14 DAY TRIAL // The Virginia Supreme Court has ruled AOL spammer Jeremy Jaynes should go free, after he was convicted in 2004 and sentenced to serve 9 years in a federal prison. The court's decision was not taken because Jeremy Jaynes was actually innocent, as he did send spam e-mails, but because the law under which he was convicted conflicted with the rights stipulated in the First Amendment.
Jeremy Jaynes was tried and convicted in 2004 by the Loudoun Circuit Court Judge Thomas D. Horne under Virginia's anti-spam law enacted in 2003 and, as a result, he has been under house arrest since then. The same ruling was reinforced by the Virginia Supreme Court 6 months ago but, after Jaynes’ attorneys appealed, the Court surprisingly changed it.
The reason for this seems to be that the law was conflicting with and violating the right to free and anonymous speech by applying to all unsolicited e-mail, and not just e-mails that contain commercial spam messages. In comparison, the federal CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing) Act of 2003 only regulates the sending of commercial e-mail that has a financial gain as purpose.
According to Brian Krebs of SecurityFix, John Levine, president of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email commented that, "everyone agreed Jaynes was incredibly guilty, but the issue was the peculiarity of the Virginia law in that it could be read to apply to people who were sending junk e-mail but not quite as naughtily as Jaynes was doing it.” He also added that "in the United States, we have this ancient tradition where political and religious speech are very strongly protected, but the Virginia law applied equally to all speech, commercial or not."
Jeremy Jaynes was considered one of the most notorious spammers in history after he used a stolen AOL database that contained around 100 million e-mail addresses to send spam messages to AOL customers from his home in Loudoun, Virginia. His financial gains were estimated at over $20 million, and he was the first American to be convicted in US for sending unsolicited commercial e-mails.
Virginia Attorney General Bob McDonnell does not agree with the decision to free Jeremy Jaynes just because the law can apply to other forms of unsolicited e-mail messages too. He pointed out that "we will take this issue directly to the Supreme Court of the United States. The right of citizens to be free from unwanted fraudulent emails is one that I believe must be made secure."