USINESSES and consumers seeking to stem the tide of what they view as a growing mountain of junk e-mails clogging their computers and networks were handed some powerful ammunition recently in the form of two state appellate decisions from the West Coast.
The decisions, from the Supreme Court of Washington and from the California appellate court in San Francisco, were the first to address the constitutionality of two of the 22 existing, and largely similar, statutory restrictions on the distribution of the e-mails, known formally as “unsolicited commercial e-mail” (UCE) and more colloquially as “spam.” Last month, the California Supreme Court let stand without review the appellate court’s decision to sustain a statute regulating UCE.
