Appeals court upholds state anti-spam law
Appeals court upholds spammer conviction.
By CHELYEN DAVIS
Date published: 9/6/2006
RICHMOND--The Virginia Court of Appeals yesterday upheld the nation's first conviction under an anti-spam law.
The court rejected an appeal by Jeremy Jaynes, who was convicted in 2004 in Loudoun County of violating Virginia's anti-spam law, the nation's most restrictive law against Internet spam e-mails.
Jaynes, a North Carolina resident who was considered the eighth worst spammer in the world by Spamhaus, a spammer monitoring group, was accused of hiding and falsifying routing and domain information to send hundreds of thousands of unwanted e-mails.
Virginia's law allows for the sending of unsolicited bulk e-mail, but makes it a crime for senders to hide their identities if they're sending more than 10,000 pieces of e-mail in a single 24-hour period, or 100,000 in a 30-day period.
Evidence from his original trial showed that Jaynes had sent more than 12,000 unsolicited e-mails on a single day in July 2003--right after Virginia's law took effect--and more than that on two other days that month. He had also gone to lengths to hide the origin of those e-mails.
A Loudoun County jury had convicted Jaynes of three counts of spamming, and sentenced him to nine years in jail. He was the first person in the nation convicted of a felony for sending spam e-mails.
Jaynes had appealed, on the basis that Virginia's law was a violation of the First Amendment, and that the trial court lacked jurisdiction because his e-mail messages went through numerous servers and routers.
His attorneys also complained that nine years was too long of a sentence, given that Jaynes was an out-of-state resident and the law had taken effect just two weeks before his illegal actions.
Also filing briefs on behalf of the defendant were the Rutherford Institute and the American Civil Liberties Union.
In rejecting Jaynes' appeal, the Court of Appeals opinion--written by Judge James Haley Jr. , a former Stafford County judge-- said that Virginia did have jurisdiction because the spam e-mails for which Jaynes was charged all went to AOL subscribers, and AOL's servers are in Virginia.
The court also rejected Jaynes' constitutional challenge, saying that while anonymous speech is protected by the First Amendment, Virginia's anti-spam law prohibits not the anonymity but the "trespassing on private computer networks through intentional misrepresentation, an activity that merits no First Amendment protection "
Date published: 9/6/2006
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