US courts: spam = free speech

17-09-2008

by Ralph Averbuch

On the internet there are few barriers to the passage of all those bits and bytes (excepting despotic regimes and the great firewall of China) so national laws are simply incapable of handling global issues like spam. This was brought home by two recent occurrences. The first was personal, involving this writer caving in to the inevitable and introducing a proper form of server side spam management. It was a shock. Instead of downloading thousands of spam messages every 24 hours, it reduced to a few hundred mostly legitimate, and actually wanted, emails. It makes a huge difference, allowing time to be far better utilised. The second was recent news that a Virginia court has overturned the conviction of prolific spammer Jeremy Jaynes. He initially received what seems a fairly harsh nine-year sentence for his activities. It seems a lot for someone who wasn't actually killing people or robbing them at gunpoint. However, the decision to overturn the ruling, apparently on the grounds of the First Amendment's free speech rights, is still worrying. That's because it seems crazy for a democracy's court to rule that unsolicited spam is somehow on a par with a person's right to free speech. Sadly it also means that the US remains a good place for spammers to continue to ply their trade. So, for anyone hoping that the US was getting its act together and actually dealing with the problem (and thus leading by example)... forget it. Spam will be the single biggest headache for e-mail provider and ISP alike for the foreseeable future.