[Air-l] anti-spam law

[Laura Gurak]

Thanks to everyone who wrote back regarding my spam question. Anecdotally,
almost everyone who wrote back indicated that they had in fact noticed a
rise in porn spam (should we coin a new term: pornspam?) Anyway, one of our
graduate students here, Mark Stewart, suggested that perhaps this rise is a
last-ditch effort of pornspammers to get their message out before the
California court heard this case. See below, excerpted from the January 7
Edupage (for fair use purposes, of course). Others of you suggested that the
general rise in spam around the holiday season (thanks to my colleage Dr.
Andrew Odlyzko, director of our Digital Technology Center, for his
information on this) might be to blame. Still others noted that perhaps
there has been a rise in "adult content" since 9/11. Anyway, all of this is
anecdotal. Anyone out there in the Internet research world interested in
doing something more scientific??
LG


---------------------
APPEALS COURT UPHOLDS ANTI-SPAM LAW
Commercial e-mails, or spam, must contain valid return addresses
and other identifiers that make it easier for consumers to remove
themselves from mailing lists, according to a ruling upheld
recently by a California appeals court. The defendants in that
case, two Palo Alto-based companies, had argued that the previous
ruling violated the commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution.
Because Congress has yet to settle on any comprehensive anti-spam
law, consumers must rely on state law. But that could result in
a hodgepodge of restrictions on legitimate Web-based businesses.
The California ruling requires that commercial e-mailers also
mark their messages with an "ADV:" in the subject heading, and
a special "ADV:ADLT" for messages linked to adult content. The
Supreme Court in October refused to hear a challenge to a
Washington state law that stringently regulates spam in that
state.
(Cnet, 7 January 2002)



----------------
Laura J. Gurak, Ph.D. Associate Professor
Rhetoric Department, University of Minnesota
1994 Buford Ave., St. Paul, MN 55108  v 612-624-3773
also--Director, Internet Studies Center -- www.isc.umn.edu
Faculty Fellow, Law School
gurakL at tc.umn.edu   http://www.rhetoric.umn.edu/faculty/LGurak/