for spam, yeah baby! It has just been announced that California State's spam law has been ruled constitutional and valid by California Court of Appeal for the First District: '...we hold that section 17538.4 does not violate the dormant Commerce Clause [of the United States Constitution].' The actual ruling is here. Congratulations to Mark Ferguson and his lawyers (1, 2) for fighting it out for the rest of us..."

Comments

This seems like a bad thing to me...

[taliver]

Yes, I hate spam.

However, do we really want a precedent of banning certain types of emails? As much as we don't like spammers, I would much rather have to delete "Increase your ejactulation by 581%" than to worry that an encrypted email transmission was deemed illegal.

But it's a pro-spam law

[isdnip]

Read it. The law says that spammers have to provide an "opt-out" address, and users have to send their real email addresses to them, the spammers.

Duh.

So now the spammers will have a list of valid, guaranteed active email accounts. To sell, which is what opt-out addresses in spam are for. Not to opt out, but to verify that they're real.

And since this is a state law, the spammer can get away with this by being out of state. Not that spammers ever care about the law. The law merely encourages users to ACT LIKE IDIOTS and send real email addresses to spammers who will then use them as verified, premium spambait!

We want our Spam can logo back!

[caferace]

I noted the following at the bottom of the ruling:

Hormel Food Corporation, which debuted its Spam(R) luncheon meat in 1937, has dropped any defensiveness about this use of the term and now celebrates its product with a website . . . . [Citations.]" (Heckel, supra, 24 P.3d at p. 406, fn. 1.)

Does that mean /. can use the old Spam logo again? (only partially kidding...)

A bad decision on a bad law

[btempleton]

While if you hate spam as much as I do, you might be tempted to be pleased at this law, it's actually a terrible decision.

The court has said that when you mail, you have a duty to figure out in advance what state the mailbox you're mailing to is in, and then find out the e-mail laws of that state and obey them.

Yikes! That's not at all the way E-mail works. You often have no idea what state the other guy's mailbox is in, and it's a pain, or impossible, to find out in many cases.

You may cheer that this law puts this burden on senders of UCE, but the reality is that if this decision stands, you are letting all states put whatever rules they care to pass on E-mail, and putting a duty on everybody to know all the laws and know the state they are mailing.

To add insult to injury, this law defines new syntax for the Subject header! The government should not be defining the forms of e-mail headers. The IETF does that. This is also compelled speech and apparently the defendant didn't even bring that issue up.

Less you think I'm defending spam, you can read my essay on the insidious evil of spam to find out the contrary.

But we must fight spam the right way, and setting precedents like this is a dark day for e-mail and the internet in general.

California had another spam law which wasn't so bad because the recipient had to notify, thus making it clear what state they were in.