Questionable anti-spam law
Almost all 50 states of America have passed anti-spamming laws. As there has been a trial of one of the top 10 spammers in the world, there has been made a statement that Virginia’s law banning the massive distribution of junk email is an unconstitutional barrier of free speech.
Jeremy Jaynes was the person among the top 10 spammers in the world and he was the first one to be charged of illegal spamming in the United States of America. According to newsday.com, prosecutors then said Jaynes, using aliases and false Internet addresses, bombarded Web users with junk email peddling sham products and services.
He was charged in Virginia only because the emails he sent went straight through an AOL server, the place where America Online is based.
The evidence in this exact case consisted of 53,000 illegal emails sent over the three days in July, the same year Jeremy was arrested (2003). Although this was the only evidence, Jaynes was believed to be responsible for spewing out 10million emails a day in an enterprise that grossed up to $750,000 per month. Yet, this second fact remained only a belief.
Jeremy Jaynes, was convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison, the court saying the statue “does not prevent anonymous speech…but prohibits trespassing on private computer network through intentional interpretation, an activity that merits no First Amendment protection.”
The main gap in Virginia’s anti-spam law seen by Jaynes’ lawyer was that the state attaches severe criminal penalties to unsolicited bulk email of a noncommercial nature. However, in his opinion the spam can be regulated without any doubt.
Although Virginia’s First Amendment says that anonymous speech, no matter it is political or religious, in any shape including email, is protected, a person from any country around the world may unwittingly break the law. It is not as unbelievable as it may seem, for some messages almost certainly would pass through servers in Virginia.
According to newsday.com the response to the statement above was: “the law doesn’t bar speech – it prohibits falsifying Internet routing and transmission information to electronically trespass on a privately owned computer network. There is no constitutional right to use the property of others to engage in speech.”
Statistically about three-fourths of the email, sent through AOL a day, is rejected as spam. Although AOL, together with all the other internet service providers use filters in case to protect users from spam, spammers use false information to try to circumvent the filters.
However, the problem of impermissibly regulating activity outside Virginia remains.
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