Weird Anti-Spam Law Proposed In Georgia

from the success-breeds-legal-trouble dept

While CAN SPAM supposedly supersedes all state level anti-spam laws, states keep coming up with anti-spam laws anyway. Considering how weak CAN SPAM is, this is probably a good thing. However, the latest proposed anti-spam law in Georgia appears to have some strange provisions. It counts forging headers, misleading subject lines or falsely claiming an email was requested as the defining characteristics of spam. That "misleading subject line" could be twisted in a bad way. From there, though, the crime will be considered a felony if the spammer sent more than 10,000 messages in a 24 hour period, generated more than $1,000 in revenue from a single spam message or $50,000 from all spam sent or if the spammer "knowingly uses a minor to assist in the transmission of spam." Those last two provisions are what caught my attention. Should the amount of money made by the spammer impact what level of crime they're charged with? The crime isn't in selling a product, but the manner in which they are bombarding servers and users. Why should it matter how successful the particular spam is? If anything, this opens things up to a counter claim from the spammer that if they're making this much money off a single spam, then it's clear that people wanted the emails -- and thus, it's not spam. Also, it's not clear why the "use of a minor" in sending spam should make it any worse. I didn't realize spammers have been using child laborers to help them out. Shouldn't that just fall under child labor laws?

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