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Michigan's Proposed Spam Law Called Toughest In U.S.
goats_in_boats writes "A new bill (PDF
or HTML)
was presented to the Governor
of Michigan that would require spam sent to residents of the State to be identified
as such. Highlights include the requirement that unsolicited email 'Include in
the e-mail subject line "ADV:" as the first 4 characters' and that 'a person who
violates this act is guilty of a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for not
more than 1 year or a fine of not more than $10,000.00, or both.' An article
in the Detroit Free Press calls the bill 'the most stringent anti-spam law in
the nation.'"
Now we just need a few more laws in different states, mandating a different set of initial 4 characters. SPM:, AVT:, etc... That would make it reasonably difficult to send nationwide SPAM with any guarantee of legality.
1. Enforcement: How will they actually prosecute (or even find) spammers that violate the law? I'd say there's a pretty good chance that there will be quite a few complaints. Assuming they're even able to backtrack and find the spammers who violate the law, a large number of violations could render this law unenforceable. It takes a good amount of time to review the violation, try to track down where the e-mail came from, etc. If they can't effectivly track down violators, the law won't do much.
2. Interstate/International commerce: While this should affect spammers in all states (as explained in another post), how will this hold up with international companies? Does this stop a company in the US from sending it's spam through a Canadian e-mail advertising agency? Does it apply to non-US companies at all? I'm far from a legal expert, so if you have any ideas please share them.
As much as I dislike spam I find it disconcerting that so much focus has been put on it by politicians. Our current government has major structural problems which have been getting little press as of late (such as the bush mandated discrimination against pro-homosexual bureaucratic policies). The fight against spam is trivial, yet has a powerful hold. I think its largely the result of common support from all consumers + it makes politicians look technologically adept and forward thinking. In short, it's low hanging fruit, an easy win. This question has been asked a million times, but, why can't we focus on what's really going on.
Photos.
(a) "Commercial e-mail" means an electronic message, file, data, or other information promoting the sale, lease, or exchange of goods, services, real property, or any other thing of value that is transmitted between 2 or more computers, computer networks, or electronic terminals or within a computer network.
I can't quite decide if this covers donations and political messages, the usual exemptions you see in these bills.
I'm guessing the word "commercial" was inserted in there to make the exemption implicit. A shame.
What if a Michigan citizen is checking his e-mail from a server in London, from a hotel room in Tokyo?
Michigan never enters the scope. Who and what has to be in Michigan for this to work?
but I don't see these laws really doing much about Spam, especially since people can just spam from other states or countries. I think that we will need to change the way Internet email works before we see some real relief.
With offshore spammers and the like, who the f#(* is going to be able to enforce that?
.gov and .edu domains. It would help keep the spam from clogging up the government machines/networks (it's likely clogged enough already with them folks doing "work"), and would help keep the porn spam from getting to kids. (Plus I work at a univ. and it would help me!)
If they can/do, I think a law should be passed that bans spam for
I'm all for wiping out Spam, but this law is a giant piece of junk. I run a small business. I solicit business by email. Lots of people do. Now you're telling me that if I try and solicit any work from a client that happens to reside in Michigan that I'm going to get hit with a $250,000 fine? Nope.
....
For those who didn't RTFA:
(a) "Commercial e-mail" means an electronic message, file, data, or other information promoting the sale, lease, or exchange of goods, services, real property, or any other thing of value that is transmitted between 2 or more computers, computer networks, or electronic terminals or within a computer network.
No exceptions for small business guys like me means an unlawful restriction of business speech.
And this is the real penalty, not $10,000
(b) In lieu of actual damages, recover the lesser of the following:
(i) $500.00 per unsolicited commercial e-mail received by the recipient or transmitted through the e-mail service provider.
(ii) $250,000.00 for each day that the violation occurs.
yes yes, I understand this, but seriuosly, this legislation is being pushed LIGHTNING FAST, not PATRIOT act fast, but fast. The way I view it your analogy doesn't work. Why? Because all these little chickenshit problems get more public mindshare than the important ones. Spam articles abound, articles on say, congolese massacres never make the headlines. Hell, liberia's pres resigned today and it only got to the bottom of the front page in the LA Times. I dont' know if this reflects something bad about the public or the publishers, but its still fscked up.
