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Michigan Enforces Do-Not-Email Registry Law

Posted by CowboyNeal on Fri Aug 11, 2006 08:47 AM
from the think-of-the-children dept.
Spam Government The Courts News
elanghe writes "The Michigan Attorney General filed suit against two companies sending adult-oriented email messages to the state's children, in violation of the Michigan Children's Protection Registry. A similar law in Utah is being challenged by the porn industry. While the FTC, influenced by the Direct Marketing Association, rejected the idea of a do-not-email registry, have these two states proven anti-spam laws like these — unlike CAN-SPAM — really have teeth?"
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  • The Love of Money (Score:3, Insightful)

    by eldavojohn (898314) * <my/.username@@@gmail.com> on Friday August 11 2006, @08:49AM (#15888637) Homepage Journal
    A similar law in Utah is being challenged by the porn industry.
    What's there to challenge? A state makes a perfectly reasonable law that requires you to check an e-mail against a database of registered users who don't want that mail. Take some porn and go to your downtown local metropolis. Now hand out those pornographic pictures to everyone, young and old alike. See how long you can do that until you're arrested. Nobody challenges those laws, why the hell would anybody be able to challenge laws against people who randomly distribute lewd messages online? The least they can do is check if the person has registered not to receive them. Ohhh, that's right. Silly me, porn is a $10 billion dollar industry. They'll just throw money and lawyers at that problem to fix it.

    While the FTC, influenced by the Direct Marketing Association, rejected the idea of a do-not-email registry...
    Yeah, influenced by a marketing association? Well, if you delve into this deeper, you'll find articles [washingtonpost.com] quoting FTC chairman Timothy J. Muris who offered these sage words of wisdom:
    More dangerous, he said, was the possibility that spammers might get hold of the list, which would provide them with a gold mine of valid e-mail addresses that would be used for more spam.

    "Consumers will be spammed if we do a registry and spammed if we don't," said Muris, who has long opposed the idea.
    I'm sure that if you start hitting these companies with $10,000 fines per violation that they would pay attention to the list. And if they stole it, it's all the more fines.

    Muris does raise a good point that should be taken into consideration:
    Instead of starting a registry, Muris said, the FTC would first push the private sector to agree on a method for electronically authenticating senders of e-mail, which would cut down on spammers' ability to hide their identities and locations. Muris said such authentication is a necessary precursor to any no-spam registry.
    I'm not sure how feasible that idea is, however. I would recommend just hitting the company that owns the last server to forward the e-mail. If they can't provide/prove another source from which the e-mail came, hit them with the $10,000 fine. I would wager that companies would be awful quick to clamp down their SMTP servers and keep records of where everything came from. Not only would this increase a company's security but it would reduce much of the spam you see that has a legitimate address from a careless company.

    • Re:The Love of Money (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2006, @08:55AM (#15888683)
      Take some porn and go to your downtown local metropolis. Now hand out those pornographic pictures to everyone, young and old alike. See how long you can do that until you're arrested.

      Point well taken, but have you been to Las Vegas lately :).

      • Re:The Love of Money (Score:4, Informative)

        by castoridae (453809) on Friday August 11 2006, @09:41AM (#15888980)
        Yeah - but in Vegas, notice how they have to stand in those little slices of land between the casino properties - city-owned land - because casino security won't let them distribute it on their private property which extends all the way to the street.

        Funny how that works; the CASINOS of all entities are the ones enforcing "decency." :-)
        • Funny how that works; the CASINOS of all entities are the ones enforcing "decency." :-)

          They're enforcing not having people potentially harrassing paying customers and possibly scaring them off; I don't suppose morality comes into it for a second.
      • Yeah, I'm walking down the Strip, holding my daughter's hand, my wife is next to me holding my other daughter's hand. This idiot tries to shove an escort service flyer at me.

        I mean, what are these idiots thinking?

    • Re:The Love of Money (Score:5, Insightful)

      by giorgiofr (887762) on Friday August 11 2006, @08:57AM (#15888705)
      I'm sure that if you start hitting these companies with $10,000 fines per violation that they would pay attention to the list.

