High court won't hear Virginia spam case
The Supreme Court on Monday said it is refusing to consider reinstating the Commonwealth of Virginia's junk e-mail law.
The court's inaction upholds an earlier ruling of the Virginia Supreme Court that Virginia's Computer Crimes Act violates First Amendment rights. The broad law prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails, including those containing political, religious, or other speech protected by the U.S. Constitution.
Virginia State Attorney General Bill Mims, according to other reports, is planning to draft a new antispam law in the next General Assembly session to address constitutional concerns.
The Virginia Supreme Court's September ruling overturned the conviction of Jeremy Jaynes, the first person to be convicted of a felony under the state law. In 2005, Jaynes was sentenced to nine years in prison for sending more than 10 million junk e-mails a day.
Considered one of the most prolific spammers ever, Jaynes, according to prosecutors, made up to $24 million by selling fake goods and services via spam. He is currently serving 42 months in federal prison on an unrelated fraud conviction.
Stephanie Condon is a staff writer for CNET News focused on the intersection of technology and politics. She is based in Washington, D.C. E-mail Stephanie. 
Forget your middle school edu-ma-cation? The supreme court only interprets and enforces the law, legislatures write the law. I believe they interpreted that First Amendment correctly in that it does infact protect spam messages, as much as I hate it. I'm confident that a little more time in the oven would allow Virginia state legislatures to hammer out a revision of the law that doesn't step on the constitution's toes. It seems religion and politics doomed this one, so exempt those spam messages... unless spammers start sending out Jesus viagra or Barak Obama ***** pumps.
The Supreme Court protects us from the wild and crazy nonsense that would come out of Congress if there wasn't a group of nine people keeping them from producing all sorts of restrictions on our freedoms. Did you miss the previous administration's gutting of the Constitution? If it weren't for the Supreme Court, it would have been way worse. It's bad enough they didn't stand up to the shrub when they should have!
My gosh, there certainly does need to be a re-thinking of our education system.
Now...... the Supreme Court has been pretty good on that... but there are sometimes where it has FAILED MISERABLY for a long period of time. Homosexuality, pedosexuality, racial rights..... the Supreme Court has been slow on these issues to realize that sexualities are inborn, thereby making ANY restrictions on ANY sexuality (regardless of the age of the participants) illegal as a violation of human rights, and they were slow on realizing that the 'Jim Crow' laws were in violation of human rights.
The Constitution is NOT stupid. But the way it's sometimes interpreted is. Do yourself a favor and think for a minute before you post.
The Supreme Court made the right decision.
Spam is simply ILLEGAL and should always be. My mothers e-mail accounts gets LOADS of spam because she was stupid enough to sign up for a thing that she should have known was a scam........ and I'm getting tired of having to clear it out of her mailbox!
It's against the law to put stuff in someone's mailbox without mailing it, so why treat email differently than snail mail? Why is it OK to send out bulk emails on Canadian pharmacies and how to increase the size of my *****, yet I never get those kind of things in snail mail? If bulk mail is free speech, then surely there's nothing illegal about going around shoving all sorts of junk in people's mailboxes at night while driving an unmarked car that can't be traced back to anyone... or better yet, stealing someone else's car and using it to drive around and do your dirty work.
I have email addresses that are 15 years old, and I use over 100 different addresses. I receive heaps of spam but it's not going to change my life in anyway. It takes me about half an hour to check the hundreds and hundreds of spam mail once a week to ensure that my spam boxes are working correctly, and if they are then I often don't bother. So, setup a spam filter, and get on with more important things in your lives, like the massive increase in homelessness or child abuse victims or stopping the people that are killing your next generation of children by promoting and conducting the hundreds of thousands of late term abortions.
It's the ISPs who actually suffer - it's their networks which get clogged unless they spend money and time holding back the huge amounts of spam from end users. And stop trying to change the constitution which as made your nation great, especially for small annoying infringements; just write better laws.
If isp's charges once cent per email nobody would be hurt but spammers. Require all email to have the originators return address to where unwanted can be bounced.
The fact is these things are pretty well written.... it's is the Supreme Court, in their infinite STUPIDITY who are taking these free-speech things too far. Religious spam? Okay. Business spam? Not okay. FRAUD SPAM? THROW THE PERSON IN JAIL WITHOUT NO TRIAL.
I actually agree that e-mail should have the original address of the person who sent it, that cannot be 'faked' in any manner..... however, that would take a complete rewrite of the protocols that are used for e-mail and updating of the e-mail servers and e-mail applications that consumers and businesses use.
Then I got to the "isp's charges once cent per email" idiocy and realized I'm not even dealing with a mentally handicapped person here, I'm dealing with a retardican troll. May the overpass you live under crumble and crush your pathetic troll body late one night because of the deterioration our infrastructure has suffered under your "great divider's" time in office. Trust me, no one will ever miss someone like you.
- by hadaso March 31, 2009 2:42 PM PDT
- The main problem with anti-spam law is that they don't address the real problem. The problem is not the "speech" but the way it is broadcasted by stealing the recipient's communication medium that the recipient has alloted for person to person communications and using it as a broadcast channel without permission (and without paying the owner of the channel for the costs incurred, which though are small, add up to millions when hundreds of millions of copies are sent). Anti-spam laws should not disallow sending advertising material but rather regulate it by placing requirements on the way they can be broadcasted. One requirement can be that broadcasting a message through an electronic/digital medium that is meant primarily for person to person communications would only be allowed if the sender has knowledge of the identity of the recipient (that is having an email address would not be enough. The sender should be required to have proof that they have the full name of the recipient. And the sender should also be required to prove that sending to multiple addresses of the same recipient was actively avoided. That is the senders of bulk mail should be required to invest resources in maintaining their mailing lists. That would be a hurdle to sending bulk mail to lists of just addresses. I'm sure there are other aspects of sending spam that can be regulated, but my main point is that anti-spam laws should not forbid speech but rather restrict the use of mediums that are paid for by the recipient as broadcast mediums and place a price tag on such uses.
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(26 Comments)BTW, Israel added a new anti-spam clause to its communications act that became active on December 1st 2008, and that sets a fine of about $250 on each piece of unsolicited advertising (by email/phone/fax) without need to prove damages, and makes the advertiser (the one whose product/service is being advertised) responsible for paying such fines, and spam from Israeli spammers to Israeli recipients stopped almost completely on Decmeber 1st and since then there is almost no such spam.