DM News: List Firms Welcome Pre-emption Aspect of Federal Spam Bill
DM News: Gartner: CAN-SPAM Will Fail

In what hardly seems a coincidence, DM News reports both that Gartner predicts the Can-Spam Act will fail due to lack of enforcement and that direct marketers are hailing the Can-Spam Act as a vast improvement over the prospect of a patchwork of state anti-spam laws.

The biggest difference between some of those state laws and the new federal law that pre-empts them a measure excluded from the national measure: civil standing. Some of the state laws had allowed for citizens to sue spammers for statutory damages, all but guaranteeing that the measures would be enforced - the very hinge point on which both spammers and spammees agree the current measure will fail. But granting civil standing looked to congress like the greater of the two evils, with out-of-control juries potentially doing more harm and more arbitrary harm than spam itself. Revisions trying to fix this conundrum may make bedfellows out of tort reform advocates and anti-spam advocates.