Anti-Spam Law Against Free Speech

Everybody's bugged by spam nowadays, and as if the fact that it's annoying weren't enough, people make a profit by using spam too. That's why anti-spam laws exist, so that spam-scammers and other scammers too can be punished. But recently, a lawyer defending one of the world's greatest spammers has stated that Virginia's law regarding unwanted messages is actually thwarting the right to free speech. Really now?

Jeremy Jaynes of Raleigh, N.C., was considered among the top 10 spammers in the world when he was charged in 2003 in the nation's first felony case against illegal spamming, as the Washington Post informs us. He got nine years back then, but his lawyer stated that the law is against human rights. In any case, the judge had a different opinion, and I agree with him. It's one thing to send noncommercial spam mesages from your machine. Nobody has anything against that, as long as it won't result in getting the receiver infected with a computer virus. But it is against the law to hijack a server to send spam, or any message for that matter.

It doesn't matter that the e-mail is not related to anything commercial or that it isn't a cyber-threat, since if you use a machine that is not yours to send it, then, it's against the law, especially if you're a hacker!

The sentence has been appealed by Jaynes' lawyers, but I seriously doubt that they are going to make a change. As I've read in the same online publication I mentioned above, the court said that the law does not prevent anonymous speech, but prohibits trespassing on private computer networks through intentional misrepresentation, that being an activity which deserves no First Amendment protection. You can read more about it on this site.