Email Laws That Could Bring You to Jail Even if You're Not Spamming

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 .