When Congress passed the CAN-SPAM Act in 2003, Mark Zuckerberg was a student at Harvard, playing around with the computer code that would eventually morph into Facebook. In those days, Congress was worried about junk e-mail hitting our inboxes. It had no idea that someday there would be a social network with more than 500 million active users.
If there was any doubt that the internet’s evolution has outpaced Congressional intent, it should be dispelled by a San Jose, Calif., federal district court decision handed down Monday in Facebook’s suit against the online marketing company MaxBounty. The ruling answers a question that courts in the 9th Circuit have never before directly addressed: Does the law that prohibits spam apply to social networking communications in which no e-mail inbox is involved?
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