US House, Senate Agree on Anti-Spam Bill

Folic_Acid writes "Rep. Billy Tauzin, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce committee, has announced that the House and the Senate have reached a deal to both pass an anti-spam bill, the first ever federal anti-spam law in the United States. Specifically, the law contains: opt-out, authority for the FTC to set up a "Do-Not-SPAM" registry, criminal charges for fraudulent spam, including five years in prison, statutory damages of $2 million for violations, tripled to $6 million for intentional violations, unlimited damages for fraud and abuse." News.com has a copy of the bill and a story.

Comments

The RIAA/MPAA has their mitts in this one too!

[corebreech]

Go to http://thomas.loc.gov and do a bill search on "anti-spam" and read the Senate version, from which I quote:

...the term `unsolicited commercial electronic mail message' does not include an electronic mail message sent by or on behalf of one or more lawful owners of copyright, patent, publicity, or trademark rights to an unauthorized user of protected material notifying such user that the use is unauthorized and requesting that the use be terminated or that permission for such use be obtained from the rights holder or holders.

Unbelievable.

Finally!

[jon3k]

This has been a long time coming, I hope we're actually able to enforce it. Although, its going to be tough with all the world wide spam.

Is this really just fluff to impress voters? Or do you think it will actually carry any weight?

Re:Finally!

[masoncooper]

My question is how would one go about No-Spam listing their entire domain. I'm sure plenty of people here have Catch-All's and it would be impossible to include every iteration.
The same goes for ISP's. We have all seen Earthlink, Yahoo, even Hotmail include anti-spam methods, could they have their entire domain listed? Should they?
This raises several other questions, but at least in response to your (2), this would cover all recipients of a domain without giving a single address away.

Re:SPAM fines

[sfjoe]

But as for unlimited damages for fraud and abuse, I think it's a good idea that the US Gov't has the power to bankrupt SPAM companies that lie, cheat and steal. How can I convince my own govrenment (Canada) to do something like this?

get your own government to actually do something useful instead of this piece-of-shit legislation. Here's a quote about it from Spamhaus.org:
All todays spammers applaud Tauzin's "Reduction in Distribution of Spam Act", as does the Direct Marketing Association. It's what spammers have always dreamed of. They would no longer need to hide their identities to thwart disconnection, on the contrary, once spamming is legal they would be able to sue any Internet Service Providers who disconnect them for 'spamming legally'.

See http://www.spamhaus.org/news.lasso?article=10 for the whole article then let your congrescritter know whether or not you support them.