Bill toughening anti-spam law in works
Backers, foes agree in Assembly talks to work on new bill
Deborah Gage, Chronicle Staff Writer
A bill to strengthen California's anti-spam law is working its way through the state Legislature and could go into effect as early as next year.
At an Assembly committee hearing Thursday in Sacramento, supporters and opponents - which include Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL and the AeA, a trade group for high-tech companies - agreed to work out a bill that all sides can support.
Details are still up in the air, but the goal is to get tougher on spam, or unwanted e-mail, by prohibiting falsity and deception. States are allowed to regulate in these areas under a federal law called CAN-SPAM, Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing, said Dan Balsam, a third-year student at UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco.
For example, Balsam said, spammers should be barred from deliberately misspelling words in the subject lines of e-mails and registering for hundreds or thousands of domain names to send e-mails that evade spam filters. Balsam has been working on the bill for about two years - he co-wrote it with Craig Kleffman of the Los Angeles County district attorney's office.
In 2004, California was poised to have the toughest anti-spam law in the country. But the state's law was pre-empted by the federal CAN-SPAM act, which took effect on Jan. 1 of that year.
Since then, the volume of spam has continued to increase and now constitutes 95 to 98 percent of all e-mail, said Joe Wagner, the president of Hypertouch, an Internet service provider in Menlo Park. Wagner is also working with Balsam and Kleffman and spoke Thursday to the Assembly Judiciary Committee in favor of the bill.
Federal law has been ineffective at stopping spammers, Balsam said, in part because it prohibits individuals from suing the spammers in federal court. Instead, litigants must rely on California's current law, which does not define what's deceptive or false.
Balsam, 38, started going after spammers when he worked in marketing and ended up changing careers. He said he went to law school to "clean up the Internet." He's prosecuting half a dozen cases against spammers in state Superior Court and has won 28 cases in small claims court.
But opponents said the new bill as written might have exposed legitimate companies to unnecessary lawsuits because so many spammers are outside the country.
"AOL has struggled for years to go after bad actors ... (but they're) in other countries or offshore and difficult to get at," said AOL lobbyist Cliff Berg. "You run the risk of overreaching."
Balsam and the bill's sponsor, Assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, agreed Wednesday night to step back and work with opponents to rewrite the bill. "We're completely on the same page with regard to the need to fight spam," said Roxanne Gould, senior vice president of state government relations for AeA.
If all goes well, Huffman said, the bill could reach Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's desk this fall.
Dan Balsam's Dan Hates Spam site:
www.danhatesspam.com
CAN-SPAM Act of 2003: links.sfgate.com/ZDCG
Proposed anti-spam bill: links.sfgate.com/ZDCJ
Deborah Gage