      Good luck fining and/or shutting down a fly-by-night company registered in Vanuatu using an anonimous credit card founded via E-Gold.
      Unless you barricade yourself behind a US-only barrier of SMTP servers, required by law to apply certain filtering criteria to email *or else* (China, anyone?), you're not going to stop them. And I think the remedy would be far worse than the illness, to be frank.
      • I think the answer is better spam filters. My mother uses her Verizon e-mail account extensively and barely touches her Gmail account. The Verizon.net account is getting hit hard by spam now, but my Gmail account is almost entirely clean of spam entering the inbox. I salute the Great State of Michigan for its initiative, but most e-mail providers can do a much better job of stopping spam that has already been sent. A few years ago, people were proclaiming the end of the communicative medium as spam beca
      • That scheme you just proposed would honestly take a matter of hours to find out who owns the account, most people even other countries will comply with a subpeona.

        • Oh no, you are mistaken. First of all the gov't of Vanuatu disregards any communication which doesn't become bothersome enough (1st level). If and when the gov't decides to actually read the documents they have been sent, they simply hide behind their secrecy laws (2nd level). If the case is big (as in, "plot for world domination" big, not a spammer running loose) they might force the local bank or corporation to spit out the names of the real owners - unfortunately they happen to be Ben Dover and Mike Hunt
      • bravo - I was going to post something much the same.

        I think the only way enforcing a law like that would be to go after anybody in the US that is caught hiring offshore work for spam purposes. It would be hard to go after the pornographers unless they are the ones actually sending the spam because most of the time it's legal to create it where they are located. I seriously doubt that most porn mail originates in someplace like China or my spam box would be filled with Hot, Horny Asians just waiting for yo

    • Re:The Love of Money (Score:4, Interesting)

      by thebdj (768618) on Friday August 11 2006, @09:03AM (#15888744) Journal
      What's there to challenge? A state makes a perfectly reasonable law that requires you to check an e-mail against a database of registered users who don't want that mail. Take some porn and go to your downtown local metropolis. Now hand out those pornographic pictures to everyone, young and old alike. See how long you can do that until you're arrested. Nobody challenges those laws, why the hell would anybody be able to challenge laws against people who randomly distribute lewd messages online? The least they can do is check if the person has registered not to receive them. Ohhh, that's right. Silly me, porn is a $10 billion dollar industry. They'll just throw money and lawyers at that problem to fix it.
      Free speech? I do not see them slapping fines on people for unsolicited snail mail. And trust me, you can get a lot of that crap and getting addresses is really damn easy. Also, the article isn't clear about the Utah law. It could be using those nice, vague terms that make the law unenforceable and could even target e-mail that was solicited. Remember, people sometimes identify items as spam that really are not.

      I'm sure that if you start hitting these companies with $10,000 fines per violation that they would pay attention to the list. And if they stole it, it's all the more fines.
      The problem is that a lot of the real spam companies are outside the US. It is sort of hard to enforce US laws outside the US. If a spam company has no office, no location and no connection to the US, it will be hard to enforce. Also $10k per violation will be hard to uphold. If you charge that by millions of e-mails, companies will claim you are asking for unreasonable damages and the truth is you would. The damage caused per spam e-mail is minimal, and certainly not a $10k violation. This idea that the children are being hurt (the articles own words almost) is nothing more then a red herring.

      I'm not sure how feasible that idea is, however. I would recommend just hitting the company that owns the last server to forward the e-mail. If they can't provide/prove another source from which the e-mail came, hit them with the $10,000 fine. I would wager that companies would be awful quick to clamp down their SMTP servers and keep records of where everything came from. Not only would this increase a company's security but it would reduce much of the spam you see that has a legitimate address from a careless company.
      This only hurts ISPs. Watch the way an e-mail hops from router to router, point to point, on the "information super highway". Your statement almost screams, "I do not understand networks or the internet." This is unreasonable and puts blame on providers because of the actions of their users.

      • Re:The Love of Money (Score:4, Informative)

        by Silver Sloth (770927) on Friday August 11 2006, @09:09AM (#15888785)
        Free speech? I do not see them slapping fines on people for unsolicited snail mail. And trust me, you can get a lot of that crap and getting addresses is really damn easy. Also, the article isn't clear about the Utah law. It could be using those nice, vague terms that make the law unenforceable and could even target e-mail that was solicited. Remember, people sometimes identify items as spam that really are not.
        I don't know about Utah, and IANAL, but here in the UK, you do get prosecuted for sending snailmail pr0n, there are quite stringent laws about what can, and can't be sent via snail mail for this very reason.
        • I don't know about Utah, and IANAL, but here in the UK, you do get prosecuted for sending snailmail pr0n, there are quite stringent laws about what can, and can't be sent via snail mail for this very reason.