Photos.
From the article's paraphrasal of the spam bill, I would say that it misses the mark. The problem is not advertising per se, but email designed to trick you. The leading trick is a fake sender address.
Almost all spam uses a fake sender address. Usually the sender address is bogus. Pernicious spam uses a real, forged sender's address. Not only is this difficult to detect, it causes the victim of the identity theft to receive rejection messages and hate mail. I have been the victim of such identity theft and it isn't pleasant.
I support legislation making it a criminal offense to forge the sender's address, and a lesser offense to send email (especially in quantity) with a bogus sender address.
I believe that legitimate advertisers and freedom-of-expression devotes can agree that forgery has no legitimate purpose.
If emails were signed, it would be much easier to bring pressure to bear on the senders of undesirable email to cease and desist.
And how many lines of code would it take to block the whole message at the mail server? This could be an option the user could enable, and then the server itself only downloads the header before rejecting the message.
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
One mother told me that when she found pornographic messages in the family's e-mail, she immediately suspected that the teenagers in her house had been up to no good. The broken trust took weeks to repair.
and that's the basic tone of the whole piece: spam is a trojan horse rolling sexual material into the living rooms of godfearing, wholesome americans.
of course, it's not worse than the detroit free press who provides for the solicitation of prositution....
2 1337 4 u!
If someone out of state sues you (or a DA charges you with a criminal offense) in an out of state court, what can they possibly do to make you show up?
They can't send a Michagan State Trooper to Florida to serve papers or forcible bring someone into court (Look at the incident in Texas with the Legislators who left the state for a few days to break quorom, which is a violation of the law, - the state police knew where they were but could not arrest them because they were in Oklahoma).
This is why we need spam laws to be at the Federal level, but even then, our reach won't cover asian spammers (Unless you can get Dubya to declare war on Weapons of Mass Spammage).
From Sec 3 of the Act:
"an e-mail service provider that the sender knew or should have known is located in this state or to an e-mail address that the sender knew or should have known is held by a resident of this state"
Requiring willful conduct or intent as this law does (in Sec 3, not Sec 4) puts a huge burden on the prosecution/plaintiff. With email addresses that have no physical correspondence to the receipt's real address, how is the spammer supposed to "know or should know" if the resident is in Michigan? Once this, nearly unprovable, element is part of the crime, the crime becomes nearly unenforceable. And, all the draconian requirements that got this law the press coverage may be ignored.
I guess the real battle is "can you assume that if a Domain Name is registered to a MI address that the email server is physically in MI?" After all, the Domain Name's mailing address may be a corporate headquarters and the server may be located in Florida.
Sec. 4 of the Act is a good old strict liability requirement (no intent or negligence needed to prove the crime). But, the requirements imposed by Sec. 4 aren't that odd, just standard "truth in advertising" applied to email.
Will a consultant have to use this header to solicit business? That might mean most of his emails will never get read. What about a contractor trying to hire himself out to employers? What about someone notifying a mailing list about a special-interest web site he just set up, which incidentally sells merchandise on the side? We all might know spam when we see it, but once you start down this path you can get entangled in the law.
to control spam. As it is now, email is still somewhat unregulated and protected by first amendment rights.
Spam can be controlled with properly configured mailers, good filters, and good habits about who you give your address out to. (plus blacklists, whitelists, etc)
Legislation being applied to this area could potentially open the door to more regulation in this area, and I'd rather not take the chance.
I get almost no spam at all at GMX. the site may be in German, which I cannot read, but they have a very effective, multi-layered, and reliable anti-spam implementation. Thier service supports pop and imap for retrieving your mail, and smpt (with auth) for sending.
I'm sure that most (smaller) ISPs would implement good anti-spam measures and policies if enough of thier users (politely) requested them.
If you are using Hotmail, MSN, AOL or similar, my guess is that you're sh*t out of luck, and it's time to change providers.
Read, L
It would be nice to see someone enforce these laws. Every one of these spams leads to someone making money from them - that's why spam exists. Every one of those websites selling viagra knock-offs, or porn, or selling mailing lists can be traced to someone who profits from these sales. Those are the people paying for the spam; make them accountable - cut off the money - and the spammers go away.
