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Yes, Virginia: Some types of forgery ARE legal
Jeremy Jaynes, best known as a spammer who hawked a variety of products to AOLusers via e-mail blasts, is (or will soon be) a free man. Convicted of
"intent to falsify or forge electronics mail transmission information or other routing information in any manner in connection with the transmissions of unsolicited bulk electronic mail."
and sentenced to 9 years in prison, his conviction was overturned when the Virginia Supreme Court declared the state's tough anti-spam law unconstitutional.
This anti-spam crusader says: bully for them. Glad they got it right.
The problem that the Court had with the law was that it criminalized the falsifying of email headers, which is also a common tactic for those wanting to remain anonymous. The court said that this meant that the law could be used to punish someone who, for example, wanted to send out a political communication while remaining anonymous: this went beyond protecting the "compelling interests" of the State.
While I hate spam as much as the next person, much of it has other aspects which should be prosecutable under existing law. For example, MMF, penny stock scams, work-at-home scams, Nigeria 419 scams, and the like have one thing in common: they are designed to defraud someone. We have laws on the books which can address these: all we need to do is insist that our elected officials perform the duty we elected them to do. Put these people away for fraud: if they send out tens of thousands of this type of scammy e-mail, then take them down on multiple counts.
That ought to send a proper message to the MMFools out there, while not putting those with legitimate interests in remaining anonymous at risk.
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2 comments
They used the example of the "Common Sense" pamphlet, but left out one important fact: Anyone who wanted to read it paid voluntarily, or read it for free if the Paine absorbed the cost, something that did NOT happen with Jeremy Jaynes large-scale "theft by conversion"!
After reading the decision, I had a couple of thoughts:
1.) What was the SCOVA smoking?
2.) How come history is not a required course for judges?
By the SCOVA (and attorney Wolf's) logic, it is legal for me to plug my phone into the outside test jack at YOUR house (if you have one), and make long-distance calls protesting this and that. They simply forgot that Jayne's passed most of his costs along to ISPs and recipients (keep in mind ISPs are NOT common carriers!).
-- Tom
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