          Any chance you could post a link to a case history here? As far as I am aware, the last attempt to prosecute under the UKs indecency laws was over Lady Chatterly's Lover and was (quite literally) laughed out of court. Now, if you'd said child pornography, it would have been been a different matter..

      • Free speech? I do not see them slapping fines on people for unsolicited snail mail. And trust me, you can get a lot of that crap and getting addresses is really damn easy.

        If we were talking about normal spam, then you'd be right. However, we're talking about adult-oriented spam. That takes it out of the free speech arena
        • Would you be so kind as to cite the portion of the Constitution that excludes "adult oriented" from the first amendment?

          "Obscene" is a legally defined (albeit very loosey goosey and hard to know exactly where the line is) term, but the mere fact that material is of interest to Adults does not exempt it from First Amendment protection.

          In this case, the issue is that Interstate Commerce is involved. You're attempting to subject a company based in, let's say Maine, to Utah's laws, becase an e-mail address

          • Re:The Love of Money (Score:4, Insightful)

            by kbielefe (606566) <d0s492i02 AT sneakemail DOT com> on Friday August 11 2006, @02:36PM (#15890969) Homepage
            Would you be so kind as to cite the portion of the Constitution that excludes "adult oriented" from the first amendment?
            Certainly. Please see Roth v. United States and Miller v. California.
            ...the mere fact that material is of interest to Adults does not exempt it from First Amendment protection.
            The mere fact that the material is being distributed to minors and/or unwilling third parties does.
            In this case, the issue is that Interstate Commerce is involved. ... That's exactly the kind of thing that is supposed to be within the purview of Federal Regulation, not State powers.

            You are oversimplifying the commerce clause. The fact that a business operates across state lines does not preclude individual states from applying their own restrictions, as long as they do not contradict federal regulations.

            For example, you still pay state and local sales tax on things you buy in a local store, even if none of the products sold were actually produced in the state. For another example, in order for an insurance salesperson in a national call center to conduct business with a customer in another state, he or she must hold a license issued by that state.

            Every business must comply with all federal and state laws, unless the state law is struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Thousands of businesses do just fine with this restriction; obscene spammers should be no different. In fact, supreme court decisions have specifically said that community standards must be applied in deciding what is obscene. There is an undue burden standard, but I find it hard to believe a court will rule that checking 50 blacklist databases is an undue burden for a business that handles databases of millions of email addresses.

      • The supreme court has drawn a clear distinction between speech that can be censored by parents and speech that can't. You can send whatever in snail mail because, the court reasoned, adults have an opportunity to ensure that it doesn't reach the family proper by censoring it at the mailbox. The situation with spam is much more complicated. It'd make an interesting case.

      • Re:The Love of Money (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        "Free speech? I do not see them slapping fines on people for unsolicited snail mail. And trust me, you can get a lot of that crap and getting addresses is really damn easy."

        Junk fax laws [wikipedia.org] withstood legal challeges based on the first amendment. I can't see e-mail-related laws being any different in this respect.

      • I would recommend just hitting the company that owns the last server to forward the e-mail. If they can't provide/prove another source from which the e-mail came, hit them with the $10,000 fine. I would wager that companies would be awful quick to clamp down their SMTP servers and keep records of where everything came from. Not only would this increase a company's security but it would reduce much of the spam you see that has a legitimate address from a careless company.

        This only hurts ISPs. Watch the way

    • Muris does raise a good point that should be taken into consideration:

      Instead of starting a registry, Muris said, the FTC would first push the private sector to agree on a method for electronically authenticating senders of e-mail, which would cut down on spammers' ability to hide their identities and locations. Muris said such authentication is a necessary precursor to any no-spam registry.

