Oklahoma Court Highlights How CAN SPAM Legalizes Spam
from the bad,-bad-news dept
Back when the CAN SPAM law was first passed, we noted that it effectively legalized spam rather than the other way around, by setting up the rules by which spam was perfectly legal. While the law itself has been effectively useless in actually stopping spam, a new court ruling has shown how it actually could help spammers. The case is one we wrote about last year, where an anti-spam activist was sued by a spamming travel operation after he opted out of their spam and they kept spamming him. He wrote about it and threatened to sue them under Oklahoma's anti-spam law (where he resides). The company responded by suing him, claiming defamation and trademark infringement. While the court did reject the trademark infringement claim right away, and is still getting ready to look at the defamation issue, it has sided with the travel company saying that their emails are not actionable as spam under CAN SPAM -- even though they had misleading header information (such as return addresses). Basically, the ruling says that Oklahoma's own anti-spam law is bypassed by the much less strict CAN SPAM, and the false info in the header (including a non-working return address) doesn't violate CAN SPAM at all. It's a bad ruling for anti-spam folks everywhere, making it much easier for spammers to claim their spam is legit -- and the anti-spammer in this case has said he's basically going to give up now. It's easy to pick on the judge in this case, but the much bigger problem is clearly CAN SPAM itself -- and yet, there's no talk of changing it, because the politicians who passed it got their press release about how they had stopped spam and have moved on.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Sadly true
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Re: Sadly true
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Congress is the real retards
New Law: Anytime a proposed law involves technology, congress is required to get their 20-30 something year old children to vote for them.
hehehehhe
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Re: Congress is the real retards
My take on the situation:
A) set term limits on congressional seats (2 sounds fair to me). This will get rid of the geezers and bring in some fresh minds.
B) require congress to consult no less than three unrelated, independant tech firms on tech issues during session before voting on the subject.
C) mandate a review of tech laws 5 and 10 years after they pass to ensure they are doing what was intended. This would require additional votes to sustain the law as it is and would not allow for modification except when voted down.
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OP: You missed this:
"
In addition, after Mumma telephoned Omega World Travel's general counsel and gave a list of domain names to be removed from all of the company's e-mail lists, he continued to receive e-mail after Can-Spam's 10-day deadline.
But the 4th Circuit concluded that those were "immaterial errors" and therefore the repeated spam messages were legal under the Can-Spam Act.
"
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