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US House, Senate Agree on Anti-Spam Bill

Posted by michael on from the writing-on-the-wall dept.

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.

3 of 448 comments (clear)

  1. How to fund enforcement by mabu · · Score: 1, Redundant

    According to statistics from last year, there are more than 27 million registered .com/net/org domain names. If each domain holder paid an additional $2/year for renewal, this would generate more than $50 million for cybercrime enforcement activities. If each domain holder paid $5/year, that would generate more than $1.3 BILLION DOLLARS that could be dedicated towards creating and funding an agency dedicated to actually enforcing all these laws that are currently un-enforced.

    I don't know about anyone else, but the prospect of paying a few more dollars per year on my domain registrations would be worth eradicating spam, and it could generate enough money to easily fund whatever efforts were needed to finally enforce these laws, crack down on worm/virus developers and the plethora of other Internet-based crime that's going on.

  2. Re:Hasn't passed the House yet. Call Congress now. by Animats · · Score: 0, Redundant
    As of 3:11 AM EDT, the spam bill, S.877, still hasn't come to a vote. The House is still in session. There's a big fight going on over the Medicare prescription drug benefit bill, and the House is dealing with procedural votes on that.

    Saturday ends the session. If it doesn't pass today, it's dead.

  3. SPAM? by arothmanmusic · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I say Hormel Foods should sue the government for using the trademarked name of their canned meat product on this legislation without permission!