| LEESBURG, Va. (AP) -- A Virginia judge sentenced a spammer to nine years in prison Friday in the nation's first felony prosecution for sending junk e-mail, though the sentence was postponed while the case is appealed.
Loudoun County Circuit Judge Thomas Horne said that because the law targeting bulk e-mail distribution is new and raises constitutional questions, it was appropriate to defer the prison time until appeals courts rule. A jury had recommended the nine-year prison term after convicting Jeremy Jaynes of pumping out at least 10 million e-mails a day with the help of 16 high-speed lines, the kind of Internet capacity a 1,000-employee company would need. Jaynes, of Raleigh, N.C., told the judge that regardless of how the appeal turns out, ``I can guarantee the court I will not be involved in the e-mail marketing business again.'' |
I understand there are free speech issues at work here, and I applaud the judge for taking that into consideration in postponing the sentence. It will be interesting to see how this one shakes out.
Email marketers like to claim that their work is similar to junk email sent via the US Postal Service. But it is not. Although the Internet itself is probably some form of "public space," the servers that store and forward email are much, much more private than your typical Post Office mail box. Bulk email works because a vast majority of the cost, including bandwidth and network infrastructure, is borne involuntarily by others. Unlike postal junk mail, junk email providers do NOT pay for the cost of transmitting their material. And on those grounds government intervention is clearly justified. One man's opinion...
--------
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: CAN THAT SPAM.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.alexwhalen.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1957
Subscribe to this blog's feed
Leave a comment