      I'm not sure how feasible that idea is, however. I would recommend just hitting the company that owns the las

    • More dangerous, he said, was the possibility that spammers might get hold of the list, which would provide them with a gold mine of valid e-mail addresses that would be used for more spam.
      Then only distribute the registry as a set of hashes. Simply run a hash on the email you want to send to, and skip it if it matches a hash in the registry. This has the added benefit of making the spammers waste a little more cpu time before filling our inboxes.
      • And the City of Las Vegas /State already has a law against that, it has been not enforced, but it is a perfectly legit law.
      • And i just collected a Miss Veluptia - she had 450 homeruns last season.

        I'm looking to complete the set, so if anyone has Foxy Downtown let me know, I'd be willing to trade.
        • "I'm looking to complete the set, so if anyone has Foxy Downtown let me know, I'd be willing to trade."

          You need to hook up with other collectors to play the game "Gasmic: The Gathering". You'll get a lot more cards that way.
      • That's just it though, most spam doesn't originate in the states or Canada. I get quite a bit from south america these days. Hardly any of it is even in English!!!

        As an aside: Anyone else notice a lot of spam getting through gmail's filters lately? I routinely wake up to see 10-20 spams in my inbox. Of course I also routinely get more than 100 spams a day, but a 10% miss rate seems a bit high.

        Tom
          • Yeah because all other mail providers are totally above board and legit. And even if you run your own, unless you encrypt all your emails what says your ISP doesn't snoop port 25 traffic?

            In other words, "your face, shut it."

            Google is no more evil than I just assume they are. I'm sure they single me out on a daily basis, amongst their millions of users because I'm the top shit. Hell, I've had the CIA after me since I was 11, yada yada.

            The type of spam I'm getting doesn't seem well targetted [thus not the
              • Um, there is difference between them showing you ads based on your email and them sending your email keywords to spammers.

                I mean what is the threat? THEY CAN ALREADY READ MY GMAIL messages that are unencrypted. If I encrypt my emails [say with GPG] then their targetted ads will be on the keywords they can see like PGP, Encrypted and Message.

                I'm contending that Google does not send out keywords from our emails to spammers. The evidence, albeit anecdotal, is based on the fact that none of my ads are target
      • They need to go after these assholes for fraud and computer crimes. They are already breaking dozens of laws to get the spam to you in the first place. Why do they need aspam law? It is just another law on the books, that is much weaker than nailing them for 2,000,000 counts of fraud, and unauthorized use of computer systems (the zombies etc). They would need a calculator to figure out the time. It would only take a couple of cases where the spammer went to prison for 10 sentances of 5 years to be serv

  • How does it work? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by telchine (719345) on Friday August 11 2006, @08:49AM (#15888643)
    Does everyone in the world have to check these databases, or just if you're sending mail from inside of the US?
    • It works questionably, because no one HAS to use the database. There need to be clear and enforcable punishments for not using it in order to get people to use it. If a couple cases get attention and the spammers pay out, more suits could possible be filed, but obviously you'll have trouble suing some dude in Nigeria. Personally, as a victim of the whole Blue Security crap that ended up with a whole lot more spam after that DB was compromised, I am reluctant to sign up for these sorts of lists and would ra
    • Nobody has to check against these databases at all.

      The options for bulk mailers are:
      1) Check against them
      2) Only mail people who have opted in
      or best of all
      3) Don't send adult-oriented spam at all.
  • How about we behave sensibly for a change? Scneario: the pr0n guys don't spam children with nekkid b00bi3z (wake up pr0n guy, children have no credit cards and probably no interest in pr0n yet); and the gov't does not pass laws restricting said b00bi3z.
    Hey, I can dream...
    • And when you're spamflooding through a Russian botnet, how exactly does one determine that the target email address belongs to a "think of teh children"?
    • Clearly they're trying to develop brand loyalty in these youngsters. It is a page right out of Phillip Morris's marketing playbook.

  • Non-miner? :) (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 11 2006, @09:02AM (#15888733)
    What about us non-minors here? Not all of us want spam, do we have to impregnate some woman to be eligible for this kind of protection? :)... And ofcourse move to one of theese two countries of which you speak.

    What about non-porn spam, like the nigeria passport scam, and all that valium crap? I don't see it providing a defence against that.

  • we should be thanking them... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Mark19960 (539856) <Mark.freequest@net> on Friday August 11 2006, @09:04AM (#15888753) Homepage Journal
    Send these guys in Michigan a thank-you note for creating laws that have some bite.
    Use Michigan as an example for your own politicians....

