Send Email to Utah, Go to Jail

Talaria writes "The Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy is reporting that two new laws in Utah and Michigan are going into effect next week, creating 'do not email' registries for children's email addresses. According to ISIPP, 'Email marketers who send unpermitted messages to email addresses or domains on the child protection registries in Michigan and Utah face stiff penalties including prison and fines.'" (Note that ISIPP has a vested interest in publicizing these laws, since they offer a service intended to establish that senders are in fact within the law.)

Comments

oy....

[cryptoz]

This sounds freakishly like the old Do Not Call list. As in, it's a really stupid idea. Why don't we create a list of all the e-mails of people who won't want to be e-mailed? 'Cause, you know, that's smart...no one will ever think of stealing the list and e-mailing all of the people...which would be a great irony, now that I think about it.

I remember how easy it was to get the DNC list from donotcall.gov for five different area codes, for free (if you lied a couple times about your tax information or something like that).

What's going to be in place for this to be stopped in this case?

Re:Enforcement Across the Pacific

[FidelCatsro]

Simple answer to that,They can do absolutely nothing.Which is about all they can do for about 99.999% of the spam out their , they may get lucky and catch a few spammers in Michigan , but not even if a country has an extradition treaty with the USA they will not extradite someone for spamming

What is Utah really like?

[CyricZ]

I have to ask what Utah is really like. I'm from Britain, so I've never been there. But all I hear about is that they're a very backwards state, in basically every way possible. I've even heard some people go so far as to say that Utah is resonsible for a lot of the decay in the United States today. Are those claims true, or are they just overgeneralizations based on the actions of a select few individuals?

Re:What is Utah really like?

[Deagol]

However, truth be told, Utah just doesn't have that much influence. It's only a few major cities (or perhaps just one - Salt Lake City), and most of the region is desert and salt flats. There just isn't all that much there to influence the rest of the country.

Two points:

1. The LDS Church, being a fairly good-sized, fast-growing non-profit organization whose members diligently ante up 10% of their income, has some politial clout. They lobbied heavily in Hawaii and Alaska (maybe wrong on this state) to defeat state bills that would sanction gay marriages (several years ago). I *think* the bills were defeated, but I can't say for sure.

2. Orrin Hatch. He's Mormon and he's got some clout in Congress. (This scares the hell out of me, to be honest.)

I (an atheist) live in central Utah and I kept tabs on what the locals were on about during this last election. While LDS friends tell me that the Church has an actual policy against peddling its political preferences at the pulpit, I'm almost certain that it happens all the time. If not during normal "service" (whatever they call it), very likely during the various other activities the church members engage in. The LDS implementation is of a "distributed" nature. No real offical clergy, per se, other than the standing profit -- err, I mean prophet -- and the Quorum of Twelve (or somesuch). Average joes are selected to act as "bishop" of local stakes/wards and lower members serve various functions, too. Given that, it's almost a guarantee that these people push/reinforce their political view amongst each other.

It's no wonder this state was the reddest on the map in 2004. I swear, The Stepford Wives story must have been about Provo, but some influencial Mormon put pressure on the author. :)

I do not see how this could possibly work

[Approaching.sanity]

Will this apply to e-mail addresses Created in Utah? Stored? If I am a resident of that state, create an e-mail address for that list and move to a different state can I use their law against someone else?

It will be impossible to enforce.

Re:Um, no

[The boojum]

I'm a "gentile" who moved here to Salt Lake City at the beginning of the year to go back to grad school and this is pretty much how it's looked to me so far. About the only thing I have to add is that I've been told that many people aren't quite as wealthy as they seem at first glance here. The LDS tendency to mary young often leads to people overextending their credit trying to purchase a house too early.

And yeah, I have yet to really meet annoying pushy LDS folks like I have evangelicals. Polite protest of disinterest have worked just fine.

There also turn out to be some surprising advantages to the oddities in legislation here. For example, the recent SCOTUS Eminent Domain ruling has no effect here as the state government recently passed legislation banning eminent domain for redevelopment purposes (except, in a twisted joke, for the redevelopers own property.)

I should mention, however, that my views are somewhat coloured by a fairly centrists view of American politics and religion, so the politics and religion here don't really bother me as much as they might some. (Honestly, for the moment I find them a somewhat refreshing change from my old heavily blue state.)