Reuters reports that a UK appeals court ruled that an English 18-year old who sent five million spams to a company who had fired him had indeed broken the law. The judge said that "while a computer user might consent to being sent some e-mails, that consent did not extend to receiving a barrage of such messages."

This may seem obvious, but it wasn't to a lower court, which now has to reconsider the case and what penalty to assess.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060511/wr_nm/crime_britain_spam_dc

Australia has an excellent anti-spam law, the Spam Act 2003. The Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Senator Helen Coonan has called for public submissions as part of a review of the Spam Act 2003, to be completed by April 2006.

"The Australian Spam Act is internationally recognized as a leading legislative model to crack down on the scourge of spam that is overloading people's in-boxes and causing great frustration," Senator Coonan said. "Since the Act came into effect, many professional spammers that had been based in Australia have either shut up shop or left the country."

Australia's Spam Act applies to commercial electronic messages which include spam sent via email, SMS, Instant Messaging and Multimedia Messaging Service.

For more info, see http://www.dcita.gov.au/ie/spam_home/spam_act_review.

CAUCE Canada, CAUCE U.S., and Asia-Pacific CAUCE (APCAUCE) have joined the London Action Plan (LAP). The LAP is a project started by government consumer protection agencies like the US Federal Trade Commission, the UK Office of Fair Trading, and the our governmental contingent includes both Industry Canada and the Competition Bureau. Many European and Asian governments participate as well.

CAUCE looks forward to working with the various governments to help enforce the anti-spam laws that exist, to better understand how the laws do and don't work, and to learn how better laws might be written.

CAUCE Chair Neil Schwartzman attended the meetings in London in October, 2005.

We've also joined the Anti-Spyware Coalition, a group of makers of anti-spyware software and public interest groups. The ASC is hoping to build consensus about definitions and best practices in the area of spyware and other unwanted technologies. The group is made up of representatives from the Center for Democracy & Technology, the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, AOL, Microsoft, McAfee, Symantec and many others.

While spyware isn't CAUCE's direct area of concern, the legal remedies overlap with those against spam, and the bits of the government that address spyware are the same ones that address spam. The ASC has had several private meetings to work on policy; Neil Schwartzman and John Levine attended the meetings held in Chicago and Berkeley, California in recent months.

The ASC will be holding public events on February 9, 2006 in Washington D.C. and on May 16, 2006 in Ottawa.