Virginia Supreme Court Says Anti-Spam Law Violates First Amendment
The Supreme Court of Virginia today held that the unsolicited bulk electronic mail (spam) provision of the Virginia Computer Crimes Act was unconstitutional, and reversed the criminal conviction of Jeremy Jaynes, who had been convicted of sending more than 55,000 emails to AOL subscribers over three occasions in 2003.
In a unanimous opinion in Jaynes v. Commonwealth, Record No. 062388 (no Westlaw cite available yet), the court rejected Jaynes’ claim that the Virginia circuit court did not have jurisdiction over him because he sent the emails from his computer in Raleigh, North Carolina, and had no control over the routers used to send the emails, which were located in Virginia. Because Jaynes selected AOL subscribers as recipients, however, the court found that he knew that sending the emails would use AOL’s servers, and thus came within Virginia's jurisdiction.
But Jaynes fared much better on his challenge to the statute on the grounds that it was overbroad under the First Amendment. There, the court agreed that:
[The Virginia] statute is constitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
The court distinguished between Virginia’s statute, which applied to “the transmission of unsolicited bulk electronic [UBE] mail,” and other states’ statutes, which “have restricted such regulation to commercial e-mails.”
Virginia’s statute “is not limited to instances of commercial or fraudulent transmission of e-mail, nor is it restricted to transmission of illegal or otherwise unprotected speech such as pornography or defamation speech. Therefore, viewed under the strict scrutiny standard, [Virginia’s statute] is not narrowly tailored to protect the compelling interests advanced by the Commonwealth.”
Here is a post from The New York Times' Blogrunner, which provides a round-up of blog posts and news articles about the decision.
