For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
December 16, 2003
Fact Sheet: President Bush Signs Anti-Spam Law
December 16, 2003
Fact Sheet: President Bush Signs Anti-Spam Law
Today's Presidential Action
Today at the White House, President Bush signed into law the
Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act
of 2003 (CAN-SPAM Act), which establishes a framework of
administrative, civil, and criminal tools to help America's consumers,
businesses, and families combat unsolicited commercial e-mail, known as
spam.
The new law is a pro-consumer measure that allows consumers to
choose to stop further unsolicited spam from a sender. It also
provides a protection against spam containing unmarked
sexually-oriented or pornographic material. Background on Today's
Presidential Action
Spam is a problem for Americans. E-mail is an extremely important
and effective means of communications and is used by millions of
Americans on a daily basis for personal and commercial purposes. Its
convenience and efficiency, however, are increasingly threatened by the
rise in spam. Spam currently accounts for over half of all e-mail
traffic. Today, most spam is fraudulent or deceptive in nature. The
growth in spam also imposes significant costs on Internet Service
Providers (ISPs), businesses, and other organizations, since they can
only handle a finite volume of e-mail without making further
investments in their infrastructure.
The law provides a well-balanced approach that will help to address
some of the harmful impacts of spam. The problems associated with spam
cannot be solved by Federal legislation alone, but will require the
development and adoption of new technologies. Nonetheless, the law
will help address the problems associated with the rapid growth and
abuse of spam. The new law establishes important "rules of the road"
for civil enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), other
Federal agencies, State attorneys general, and ISPs to help curb spam.
It also creates new criminal penalties to assist in deterring the most
offensive forms of spam, including unmarked sexually-oriented messages
and e-mails containing fraudulent headers. At the same time, the law
caps statutory damages for civil violations in most cases. The law
also provides greater certainty in interstate commerce for businesses
that would otherwise face a wide diversity of state laws on spam.
The law builds upon the Administration's efforts to empower
consumers with choices in the technology field. Under the law,
consumers are provided with a choice not to receive any further
unsolicited messages from a sender. Senders that do not honor a
consumer's request are subject to civil penalties.
The law strengthens a cornerstone of the Administration's agenda to
help protect children against pornography. The law makes spam
containing unmarked sexually-oriented material a criminal offense. The
labeling requirement gives parents a tool to protect their children
from such messages. Under the law, senders of e-mail are required to
place warning labels on messages containing sexually-oriented or
pornographic material. If they knowingly violate this requirement,
spammers are subject to fines or imprisonment.
The Administration supports the law's tools to help deter the
harmful effects of deceptive and misleading spam. The law
establishes both civil and criminal prohibitions to deter spammers from
using false or misleading identification, and imposes penalties against
spammers for these violations
.
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