Virginia court upholds notorious Jaynes’ right to express himself in bulk.
Infamous
AOL
spammer Jeremy Jaynes, convicted of a massive spamming campaign targeting
AOL
users in 2004, has had his conviction overturned in a Virginia Supreme Court judgement which essentially undermines the state’s local anti-spam laws in favour of free speech arguments.
Jaynes was indicted and found guilty of contravening the state of Virginia’s strict laws controlling bulk email in 2004, in the first ever felony conviction of a spammer in the US. The free speech argument was first aired shortly after his initial sentencing, but the argument was
dismissed
by a circuit court judge, and the sentence was
upheld
and later
confirmed
by the Supreme Court. His sentence, nine years in prison, was heralded at the time as a strong message that spamming would not be tolerated, an example now seriously weakened by the court’s change of mind.
The Virginia law, now under heavy fire having been labelled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, bans all unsolicited bulk mails, with a felony charge applicable if more than 10,000 mails are sent in a 24-hour period – Jaynes is thought to have sent many times this number, and to have made profits of as much as $24 million from his campaigns. The legal argument against the law holds that, as it covers all forms of bulk mail, it impinges on the right to flood inboxes with political or social messages, upheld by the US constitution. The CAN-SPAM Act, which covers the whole of the US, is not at risk from similar ruling as it only affects commercial email. It would have covered Jaynes’ activities had it been in place at the time he unleashed his bombardments.
More details are at
Yahoo! News
here
, with comment in
The Register
here
.
VB
‘s editor Helen Martin
comments
on the sentencing of convicted spammers in the September issue of
Virus Bulletin
– available to
VB
subscribers. (Click
here
for subscription information.)
Posted on 16 September 2008 by
Virus Bulletin
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