Great to see a $100,000 fine for Lance Atkinson for spamming. The law was designed to allow us to target the big time professional spam outfits who make us pay through our ISP costs for their spamming. It’s all about property rights, and they have no right to make me pay for them sending me and others billions of emails.
The Law Commission is looking at the vexed issue of suppression orders and the Internet. It is a very worthy topic. As a web publisher myself I find it difficult to obey the law, because I don’t know what information has been suppressed, so it is difficult to police the site for mentions of it, when you don’t know that the info itself is suppressed. The entire suppression and contempt regime does need to be evaluated against the Internet age we are in, and this looks a useful first step. You can read the paper from the Commission here, and submit on it by February.
