New California Antispam Law
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.
Oklahoma man wins $10 million judgement against a spammer
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.
CAUCE offers advice on Katrina relief donations
FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency has a web page listing reputable organizations accepting donations. We encourage you to check their list before donating to a charity that you're not already familiar with.
CAN SPAM at least doesn't prevent mail filtering
White Buffalo Ventures is a Texas company that sets up online dating sites. In early 2003, they had the clever idea to make a public information request to the University of Texas for all of their e-mail addresses, which the univerisity duly answered, and then to start spamming all those addresses. The university asked White Buffalo to stop, which they didn't, then started filtering them. White Buffalo sued, on the theory that the filtering was illegal under the First Amendment, since UT is part of the state government, as well as under the CAN SPAM act.
After percolating through the courts, the Fifth Circuit published its decision that UT can indeed filter out the spam. UT acts as an ISP for its students, and CAN SPAM specifically says ISPs are allowed to implement whatever spam filters they want. The court further decided that in view of the Central Hudson case, the most important Supreme Court decision about the first amendment and commercial speech, that UT's filtering doesn't violate the First Amendment.
FTC issues report on spam tagging
The act required that they look at spam tagging with ADV: or a similar subject line tag. They conclude that tagging would not be effective, mostly because spammers who are breaking the law anyway are unlikely to add tags merely because another law says they have to. They also looked at 20 state laws and national laws in Europe, Korea, and Japan that mandate tags, none of which have been at all effective. The report is well written and is worth a read by anyone interested in the way that spam policy is made.
