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First Lawsuits Filed under Missouri's No-Spam Law
darksoulz writes "The St. Louis Business Journal is reporting that Jay Nixon, Missouri's attorney general, has filed the first lawsuits under the new no-spam law against two Florida spammers. The law doesn't totally prohibit spam, it just requires that the subject line be tagged to let consumers know that it is an advertisement. One of the lawsuit recipients even managed to spam an address maintained by the attorney general's office."
This hasn't stopped Jay Nixon from suing many out-of-state telemarketers in violation of Missouri's "no-call" list - he's collected more than a million dollars so far.
I believe that it's been ruled somewhere that double ended transactions (such as a solicitation, originating in one state, and ending in another) can be said to have occurred in the destination.
Anyway, jurisdictional disputes are complicated. Your "does not and cannot" assertion is pretty thin.
C//
He's doing his sworn duty as Attorney General to enforce the laws of the State of Missouri. If the law is overturned, and he later prosecutes, what you say would become true.
"1. You are the recipient of the spam and you are a resident of California.
2. The spam was delivered via servers located in California (sender's, recipient's or intermediary server will suffice).
3. There is some indication that the spammer is operating in California, such as a California telephone number or address for orders. If you can identify the spammer and have information from other sources showing that the spammer is in California, that will also work.
4. The spam fails to comply with the statutory restrictions. To comply, the unsolicited advertising emails' subject line must begin with "ADV:", the first text in the message must offer a toll-free number or functioning email address for removal of the recipient from further unsolicited emails, and that statement must be in a type size as large as most of the other text.
1,2 and 4 are pretty easy. Proving 3 can be a real PITA, and means if I really want to work this hard I have to do a lot of legwork. Granted, the end result may be worth it, but...
ref: http://caag.state.ca.us/spam/index.htm
g IMAP), and then again the next step would be to make email-servers stop receiving messages with the forementioned subject feature to receivers who have enabled the feature.
The SMTP protocol does not allow this; once a mail server has agreed to accept a message, it MUST accept the ENTIRE message. The Subject header, like all other headers, is part of the same block of text as the message body. The receiving server can only reject the connection based on 1) the sender's IP address, 2) the HELO string, 3) the envelope from address, or 4) the envelope to address. Once it says OK to that, it must accept the rest of the message.
However, although requiring tagged subject lines will not decrease bandwidth usage, it will make filtering trivial, which will make it mostly pointless to send spam with tagged subject lines because nobody will even see it. This will discourage people from sending spam, which should decrease bandwidth usage.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
The "commerce clause" says that Congress has the power to "regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes". But that's not an exclusive power. State regulation of commerce can clearly impact interstate commerce. State jurisdiction can thus overlap federal jurisdiction.
The way this works, after two centuries of dealing with grey areas, is that the states have power to act in an area where the states and the Federal Government share control unless and until Congress chooses to preempt state action in that area. Congress doesn't have to preempt, but it has that option.
Most, but not all, of the bills in Congress to regulate spam are written to preempt state law. If such a bill passes, the state laws become ineffective. But that hasn't happened so far.
Alternatively, Congress can choose to legislate in an area but not preempt state legislation. Most Federal criminal law is written that way. Bank robbery is a crime under both Federal and state law, and can be prosecuted in either court system.
There's an issue of how much activity a company has to have in a state before that state can regulate its activities. This comes up in litigation frequently. But when a company actively solicits business to residents of a state by directly communicating with them, that's usually considered enough to bring them under the state's jurisdiction.
Sending direct mail to residents of a state is generally considered to be "doing business" in that state. Spam would presumably be viewed similarly. The spammer might argue that they didn't know where the destination address was. That's been argued by a spammer in Pennsylvania. The judge didn't agree.