Virginia High Court Wrong About IP Addresses 174
Frequent Slashdot contributor Bennett Haselton writes
"The Virginia Supreme Court has
ruled
that the state's anti-spam law, which
prohibits the sending of bulk e-mail using falsified or forged headers,
violates the First Amendment because it also applies to non-commercial
political or religious speech. I agree that an anti-spam law should not
outlaw anonymous non-commercial speech. But the decision contains statements
about IP addresses, domain names, and anonymity that are rather basically wrong,
and which may enable the state to win on appeal. The two basic errors are:
concluding that anonymous speech on the Internet requires forged
headers or other falsified information (and therefore that a ban on forged
headers is an unconstitutional ban on anonymous speech), and assuming that
use of forged headers actually does conceal the IP address that the
message was sent from, which it does not."
Click that magical little link below to read the rest of his story.
