Canada passes anti-spam bill

Call it C-28, call it FISA, call it COPL, just don’t call it a pipe dream any longer.
Today the Canadian anti spam law received royal assent and is now law. ReturnPath is saying it will take effect September 2011, but that’s the only date I’ve seen published. The full text of the bill as passed by the House of Commons can be found at http://www2.parl.gc.ca/content/hoc/Bills/403/Government/C-28/C-28_3/C-28_3.PDF
It’s fairly dense and I’m still reading through the final version. Of critical importance for anyone marketing in Canada is that it sets requirements that commercial email be sent with the permission of the recipient. This is different from CAN SPAM here in the US which doesn’t require consent of the recipient, but allows anyone to send unsolicited email as long as it meets the standards set by the law.
CBC Story

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Maine backs away from new marketing restrictions

The WSJ reports that politicians in Maine have figured out that the new Maine law prohibiting collecting information from teenagers without parental permission is badly written and has a lot of problems.
The Attorney General has decided not to enforce the law as it stands. The law does contain private right of action, so there may be private suits filed against companies.
I can’t necessarily fault the state senator who drafted the legislation for her intentions.

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CAN SPAM Plaintiff ordered to pay 800K in lawyer fees

Asis Internet service has been ordered to pay over $800,000 in lawyer fees to Optin Global. Venkat has details. This is the same company that was recently awarded $2.5M judgment in a different case.

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Suing spammers

I’m off to MAAWG next week and seem to have had barely enough time to breathe lately, much less blog. I have a half written post, but it’s taking a little more research to put together. That can wait until I get the chance to do the research.
Instead I thought I’d talk about the North Coast Journal article “The Rise and Fall of a Spam Crusader.” It’s quite an interesting article and looks into the personal and business sacrifices that people make in order to chase down spammers.
In my experience a lot of the serial litigators have very poor practices around data collection and analysis. They don’t collect evidence, they just collect email and then make assertions and assumptions. This not every effective when having to convince a judge that you are right.
The article actually does nothing to change this impression. The cases ASIS won are the cases where the defendants didn’t respond. That also means that ASIS couldn’t collect.
I do disagree with Mr. Singleton, the lawyer, where he says CAN SPAM is dead. In many cases I’ve seen there aren’t clear CAN SPAM violations. So if he’s trying to sue these spammers under CAN SPAM his cause of action is wrong. Secondly, the article goes on to talk about the broader implications.

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