When "there outta be a law" runs wild

Wendy McElroy has had to cease publication of her email newsletter. Not because it wasn't in demand, nor because she's too busy to put it together. She's having to stop emailing it because it'll be in potential violation of Utah and Michigan state laws:

On July 1st, new laws regarding e-mailed newsletters went into effect in Utah and Michigan; other states are close behind. Anne P. Mitchell, President/CEO of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy and a law professor, calls those laws "a legal quandry in which every sender of commercial email is about to find themselves." (See Groklaw for more information. And please note: non-commercial emailers seem to be included if their newsletters contain URLs that link to commercial sites or products.)

Both Utah and Michigan have created a "child protection registry" for email addresses that belong to children or to which children have access. It functions like a "no call list." Spamfo.co explains, "Once an email address is on the registry, commercial emailers are prohibited from sending it anything containing advertising, or even just linking to advertising, for a product or service that a minor is otherwise legally prohibited from accessing, such as alcohol, tobacco, gambling, prescription drugs, or adult-rated material." In short, e-newsletters (such as ifeminists.net) are not permitted to send to registered email addresses if those newsletters include URLs to news sites that, in turn, link to child-inappropriate commerical information or products such as casino or viagra ads, tobacco or alcohol for sale.

Many credible news sources — especially British ones, it seems — offer links to adult-themed sites or products. These links can change constantly, which means that it is impossible to check a URL and "clear" it of so-called objectionable links or ads.

The impact of these laws will be huge for small and medium-sized organizations and businesses. These are clearly a badly constructed pair of laws, with no sign of improvement as other states follow suit.