> Terry Carroll has written:
>
> > Some potential restrictions of which I would approve:
> >
> > 1. requiring senders of unsolicited commercial to maintain a list of every
> > address to which its sent its email, _and_ requiring it not to send more
> > than one email to an address on that list in some time period (e.g., two
> > years), unless the recipient has specifically responded to solicit
> > further mail. This would give one free spam, after which the spammer could
> > not send more unless requested.
>
> Hmm. "More than one email" on any subject, with any content,
> or just with substantially the same content?
>
> Terry, you're welcome to try to compose such legislation,
> but I doubt that you could avoid confronting the 14th
> Amendment, by establishing "spammers" as second-class
> citizens, lacking protections that the rest of us enjoy.
The Fourteenth Amendment doesn't all governmental discriminations: only
certain ones, such as discrimination based on race, gender, legitimacy of
birth, and citizenship. For example, my local government discriminates
against persons driving more than 25 MPH in a school zone when children
are present, and that's quite constitutional. As mentioned earlier, it's
quite constitutional to discriminate between someone who sends a solicited
fax and someone who sends an unsolicited fax.
A bigger problem is the First Amendment, but I think that the restrictions
I propose would be well within the time/place/manner types of restrictions
that have been repeatedly upheld by the courts.
My area of law is intellectual property, and I haven't done any
significant study of First Amendment jurisprudence law since the bar exam,
but unless things have drastically changed in the last few years, I don't
have any doubt that this would be constitutional.
This is getting way off-topic from FAQ maintenance, though, and we should
probably continue it, if at all, in misc.legal or a related newsgroup.
[1] - I'm presuming you're referring to the Equal Protection clause of the
Fourteenth Amendment, as far as state governments are concerned, or the
equivalent doctrine from the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment,
for the federal government (the 14th's EP clause does not apply to the
federal government).
-- Terry Carroll | "Al Gore is doing for the federal government what Santa Clara, CA | he did for the Macarena. He's removing all the carroll@tjc.com | unnecessary steps." Modell delenda est | - Bill Clinton, September 20, 1996
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