We all knew it, and now the Virginia Supreme Court has confirmed that spam does not count as protected free speech. Jeremy Jaynes, a prolific spammer sentenced to 9 years prison had appealed on constitutional grounds claiming that denying him the right to spam violated his 1st amendment rights. If this appeal had been granted it would have forced states to rethink their anti-spam laws.
Not that this will really mean much for the volume of spam on the Internet. The advent of the laws in the US simply meant the portion of spam that was being produced by American ‘business men’ moved to former Soviet and Asian countries. At least the control of the spam has. The origins of the actual messages are wherever there are people with bots on their systems. The dispersal of these closely matched to distribution of Internet users, unsurprisingly.