Email Laws That Could Bring You to Jail Even if You're Not
Spamming
by Mohamad Zaki Hussein
First things first, I'm not a legal expert and so this
article DOES NOT represent any legal or professional
information and nor can I guarantee its accuracy. I only
wrote this article to introduce you to these email laws that
might affect us, email marketers.
OK, so what're these email laws?
They're the Child Protection Registry laws that have been
taken into effect in the State of Michigan and Utah.
These laws established "Do Not Email" registries into which
individuals or institutions that primarily serve minors can
enter minors' email addresses or any email address to which
minors may have access. Institutions or entities that
primarily serve minors can also register their entire domain
names.
People are prohibited by these laws from sending email to
the addresses that have been in the registries for 30 days
or more if the email contains material or link to material
that is illegal for minors. And it doesn't matter whether
the email is solicited or unsolicited, you still can't send
such email.
You might think that the materials must be something obvious
such as pornography, gambling, alcohol, etc. Yes, but
they're only part of the materials.
The other part consists of less obvious stuff, namely stuff
that looks fine, but might be illegal for minors because
minors are prohibited by law from viewing, receiving,
participating, possessing, or purchasing this stuff. This
includes automotive sales, financial services such as credit
card, etc.
And according to the Institute for Spam and Internet Public
Policy, these laws apply to almost all people in the United
States and even those outside the United States who have a
physical presence in the United States. (see
http://www.isipp.com/child-protection-email-address-registries.php)
So, imagine you have some email addresses in your list that
happen to be already in the "do not email" registry for 30
days, but you're not aware of them. And one day, you send an
email that contains a link to a webpage that has some
Adsense ads that advertise some automotive sales, guess what
may happen to you?
Well, your action may be considered as a computer crime and
you might face civil suit and fines or/and you might even
face criminal suit and penalty.
So far, there are two things that you can do to prevent you
from getting trouble with these laws.
First, make sure that you never send email that contains
material or link to material which is illegal for minors.
This is so obvious, right?
Second, if you think that you can't comply with the first
option, then you can purge your list by matching it against
the registries in a regular basis. But there are fees for
this.
Don't panic about these laws. Instead, find more information
about it. You can start learning more about these laws by
visiting the references below:
- Michigan Children's Protection Registry site: https://www.protectmichild.com
- Michigan Public Act No. 241: http://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2003-2004/publicact/htm/2004-PA-0241
.htm
- Michigan Public Act No. 242: http://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/2003-2004/publicact/htm/2004-PA-0242
.htm
- Utah Code - Child Protection Registry: http://www.le.state.ut.us/~code/TITLE13/13_26.htm
- Michigan government's press release: http://www.michigan.gov/gov/0,1607,7-168-23442_21974-121645--,00.html
About the Author:
Mohamad Zaki Hussein is the webmaster of
http://www.webtrafficideas.com . To learn how to build a
perpetual traffic engine by combining Viral Marketing with
RSS and Blog, grab the FREE "Instant Traffic Formula" report
at http://www.webtrafficideas.com/getviral .
