Slashdot Mirror
Virginia Supreme Court Strikes Down Anti-Spam Law
Skater writes "The Washington Post is reporting that the Virginia Supreme Court has struck down the anti-spam law that was used to convict spammer Jeremy James, on the grounds that the ability to be anonymous was more important than the problem of spam. Strangely, the same court only a few months ago upheld the law. 'The court noted that "were the 'Federalist Papers' just being published today via e-mail, that transmission by Publius would violate the [current Virginia] statute." The court suggested that the law does not limit its restrictions on spam to commercial or fraudulent e-mail, or to unprotected speech such as pornography or defamation. And when the state suggested that the court merely tailor a restriction to the law within its opinion, the court declined.'"
If 'Publius' spammed my inbox with the Federalist Papers I'd want the asshole's account yanked as much as the latest grow yer tool spam. Spam is unsolicited broadcast mail, period. Zero tolerance.
The correct way to publish would be for Hamilton & friends to open a blog under the Publius pseudonym.
Democrat delenda est
If Publius sent the Federalist Papers via email to hundreds of thousands of people, it would BE spam. The Federalist papers were items that people VOLUNTARILY sought out - they weren't shoved into everyones mailboxes and under their door thresholds. If they were, they would have been ignored and thrown away just like junk mail is today.
Political freedom of expression is protected; what isn't protected is having ANYTHING shoved down my throat using my own resources.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
No. That is wrong. You can be anonymous without spoofing IP addresses or faking domain names.
Correct your usage of "anonymous" first and then I might agree with you.
Bullshit. You still don't understand "anonymous".
And here we get to a fundamental question about what we want the Net to be. The court was entirely right to balk at deciding this for us.
We can have the right to communicate anonymously over the Net. Or we can have the right not to be contacted by anonymous people. We can't have both.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
Couldn't even be bothered to read the summary, could you?
So the law just needs to be rewritten so as to tackle things which are basically not free speech because they are fraud. I think the judge missed out a little on the analogy though because if people "subscribed" to the Federalist Papers then they wouldn't be spam even though they were published anonymously.
The court is right about one thing: the law is too vague. Fix the law, and then there will be no problem with the courts.
but your right to spam everyone with it?!
First Ammendment in action?
Spam is the ideal litmus test for where someone stands on the rights of free speech. It's almost universally objectionable, never warranted, and offensive to just about everyone.
Yet I'm not sure if there's anyone in the ./ crowd who will stick to their free speech principles when such principles inconvenience them personally. Is there anyone here who, upon receiving spam, remarks to themselves, "Ah, yes, free speech is not dead. I'm glad that - although I personally could care less about replica watches or increasing the size of my body parts - that somewhere, someone out there is free to send such materials to my inbox. USA! USA! USA!"
Because it stands to reason that if spammers have no right to send anonymous messages, then neither do you or I. While a lot of people may not like this particular consequence of free speech, it's far more dangerous to do away with the legal protections for anonymous speech.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The rest of the posts missed this entirely. The court was right here too...
And when the state suggested that the court merely tailor a restriction to the law within its opinion, the court declined.
Courts more or less interpret laws and process law breakers. Changes in the law are supposed to come from legislation, not the bench.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
No, the check cleared. That's all.
Imagine if spammers sent you hundreds of text messages to your cell phone every day. Imagine you do not have unlimited text messaging. Lets say each message costs you $0.10 or so. People would be up in arms (hence why we don't see spammers doing this).
Your free speech ends where my money begins. Using my bandwidth and my energy costs me money, you have no freedom of speech there, it's not a public resource.
Why? They just ignore it, use hidden caller id, and play you a recorded message.
If you "press 1" to ask for more information (like "who the HELL ARE YOU?" so you can file an FTC complaint) you've just opted in. If you "press 9" to "opt out", you haven't, but you still don't have either a name or a number so you can't file a complaint.
I get regular calls from "credit service" or something like that, talking about this being the last day to take advantage of some offer that will "lower my rates". (I pay in full each month, I don't really care what my rates are.) When I ask who they are, they hang up. When I press 9 to opt out, I can swear I hear chuckling in the background.
Today I got the same kind of call from Dish Network. They had a caller id number. They used the company name. I reported it faster than you can say "do not call."
As for the poster who claimed that spam doesn't physically harm him, I'll point out this tiny detail. Network access via T-Mobile 3G networks costs $15/Mb (I think it was) for US subscribers while in Germany. That spam message being downloaded costs me money, which I would have been able to spend on food. That's causing physical harm.
That or drag the motherfuckers into the streets and shoot them.
Stone. The victims ought to have a bit more fun than just one or two shots ending the pain. Maybe if you said "shoot them in the extremities, progressively moving toward the heart" I'd agree, but the next scum would get the sentence overturned because has no heart.
The court did the right thing.
I submitted an article back in May about this case.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/02/1910219
The court's decision is here in pdf:
http://www.courts.state.va.us/opinions/opnscvwp/1062388.pdf
Spam is bad - personally I use gmail and rarely see spam. But it's hard to write a statute that bans spam and doesn't ban slashdot and the internet in general.