    The feds cannot do it, they are too corrupt with big industry hanging dollar bills in their faces.
    On the state level, its a little bit less corrupt and you actually have SOME chance of getting a
    law against spam thru.

  • Cart ahead of the horse (Score:3, Informative)

    by davmoo (63521) on Friday August 11 2006, @09:11AM (#15888794)
    have these two states proven anti-spam laws like these -- unlike CAN-SPAM -- really have teeth?"

    Folks, we're putting the proverbial cart *way* ahead of the horse here. This law doesn't have teeth until it produces a win in a courtroom. In the US, I can file a suit against anyone reading this message just because I don't like you're hair color...but that doesn't mean I'm going to win that suit.
  • ...why everybody doesn't just whitelist. Sure some spam may get by but it removes 99% of it right off the bat. Everything that isn't on my whitelist isn't email I want in the first place.
    • Why even put your email address somewhere public in the first place?

      Whitelisting is very impractical for people that do email support of any kind, even if its just being the leader/owner of a website or project. Sometimes people need to contact you, and frankly email is still the best way.
    • Whitelisting is an impractical solution. How do you add someone to your whitelist? It's fine if you only exchange email with a small number of friends, but beyond that you can only email people you have already communicated with out-of-band. If the out-of-band channel you use is well-defined then all you do is move the spam there.
  • When it was possible to listwash against the BlueFrog list, the Russian v1@gr@ and r013x spammers pounded the people who had opted out with threats and used their names in spoofed From: headers. I assume we can expect the same for this list. What's Michigan going to do? Extradite the Russian mafia?

  • Why would the porn or DM industries oppose a do-not-email list? Why do they have such a boner to keep sending spam to people who are willing to sign up to a list that says they are NOT interested?

    • Why would the porn or DM industries oppose a do-not-email list? Why do they have such a boner to keep sending spam to people who are willing to sign up to a list that says they are NOT interested?

      Because the companies outsource their mass-mailing operations to third parties. Those third parties are the ones who would have to filter their mailing lists against myriad "do not email" lists from as many geopolitical groups. Those third parties are often small outfits that run botnets to deliver their spam.

      Do

  • Michigan AG's name... (Score:5, Funny)

    by SwedeGeek (545209) on Friday August 11 2006, @10:08AM (#15889195) Homepage Journal
    Is it just me or is there some irony in the Michigan AG's name being Mike Cox. Seems like we should also be protecting our children from inapproriate material by leaving his name out of the news reports!

    • Re:I'm in Michigan (Score:4, Informative)

      by laffer1 (701823) <lukeNO@SPAMfoolishgames.com> on Friday August 11 2006, @10:09AM (#15889204) Homepage
      If you sell any items you have to check unless you like jailtime.

      From their website:

        Under the law, "a person shall not send, cause to be sent, or conspire with a third party to send a message to a contact point that has been registered for more than 30 calendar days with the department if the primary purpose of the message is to, directly or indirectly, advertise or otherwise link to a message that advertises a product or service that a minor is prohibited by law from purchasing, viewing, possessing, participating in, or otherwise receiving."

      The covered categories of messages include, but are not necessarily limited to:

              * Alcohol (MCL 436.1701)
              * Tobacco (MCL 722.641)
              * Pornography or Obscene Material (MCL 722.673-722.677, MCL 750.142-750.143, 47 USC 231(e)(6))
              * Gambling (MCL 432.218)
              * Illegal Drugs (MCL 333.7401)
              * Firearms (MCL 750.223,MCL 28.422)

      Marketers who fail to comply with the law face criminal penalties of up to three years in jail, and criminal fines of up to $30,000. In addition, marketers may face civil penalties of up to $5,000 per message sent in violation of the law, to a maximum of $250,000 per day. Civil suits may be filed by the Michigan attorney general, Internet service providers, and parents on behalf of their children.
    • It's the cost of doing business. Right now, spam costs nearly nothing and that's why it's overrun with halfwits and losers.
    • You don't have to check the email address if you have the permission of the holder of the email addess, you will have permission of the holder of the email address, won't you? If you don't have permission, then you will be a spammer -- and are fair game.

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