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California Business And Professions Code Section 17529

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The Legislature hereby finds and declares all of the
following:
   (a) Roughly 40 percent of all e-mail traffic in the United States
is comprised of unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisements
(hereafter spam) and industry experts predict that by the end of 2003
half of all e-mail traffic will be comprised of spam.
   (b) The increase in spam is not only an annoyance but is also an
increasing drain on corporate budgets and possibly a threat to the
continued usefulness of the most successful tool of the computer age.

   (c) Complaints from irate business and home-computer users
regarding spam have skyrocketed, and polls have reported that 74
percent of respondents favor making mass spamming illegal and only 12
percent are opposed, and that 80 percent of respondents consider
spam very annoying.
   (d) According to Ferris Research Inc., a San Francisco consulting
group, spam will cost United States organizations more than ten
billion dollars ($10,000,000,000) this year, including lost
productivity and the additional equipment, software, and manpower
needed to combat the problem.  California is 12 percent of the United
States population with an emphasis on technology business, and it is
therefore estimated that spam costs California organizations well
over 1.2 billion dollars ($1,200,000,000).
   (e) Like junk faxes, spam imposes a cost on users, using up
valuable storage space in e-mail inboxes, as well as costly computer
band width, and on networks and the computer servers that power them,
and discourages people from using e-mail.
   (f) Spam filters have not proven effective.
   (g) Like traditional paper "junk" mail, spam can be annoying and
waste time, but it also causes many additional problems because it is
easy and inexpensive to create, but difficult and costly to
eliminate.
   (h) The "cost shifting" from deceptive spammers to Internet
business and e-mail users has been likened to sending junk mail with
postage due or making telemarketing calls to someone's pay-per-minute
cellular phone.
   (i) Many spammers have become so adept at masking their tracks
that they are rarely found, and are so technologically sophisticated
that they can adjust their systems to counter special filters and
other barriers against spam and can even electronically commandeer
unprotected computers, turning them into spam-launching weapons of
mass production.
   (j) There is a need to regulate the advertisers who use spam, as
well as the actual spammers, because the actual spammers can be
difficult to track down due to some return addresses that show up on
the display as "unknown" and many others being obvious fakes and they
are often located offshore.
   (k) The true beneficiaries of spam are the advertisers who benefit
from the marketing derived from the advertisements.
   (l) In addition, spam is responsible for virus proliferation that
can cause tremendous damage both to individual computers and to
business systems.
   (m) Because of the above problems, it is necessary that spam be
prohibited and that commercial advertising e-mails be regulated as
set forth in this article.

Last modified: January 12, 2009