There are two things which everyone wondered about the Utah and Michigan child email address registries and their attendant laws. You may recall that both the Michigan and Utah registries opened for business last summer.
The first thing that people wondered was “when would there be the first enforcement action by the registries?” And the second was “when would there be the first lawsuit against the registries?”
Not unpredictably, the latter happened first, when the Free Speech Coalition filed a lawsuit against Utah over their child protection email address registry. The Free Speech Coalition, an advocacy group for the adult entertainment industry, filed their lawsuit in November.
Now, according to the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah has filed their first enforcement action again, of all things, a pornographer in… Canada?
Yep, that’s right. The state of Utah has issued a $2,500 USD citation against an unnamed pornography site which is apparently situated in Gibsons, British Columbia.
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If the offender, who sent an explicit email to an address on the registry, fails to heed the citation, the state of Utah will get a cease and desist order. Against the pornographer. Who is situated in Canada.
I’ll be he’s shaking in his boot.
Said Utah spokesperson, Thad LeVar, “These types of complaints can be difficult to track down in terms of who actually sent an e-mail. {Ed. note: well, duh!} We chose this one for our first citation because the identity of the sender was clear in this case. {Ed. note: ‘To hell with that minor detail that he’s in another country.}”
What is apparently not as clear to the good Mr. LeVar is the concept of whether a state law, already on shaky legal ground here in its own country, has any authority over someone who is from and lives in another country.
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I can’t speak for Utah but I certainly can for Michigan, I am a lifelong resident and have lived in or near Lansing since 1973. The do-not-spam list is a typical, though hardly the only, example of Governor Granholm’s legislation aimed at bolstering her popularity among non-thinking voters under the guise of “protecting the children.” Hogwash. Can you imagine how many spammers worldwide are surely drooling over lists of email addresses owned by minors??? Our Governor ought to be ashamed of herself at exposing our children this way. But she’s not.