CAN SPAM and the first amendement
From Venkat at Eric Goldman’s blog we find the federal court has rejected an attempt to claim spam was “protected anonymous speech.”
Related Posts
Buying Lists
- laura
- Jul 9, 2010
One of my email addresses at a client got spammed today offering to sell me appending services. I was going to post the email here and point out all of the problems in how he was advertising it, including violating CAN SPAM.
As I often do, I plugged his phone number into google, only to discover that my blog post from March about this spammer was the 2nd hit for that number. Well, go me.
I can report nothing has changed. He’s still violating CAN SPAM. He’s still claiming I have no right to post, share, spindle, mutilate or fold his spam. Well, in the interest in something, I thought I’d share the whole post this time. Just to warn folks from attempting to purchase services from appendleads.com (nice website, by the way).
CAN SPAM preemption of CA law
- laura
- Jan 20, 2011
The California court of appeals returned a ruling yesterday in the Hypertouch v. ValueClick case. This is a case I haven’t talked about at all previously, but I think this ruling deserves a mention.
The short version is that Hypertouch sued Valueclick in 2008 under both CAN SPAM and the California anti-spam law. Eventually the judge in the case ruled that there was no clear evidence of fraud, therefore CAN SPAM preempted the California law.
Hypertouch appealed the case.
Yesterday the appeals court published their opinion and kicked the case back down to the lower court.
Canada passes anti-spam bill
- laura
- Dec 17, 2010
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
Return Path blog post
CAUCE posts
Thin Data implementation guide