Spamming Isn’t Free Speech

03 March, 2008

David Chartier reports that Jeremy Jaynes, a resident of North Carolina, has just been sentenced to nine years for spamming—in particular, for “sending what authorities believe to be millions of messages over a two-month period in 2003.” Jaynes’s lawyers argued that spamming was free speech, which the courts correctly threw out because the spam he sent broke “the US CAN SPAM law’s condition of giving recipients a means of contacting the sender.”

If Jaynes really wanted to exercise his free speech—Hey there, is your nose big enough?—he could simply have sent those mails to himself, or put them on a blog where they wouldn’t be invasive in any way. But a person’s email account is his private property, and by invading that, Jaynes went beyond the bounds of free speech. Sure, it is evident that we can’t possibly take prior permission to email people before emailing them, which would be delightfully surreal, but when I get an unwanted email, I should have the option to tell its sender not to write to me again. If that opt-out option isn’t there, it amounts to theft, as it encroaches upon my storage space, bandwidth and time.