When is a press release an advertisement?
3 March 2010
One of the first things I learned when I became a legal assistant is that there are rarely any pat answers. A blanket assertion is almost always wrong. (Did you see the attorney-like weasel wording there?) There has been an interesting discussion on Twitter today regarding a February Techcrunch post (and wow, is a half-month
Settlement in Comcast v. e360Insight
19 January 2010
I’ve got a lot of catching up to do on Spamsuite.com, but there is a new document up there tonight. It appears that there has been a settlement filed in Comcast‘s counter-claim against David Linhardt and his (multiple) email marketing (and hosting) companies. I have a bit of analysis up there at Spamsuite, but I think it’s important to
When is transactional mail not transactional anymore?
2 December 2009
An interesting question came across my desk this morning. Here’s the request from someone we’ll call “Joe”: I need some help understanding CAN-SPAM requirements. I represent a membership organization. From time to time, we send marketing message to our members and, of course, some of the unsubscribe from those messages. Now we are getting to
Use Private Domain Registration and Go to Jail?
4 November 2009
The 9th Circuit opinion in USA v. Kilbride has been released. This is primarily an obscenity case against the defendants for sending pornographic spam email. But, it also includes a challenge to 18 U.S.C. § 1037 on vagueness grounds. 18 U.S.C. § 1037 is the part of the [acp id=”Wikimedia-01″ media=”wiki” title=”CAN-SPAM Act of 2003″
Guest Blog: Consumers Cautiously Optimistic about the Future
22 October 2009
Today, we have a guest blog from the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE). CAUCE has been heavily involved in crafting a worthy anti-spam law in Canada, so I reached out to them to see if they would like to guest blog here. Neil Schwartzman, CAUCE’s Executive Director, wrote back with the following: Neil Schwartzman
Confirm to unsubscribe?
21 July 2009
A question comes in this morning: Requiring the confirmation of an email address in an unsubscription is not CAN-SPAM compliant, right? While I’m not a lawyer, to my understanding that is absolutely correct. The current implementing rules for CAN-SPAM state: Neither a sender nor any person acting on behalf of a sender may require that
A CAN-SPAM Checklist
1 June 2009
Today, we will create a checklist of things required for CAN-SPAM compliance. So, you want to ensure that you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and not just say that you do. This post isn’t for you. You might learn something here; if you do, that’s great. But, instead, this post is really for
Prior Business Relationships are irrelevant
7 October 2008
When people don’t want to get permission to send mail, they usually don’t want to do other things as well. For instance, they don’t want to offer a way to unsubscribe. They want to make it easy to start and hard to stop. Unfortunately, CAN-SPAM decrees it should be easy to stop mail. And so
Sending email to wireless domains?
25 September 2008
One question that I get asked a lot has to do with sending email to wireless domains. So, I’ll lay out the answer here for all the world to see: No unsolicited messages may be sent to a recipient on a mobile domain for any reason, period. Here’s the general rule from the FCC’s Order
It’s hard being in court so much
1 November 2007
If you’re the owner(s) of Usenet.com, you must really feel in a pickle. One the one hand, you might feel really good. This month, Sierra Corporate Design, Inc., managed to take to trial a lawsuit against David Ritz alleging that the use of DNS is illegal in the state of North Dakota. It’s been a