In late September, California enacted a new SB 97, a new version of the 2003 spam law that was overridden by CAN SPAM before it went into effect. Both spam bills and the phishing bills were introducted by Sen. Kevin Murray, one of a handful of state legislators with an interest in online commerce.

The new law basically reconstitutes what it can of the old law that isn't preempted. CAN SPAM says states can make fraudulent e-mail more illegal, so that's what it does. If a commercial e-mail advertisement uses a third party domain name without permission, or has forged header information, or a misleading subject line, it's illegal in California. More interestingly, any of the recipient, the recipient ISP, or the Attorney General can sue for $1000 per message, up to a million dollars per incident.

On Thursday the 22nd, Robert Braver, an Oklahoma ISP owner who is a long time activist against both spam and junk faxes received a default judgement of over $10 million against high profile spammer Robert Soloway and his company Newport Internet Marketing. Soloway has frequently been cited as one of the ten largest spammers in the world.

Braver originally filed his case in state court, but Soloway moved the case to Federal court earlier this year. Soloway was initially represented by attorneys, but the attorneys withdrew from the case and since then, although Solway said he'd be representing himself, he hasn't responded in the case, although he has been actively sending comments about it to usenet and mailing lists.

Industry Canada, the part of the Canadian government roughly equivalent to the U.S. Commerce Department, has had a task force on spam working for the past year or so. It was convened at the request of David Emerson, Minister of Industry.

In mid-May, it wrapped up its work and published its report (aussi disponsible en français) to the government. It's quite good, and has a set of 22 recommendations.