California has had "antispam" laws for quite some time - can anyone point to a single prosecution of these laws?
Well, at least "something" in this case isn't worse than nothing... yet... but the way Michigan has been heading, that end seems inevitable.
Any law that says you must label spam (e.g., put ADV: in the subject) has two major flaws:
1) It only addresses half the problem, and it's not the important half. It does nothing to ease the burden on the mail servers that must transport the spammer's trash.
2) It sanctions what would otherwise be an illicit act.
As it is today, the act of spamming may or may not be illegal, but once a law is enacted that says "label it", the spam becomes sanctioned by law. Without that law, a hosting company can dump a user for spamming. With the law, it becomes more difficult because the spammer can say "I followed the law!"
IMHO: We're better off without laws like this.
--Bill
home
gimme back my
I live in Michigan, I hate spam. However politicians need to stay out of this, once they start playing internet cop where will it end? They cannot govern something on a global scale.
Sorry, this isn't nearly the flame it sounds like.
How, exactly, is forcing all spam to have a subject line that starts "ADV:" abridging freedom of speech? The spammers are just as welcome to spam away, as long as they put those 4 little characters at the beginning of their subject line. That's it. It doesn't legislate what is contained in the body or even the rest of the subject of the email.
I'm not completely disagreeing with you: government regulation is generally a bad thing. However, in the past we've had industries (the movie industry, the music industry, and the videogame industry to name three) that have desired, not out of any sense of civic responsibility but through simple desire to maintain control of their industries, to voluntarily rate the content they produce, to prominently label it, if you will. If they had not made that decision, the government was on the verge of regulating and forcing what would probably be significantly more draconian regulation upon them (remember what Tipper Gore was famous for before she almost became first lady?). The industries involved have done an excellent PR job making it look like they were taking care of the problem of kids watching "bad things" at the theatre, but in reality it was the immediate threat of government intervention that drove the labeling of content in all three of those industries.
The BCE industry doesn't have that kind of centralized authority. So they'll never self regulate, leaving only one option: Regulation being forced upon them. They could have voluntarily said "we'll put a note in the SMTP header" or "we'll only use specific domain names" or even "we won't forge headers". As a result of continuing bad conduct by the bulk commercial emailers, they get regulated. This has been coming for a couple of years now, enough time for the industry to band together and set some standards (and muscle out the little guys, consolidate their industry into a few big powerhouse BCE's, maybe pay people to accept and read spam). However, that didn't happen because it would cut into their profit margins too much. So this state government is being a bit more heavy-handed than they probably need to be, but the window of opportunity for a more subtle approach is over.
Government regulation is bad. But it generally takes a really long time, so smart industries can self regulate just enough to avoid mandated regulations being jammed down their throats. What we have with BCE is a really dumb industry. (Not to say that they don't have money, but they're dumb, they've been shitting where they sleep.)
Spam is not, and has never been a free-speech issue. It's a property rights issue. Spammers may say whatever they like, but they may NOT use MY property to do so.
The libertarian principle here is perfectly clear.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Due to the US constitution, you cannot be tried on a law made ex post facto (spelling?). This means that if an act was legal when you did it, you cannot be convicted because laws changed after-the-fact. Thus the government can only go after the person if they spammed AFTER the law was inacted, thus your "ancient SPAM" idea wouldn't work. Unless G.W. Bush declares the REST of the constitution invalid of course.
Little Brother, watching the watchers
Absolutely correct. I didn't write quite what I meant.
More along the lines of 5 years from now, the state discovers that John Q. Public once sent an email to a Bill Grudgeman asking him if he was interested in a deal on widgets. The whole story? Mr. Public sent the email b/c Mr. Grudgeman has a website describing how he uses similar widgets. John Q. wrote him a personal, friendly email asking if he was interested in a new supplier.
Grudgeman's friend is embarassed by John Q.'s investigative website, and remembers this old email. Grudgeman presents it to his local D.A. (sister-in-law's neigbor), who is looking to "make spammers pay" before the upcoming election. John Q. is charged, and faced with a year in jail, pleads out for 90 days and the $10,000 fine.
Justice indeed.