First things first, I'm not a legal expert and so this article DOES NOT represent
any legal or professional information and nor can I guarantee its accuracy. I only
wrote this article to introduce you to these email laws that might affect us, email
marketers.
OK, so what're these email laws?
They're the Child Protection Registry laws that have been taken into effect in
the State of Michigan and Utah.
These laws established "Do Not Email" registries into which individuals or institutions
that primarily serve minors can enter minors' email addresses or any email address
to which minors may have access. Institutions or entities that primarily serve minors
can also register their entire domain names.
People are prohibited by these laws from sending email to the addresses that
have been in the registries for 30 days or more if the email contains material or
link to material that is illegal for minors. And it doesn't matter whether the email
is solicited or unsolicited, you still can't send such email.
You might think that the materials must be something obvious such as pornography,
gambling, alcohol, etc. Yes, but they're only part of the materials.
The other part consists of less obvious stuff, namely stuff that looks fine,
but might be illegal for minors because minors are prohibited by law from viewing,
receiving, participating, possessing, or purchasing this stuff. This includes automotive
sales, etc.
And according to the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy, these laws
apply to almost all people in the United States and even those outside the United
States who have a physical presence in the United States. (see http://www.isipp.com/child-protection-email-address-
registries.php)
So, imagine you have some email addresses in your list that happen to be already
in the "do not email" registry for 30 days, but you're not aware of them. And one
day, you send an email that contains a link to a webpage that has some Adsense ads
that advertise some automotive sales, guess what may happen to you?
Well, your action may be considered as a computer crime and you might face civil
suit and fines or/and you might even face criminal suit and penalty.
So far, there are two things that you can do to prevent you from getting trouble
with these laws.
First, make sure that you never send email that contains material or link to
material which is illegal for minors. This is so obvious, right?
Second, if you think that you can't comply with the first option, then you can
purge your list by matching it against the registries in a regular basis. But there
are fees for this.
Don't panic about these laws. Instead, find more information about it.
