Tulsi Gabbard performs a public service
5 March 2020
Back in August of 2019, the Tulsi Gabbard campaign (“Tulsi Now, Inc.”) sued Google after Google temporarily suspended the campaign’s Adwords account after the first Democratic Presidential Candidate Debates (Marinucci & Strauss, 2019). Earlier this week, in a move that should have surprised absolutely no one, the judge in the case threw out the lawsuit…
Laws Still Apply to Bad Ideas
30 January 2020
On Monday, I posted that “Forcing Consent Is A Bad Idea”. The point was to tell say that, regardless of legal issues, there are very practical reasons in favor of setting a policy of not trying to force consent. But, just because there are practical reasons for not forcing consent does not mean that there…
Oklahoma does … something?
23 January 2020
On January 13, Rep. Collin Walke (D-Oklahoma City) filed the Oklahoma E-Mail Communication Content Privacy Protection Act. This bill is intended to “make it illegal for companies, like Google or Microsoft, that host email servers to glean information from users” (Facebook post, 14 January 2020). The bill itself is pretty short. There is a general…
US Supreme Court to consider TCPA case
10 January 2020
https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/19-631.html is the docket page for Barr, et al., v. American Association of Political Consultants, Inc., et al. This is a TCPA case involving automated calls with both the Petitioner and the Respondent in agreement as to what they feel the outcome should be. The favored result would probably gut the TCPA’s prohibition against the…
Real impacts of spam
15 February 2018
I don’t talk about it very often, but there are some real consequences to even the existence of spam. All the way back in 2004, the FTC mentioned it as a driver in address churn*(Federal Trade Commission 2004). Of course, wanted messages get lost. Finally, we can blame the mere existence of spam for the…
So tell us how you REALLY feel
22 February 2016
People will sometimes ask me why I hate the Lead Generation (lead gen) and Payday Loan industries. Ultimately, it’s because they have such deep problems that I don’t think that any self-respecting ESP should take them on as a client. This morning, I saw a press release outlining a settlement between a lead gen operation and…
What happened to Compu-Finder?
5 March 2015
The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission announced today that they have issued their first penalty against someone for sending email in violation of Canada’s anti-spam law. The penalty is substantial (C$1.1 million, or roughly US$881,700 at today’s exchange rate), but isn’t anywhere near the C$40 million potential maximum penality. Still, the size of the penalty is…
Spammer escapes slammer (Updated)
28 December 2013
The Lompoc Record is reporting that Jeffery Kilbride has escaped from the minimum security federal lockup. Kilbride was convicted in 2007 of offenses primarily related to the CAN-SPAM Act. Among the things that were apparently included was an allegation that Kilbride and his partner had impaired the ability to track them down by using false…
“Forward to a Friend” and Germany
27 November 2013
Lots of folks have been talking recently about a September BGH decision holding that “emails sent using a ‘send to a friend’ function are to be considered spam, unless the recipient had given prior express consent” Federal Court of Justice, Email Recommendation (2013).* This is a fairly significant development in law. As a general rule,…