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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..."
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?
"Moving through the masses like a fish through water." syrup
"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!!!
"Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts."
This law specifically ALLOWS spam to be sent. It just requires that spammers include a valid return email address and that they remove people from their list who want to be removed.
This is great?
It also only covers spammers who have their equipment located in California. All this means is that spammers will use mailservers in some other state or country.
The only good thing I see about this is that it requires the subject to have "ADV:" in it.
I expect absolutely no change in the amount of spam I get as a result of this law.
Are you sick of all of the SPAM that your receive in your email everyday. Well now there is something that you can do about it.
Our law firm will go after all of these hideous capitalist marketers...
To help our cause please forward this email to all of your friends and spread the word
Also be sure to tell them to vote no on the Congressional Act adding a tax to emails...
email from john@iz.cx with the following subject
$$ MAKE $$$$$ PROSECUTING SPAMMERS!!! $$
The One Rule Of Chess You'll Ever Need: Don't play someone who carries a kit in their bookbag.
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...)
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.
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
If I want to set up a stand on my front lawn and tell everybody about how great my penis enlargement system works, I can .. because I have free speech. If I want to promote my penis enlargement system on my Web page, I can .. because I have free speech. If I want to rent a hotel convention center and hold a series of meetings raving about the effectiveness of my penis enlargement system, I can .. because, well, you get the idea. Spammers have, and always have had the right to free speech. You are going one step further by claiming that massive (and often distributed) attacks on open relays and ill-prepared ISPs constitutes "speech." I must admit that this is one of the more puzzling arguments I've heard in favor of spammers.
.. not just from a bandwidth perspective, but from the perspective of computational resources as well. Back then, stories about these ISPs closing up shop were a dime a dozen.
.. when was the last time that you took a piece of "fucking C++ source code", purchased a list of 20 million email addresses from some promoter, sniffed out an open mail relay on some poor boob's network, and unleashed a bulk mailer bot to share your "speech" with the world? You're missing the point. Nobody is saying "MAKE MONEY FAST!!" isn't speech that is subject to First Amendment protection. What is being said is that the method of delivery is illegal. A spammer has no more right to steal the resources of others to mailbomb millions of people than I have to break into your house while you're sleeping and try to sell you a can of oven cleaner.
I realize that the days of the "Mom and Pop" ISP have pretty much gone the way of the dodo, but back in the mid-1990s there were quite a few of them. Unfortunately, many of these ISPs (which were pretty bandwidth limited and served a relatively small amount of users) were put out of business because of the overhead effects of spammers
This isn't to say I don't like spam, but if fucking C++ source code can be considered speech, why isn't "Do you want a longer penis?"
I'm starting to suspect that I've been trolled here, but assuming you're serious
Maybe the guy selling penis enlargment sauce really feels deeply about it and wants the world to know how truly great his product is.
Great! Then he can set up a stand on his lawn, put up an advertisement on his Web page, or put on a convention at his local Holiday Inn. Nobody is saying he doesn't have a right to promote his product. What people are saying is that there are some methods that cannot be used to do so. This has been true in the past, and it is true today.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground