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

I don't speak lawyer.....

[siliconvortex]

Could someone explain what the law means?

S.V.

E-mail is not speech?

[anthony_dipierro]

Let me get this straight. Links are speech. Code is speech. But e-mail is not speech?

Re:only a slight improvement

[HiThere]

Sorry, but I don't want my ISP deciding what I should receive. I may use spam filters locally, but I want to make the decisions. Actually, I've set up a pretty complex set of filters designed to pull out the email that I'm interested in. Someday I may bother trying to figure out one for spam, but for now it suffices to identify nearly everything else. Then I can delete most of the residue in swathes, without bothering to read it. But I scan the subjects and senders, because sometimes there's things there that I want.

Spam isn't a unitary entity. It has a complex, and largely disgusting substructure. But I don't mind the occasional mailing from, say, LinuxMall. I usually just delete it, but sometimes I feel like looking at it. (OTOH, I may add a special filter to throw away "Programmer's Paradise".)