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

Freedom?

[Darth Fredd]

I'm surprised that no slashdotters are screaming "foul". What with the freedom to trade music, etc, doesn't this put a damper on some freedom, rather?

From:evilDarthFredd@theworldisround.com
Subject :Hey yo!
Message content:
Hey brian, remember me? Hey, drop me a line, willya?

~EOF

Brian: I don't remember meeting this SOB..oh yes, it was HIM!!...SUE!!!! [calls lawyer]

And the rest is history.

Wow

[Tim C]

Five years in prison, and potentially up to $6 million in damages, all for spamming?

Now, I appreciate that spam, for a lot of people, is a major problem. I know that as a user, rather than an admin, and a careful one at that, I don't see the true extent of the problem. I get perhaps a couple of dozen spams a week to a single address that I was foolish enough to have in plaintext on a website a couple of years ago. To me, it's no big problem - Mozilla Mail's junk tools catch 95% of them. Still, I'm aware that spam is a serious problem for a lot of people.

But five years in jail? That seems somewhat excessive to me. I condemn the RIAA's lobbying partly because of the excessive penalties they seek; I cannot, in all conscience, support similar penalties for a crime which, to me at least, doesn't seem a great deal more heinous.