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Minnesota Considers Spam Legislation
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posted by turmis
on Sunday March 03, @10:28AM
from the Death-to-email-offering-me-the-ability-to-accept-credit-cards! dept.
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A bill moving through the Minnesota legislature purports to allow consumers and ISPs to collect damages from spammers. The bill would allow individuals to collect $500 or actual damages and ISPs to collect $1000 from spammers who continue their nefarious activities after being asked to stop. Questions could arise about issues such as jurisdiction over spammers outside Minnesota and outside the United States. Some elements of the bill could bring up the privacy and regulations concerns that come with a system like PICS. The bill requires that all commercial and sexually explicit email be marked to allow immediate filtering. Unfortunately, the bill is unlikely to have much impact on spam in general, but it might be fun if you're a citizen of Minnesota to demand satisfaction. See the story at SiliconValley.com.
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Minnesota Considers Spam Legislation
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I think the jurisdictional issues here might be less onerous than they seem at first glance. Within the U.S. at least, the idea of sending junk mail to a person soliciting business might just be enough to meet the purposeful availment and reasonable anticipation standards. It would be interesting to see a test case of this with some obviously Minnesota address for example a University of Minnesota student. That way the Spammer couldn't rely on the reasonable anticipation argument that he sent to an address not knowing where it would go...
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The spammer might be able to argue, though, that he couldn't reasonably examine every address in a 10,000 line mail log he purchased from another direct mail advertiser. Would a spammer be able to claim that the normal practice of his industry precludes traditional reasonable anticipation?
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I think one of the concerns here, as with the California spam law that was recently litigated, is that the states enact a law that will invoke either federalism concerns or the dormant commerce clause. That is, they will unconstituionally impinge upon the federal government's exclusive right to control interstate commerce. If the MN spam law contains no adequate jurisdictional limitation on its reach, then it is liable to reach people with no connection to MN, and thus MN would be regulating commerce that has little or no connection (other than the arguably minimal damage caused to the plaintiff) to the state. While this may be enough to convey specific personal jurisdiction over the defendant, it does not settle the aformentioned interstate commerce issues.
California's law was limited in that it only applied if the sever from which the email was sent was in California, though the wording of that requirement was somewhat vague (so that, I believe, packets traveling through CA would be enough). I have not read the MN law, so there may be something similar in that legislation.
MD
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Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be
lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
- Isaac Asimov
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