Littering laws?

I don't see how anyone could disagree with the Virginia Supreme Court ruling; the law is pretty straightforward that overbroad laws are illegal. They should have been more careful in drafting the statute. What they were trying to do was fine, they just wrote it without exempting protected speech.

You have the right to send out non-commercial speech. But that doesn't mean I have to listen. And if you include commercial speech in that message, your message would be illegal (if they modify the statute to exempt protected speech).

Virginia and other states should adopt the Virginia law modified by this decision.

Fortunately, from the receiver's point of view, you can rid yourself of almost all of this junk. For example, Abaca's spam filter was tested by The Tolly Group and filtered out 99.997% of the spam received, the highest number they've ever seen. That's the good news: the technology IS available and if we can only get everyone to use it, then there wouldn't be a spam problem.

The bad news is that IT departments are slow to adopt effective products like this. For example, it took DeAnza College (22,000 students) over a year to decide to install an Abaca box (they were using Barracuda). Now their spam has virtually disappeared. I think the problem is that the vendor hype has left IT departments tone deaf to vendor pitches. This certainly makes marketing a challenge for those of us with legitimate solutions to the problem.

I'm still very surprised that the court ruled in this way, precisely for the reasons that you state: the right to freedom of speech does not create in anyone else the obligation to listen to you -- particularly when the medium is email. As has been pointed out many times before, email is basically a letter that's sent postage due and for which you cannot refuse delivery. That being the case, no one else has a First Amendment right to send mail to it. (In part, that's the same reasoning behind the anti-junk fax law and the "Do Not Call" registry. Other people's right to freedom of speech doesn't apply to your phone or fax machine.)

Spam equivalents are telemarketers, and snail mail solicitations. Spam filters are like the "do not call" list. Too bad the post office doesn't have an equivalent for junk mail. $$$ takes priority over the physical well-being of the mail carriers...

My understanding is that the ruling does not say that spammers have a right to send their spam. It does not say that spammers have the right to have their commercial speech heard or dealt with. It says only that spammers have the right to not be convicted of an offense under a law that makes no distinction between commercial speech and other speech that needs to be protected. The court is telling the legislature that it is their job to make that distinction part of the law, rather than relying on prosecutors, judges and juries to do it for them. I think the appeals court could have chosen to rule differently, upholding the law and providing a guideline of its own for the lower courts and prosecutors to follow in applying the existing law, but I think that it is pretty rare for courts to do that sort of thing, as free speech is something that the legislature really needs to get right in the statutes. When the legislature gets it right, the long-term impact on users of messaging systems that you foresee should go away -- assuming that you think that even properly written anti-spam laws can actually be effectively enforced, which is a whole different question.