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

Whoo hoo!

[eaddict]

Now if the other states and countries would just follow. Something (besides filters) needs to be done about SPAM.

Brilliant, now...

[syrupMatt]

Lovely. Now that California has lead the way, when do you think other states will follow suit?

Is there actually a "spam lobby" anywhere that could prevent (read give money to) politicans from supporting or passing such bills in other states?

I love this definition of SPAM:

[Tri0de]

"The statute defines "unsolicited e-mail documents" as "any e-mailed document or documents consisting of advertising material for the lease, sale, rental, gift offer, or other disposition of any realty, goods, services, or extension of credit" when the documents (a) are addressed to recipients who do not have existing business or personal relationships with the initiator and (b) were not sent at the request of or with the consent of the recipient."

Perhaps not plain english, but as close as legalese gets.
YES!!!

Does this apply to junk mail?

[Chris Burke]

If not, I don't care. Spam is annoying, sure, but junk mail is heaping piles of dead trees. The recycle bins by my apartment are constantly filled with weekend shoppers and credit card offers. One place I lived put the paper bin right next to the mail boxes, so you wouldn't have to carry your armload of junk mail. Aside from that, there's also the fact that spam is easier to deal with. I can set up procmail (or even more primitive filters) to do a decent job of keeping my inbox free of crap. But no matter how often I show the contents of my .mailmanrc to my postal carrier, I still end up getting a new shopper every day from a different place, always printed on high-gloss 100% freshly killed tree.

In A Related Story

[DeadBugs]

Texas has passed a law to make it illegal for telemarketers to call people on a special do not call list. If the telemarketer violates this law they will be charged $1000 for each offense

Here is the story from Yahoo

Re:In A Related Story

[Amarok.Org]

Of course, there's several lists (each of which costs you $2-3 to get onto), and the exclusions are enough to make it basically worthless.

From the site where you can sign up (www.texasnocall.com) :

ARE THERE EXCEPTIONS TO THE RULES FOR TELEMARKETERS?

Yes. Telemarketers may contact customers:
* with whom they have an established business relationship;
* if the customer requests contact;
* to collect a debt;
* on behalf of a non-profit organization or charity, or
* if the telemarketer is a state licensee (for example - insurance or real estate agent, etc.) and:
* the call is not made by an automated device;
* the solicited transaction is not completed without a face-to-face presentation to complete a sales transaction and make payment;
* the consumer has not previously told the licensee that the consumer does not wished to be called.

Oh well. It was a nice thought.

- Dave

Spam prevention for the entire domain!

[trenton]

Check out 17538.4 (h) from the code:

(h) An employer who is the registered owner of more than one e-mail address may notify the [spammer] ... of the desire to cease e-mailing on behalf of all of the employees who may use employer-provided and employer-controlled e-mail addresses.

This is amazing! No more spam to my personal domain. No more spam at work. In fact, just start a free email system, run it as a non-profit, have everyone that signs up be a volunteer (volunteers are afforded the same considerations as employees), and you could have a spam-free deal for all!

What are the odds of getting someone big to do this, like Hotmail or AOL? Then we'll really see how against spam the big companies are.

I dont know how this would mod, maybe i need help

[t0qer]

My friend has one of those fathers that left when he was a small kid and pops in once in while to give him a car, business, just sort of out of the blue.

Anyways we're going down to his house in bakersfield next week. Apparently his father has a T1 line going into a csu/dsu into a router on a pretty unsecured network into his house. All windows machines running IIS, can't remember the spam package he's using but here is the dilema I face, maybe my fellow /.ers can help me make the call on this.

Up until last year I was a happily working dot com guy. Every company needed sysadmins so for a guy like me that understood tcp/ip networking and o/s installation it was great. Jobs were everywhere. Then I got laid off a week after buying my house. Been surviving, still got the house, but you just don't derive as much pleasure from life living day to day on ramen and cigarettes your bought scraping the change that fell out of people pockets from your couch.

His father wants our help. He know's I can help him convert everything over to BSD, which in itself would secure him a bit, get a firewall in place and a billing system. Currently he is making $2,500 a week net and has customers lined up out the door to use his spamming services.

My moral dilema is, do I help the guy to make a quick buck (which also makes the wife happy) or do I stick to my guns and say spam is wrong?

It's a really hard choice to make when you're faced with the reality of well.. reality. Bills don't pay themselves. I sometimes wonder if the goverment is lying about how bad it really is out here because I got 5 sysadmin friends in the bay area out of work now. 5 sysadmins that I personally know and hang out with. Their job hunts have been the same as mine for the last year, HR ppl just bringing you in for an interview so its "make busy" work.

I dunno, today might just be a weird day, its an odd coincidence that slash would be posting a story on this a week before i'm supposed to go help it.

Re:only a slight improvement

[Genom]

Actually, I think it may make a difference, but not as drastic a one as those who wrote the law hope for.

Valid return address - allows you to track down someone to be held liable for the spam. This makes complaining to the upstream provider much easier - and while the spammer will probably just hop accounts for the next one, it'll at least be a thorn in their side.

Address removal - This won't really change anything -- they'll remove you from the one-time list they used to generate that particular spam, but add you to 3 other lists that will be sold or used to spam again.

ADV: in subject - This is the one that could change the user experience signifigantly, if mail server admins use it. If spam is required by law to contain ADV: in the subject, than email can be filtered server-side to cull it out. Obviously this requires a little bit of work on the server admin's part - but if done right, this could bring your spamcount to zero (assuming the spammers obey the law)

Now...most likely the spammers won't obey the law. They'll keep going as they are now, until enough of them get fined/jailed over it - then they'll have to figure a way to get around it. Most likely this will involve large "donations" to various congress members, in return for their vote against making there be any real penalty for violating the law.

So yes - you're right on the one hand that the ammount of spam that comes in may not change - but the few spammers who actually abide by this law will make themselves easy targets for good filters. (and most good filters already cull out ADV: subjects ;P )