Most of the anti-spam statutes out there are unconstitutional. Yay Va. Off to read the opinion.
above post is informative, flamebait.
Is the Court truely so clueless ("were the 'Federalist Papers' just being published today via e-mail, that transmission by Publius would violate the [current Virginia] statute.")?
The Federalist Papers were never forced upon unwanting recipients who had to pay for their receipt, they were made available to those who wanted to read them. There was choice involved.
The Federalist Papers were originally published in newspapers, so there's absolutely no parallel to spam. In modern terms, it would be a better comparison to blogs or websites. That can be done anonymously.
Big FAIL for the Court.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Why do you believe that it is the only method?
You can nail it to a telephone pole.
You can print it and leave it at bus stops.
People have even nailed things to church doors.
What is it about this subject that makes people turn off their brains?
That's just wrong. Email is NOT publishing. Comparing email to publishing the Federalist Papers is the kind of argument one would expect from a high school debater.
Proverbs 21:19
This doesn't preclude laws prohibiting spamming in violation of a "do not spam" list. It doesn't preclude laws barring fraudulent or misleading spamming. It also doesn't prohibit private servers from refusing to store or deliver spam.
Telemarketers, bulk mail distributors, and spammers, suck. But deal with them lawfully--there are legal tools available.
Their First Amendment protection is YOUR First Amendment protection.
You have the absolute right to say anything you please. You do not have the right to force me to listen to it. Nor pay for the 'privilege'.
is it considered okay to use hire a dozen people with bullhorns to spew political rhetoric around someone's house at midnight?
s/at midnight/before dawn/
Yes, that's standard political campaigning where I live.
The problem is his DELIVERY of it to people who do NOT want it.
No. That is as misguided a statement as the law that was struck down. The problem is economic - the economics of email, where all the costs are borne by the recipient, are broken and encourage spamming.
I get a lot of email I do NOT want that is not spam.
I have a big problem with geographics-based laws being applied to the internet. My email goes to a mail server in Virginia. I work in California and live in the Philippines. What jurisdiction applies to me in an anti-spam law?
I also have a problem with any law that curbs legitimate usage of something, in this case anonymity, to the detriment of law-abiding people. The solution to email spam is very simple. Attach electronic postage to each email message payable to the recipient, drop any message without attached payment. Spam problem solved.
Look, I hate spam as much as anyone else, but this conviction needed to be overturned. The law was written very poorly, and could have been interpreted to convict every "Anonymous Coward" here on /. that resides in Virginia.
This is a bad thing , just in case that's not completely obvious.
Should this guy go to jail? Yep. But first, rewrite the law to get it right. Identity theft is and should be illegal. If James sent even one e-mail that misappropriated someone else's e-mail address, then nail him on that charge. If he sent even one e-mail that advertises a business that is fraudulent, then nail him on fraud/conspiracy to commit fraud.
However, the provision in the law that prohibits sending an e-mail anonymously is not and should not be what delineates a legitimate e-mail from a bogus one. If we follow that logic, then any e-mail that doesn't include some narrow variation on first name and last name (first.last@..., firstInitialLastName@...,etc.) could be interpreted as anonymous. This is not a good thing.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
they weren't shoved into everyones mailboxes and under their door thresholds. If they were, they would have been ignored and thrown away just like junk mail is today
Even if they were, they'd just be tossed on the hearth, but the cost would be largely borne by the Federalists.
You have a right to stand on the sidewalk in front of my house saying whatever you want. You don't have a right to come onto my porch, use my paper and pen, and start writing whatever you want under the guise of 'Free Speech', you're consuming my resources and causing me to incur expenses.
Just like when I get an e-mail, I pay for the bandwidth, I pay for the disk space, I pay for those electrons to excite the wires and move the drive heads. But more important than that is my time.
Mass spamming shifts the costs almost entirely to the receiver. What might cost the sender $20 can cost the receivers $200,000. That's why spam is evil.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
so you wouldn't mind having your inbox filled with v1agr4 and penis enlargement ads if they didn't crash mail servers?
if someone crashes a mail server with a botnet that's a DDOS attack, but that's not why spam is problematic, and that's hardly an accurate description of what constitutes spam. most spammers aren't trying to crash e-mail servers--why would they? their spam messages wouldn't get through.
There's certainly nothing in the text of the First Amendment that limits commercial speech. Any "allowance for the limitation of commercial speech," pornography, or anything else, is an invention of later ("activist") courts.
I wish people would stop saying "activist courts" or "activist judges." The first amendment has never been an absolute unassailable right there has always been exceptions for forms of speech which cause serious damage to the country at large.
The issue with spam and the reason why it's banned under law isn't the speech component, it's the other things that go along with. For instance breaking into other people's machines to use them for serving. Falsely identifying the source of the messages, refusing to stop sending them when requested. As well as the fact that most spam is also fraudulent in some fashion such as pump and dump, phishing and other forms of scamming.
The first amendment was never meant to protect all forms of communication, it does not for instance require that a paper include all letters sent it. And it doesn't guarantee the right of a person to be heard by a particular person unless that particular person wants to.