Image via Wikipedia

The First Amendment:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It’s difficult to understand this judge’s thinking:

The Virginia law “is unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails, including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution,” Justice G. Steven Agee wrote.

How can SPAM be protected under the first amendment??  Did this judge miss his history class?  Does he not understand the reasoning behind the first amendment?  It is to allow people to speak their minds and not be persecuted by the government for doing so.  How can millions of emails, sent anonymously to people (or “email addresses”, technically) be considered speaking one’s mind?  So now it’s ok to harass and annoy millions of people and hide behind freedom of speech?

As many of you know, our outgoing mail service became unusable a few weeks ago.  Emails were taking over 24 hours to arrive at their destination.  This was not a service outage.  This was a brand new server, with plenty of processing power and more memory than it can every use, being brought to its knees by SPAM.

As individual users of the Internet, we can shrug off the problem, increase our SPAM filtering on both the server side and on our computers locally, and pretend the problem doesn’t affect us.  The problem is, it has a profound impact on us as small business owners.  The costs of fighting SPAM are astronomical.  From SmileyRose’s point of view, we spend probably 20 hours a month on SPAM related issues.  Of course, the SPAM problem of a few weeks ago escalated that to about 40 hours for the month.  But if you look at how much time and money you spend on fighting SPAM, you’ll see that the costs aren’t just relegated to service providers.

We, the people, are going to have to start speaking up loud and clear.  We, as business owners, are going to have to start speaking even louder.  SPAM directly impacts our bottom line, and these days as we watch our profit margins shrink because of the escalating cost of goods, we can’t allow that to continue.

UPDATE: Here is CNET’S analysis of what happened.  Simply put, the law was too loose.  That’s a shame.