Basing his argument on the Free Speech Coalition’s lawsuit against the Utah Child Protection Registry law as well as recent statistics about industry revenue, Matthew Prince, CEO of Unspam, said the industry is unwilling to comply with measures intended to protect children.
“Online pornography is a billion-dollar per year industry,” Prince said. “And email is becoming the delivery system of choice for porn purveyors.
“It’s clear that at the heart of the [FSC’s] Utah lawsuit is an unwillingness on the part of the adult entertainment industry to take reasonable measures to keep pornographic emails from reaching children,” Prince added.
Prince called “absurd” the FSC’s argument that the law is infringing on the free speech rights of legitimate email marketers.
“The senders are not barred from sending their emails to adults, just those addresses registered as accessible to children,” he said.
He also noted a recent press release from an industry publication forecasting that the industry would take in $12.6 billion in revenue this year, saying, “One of the porn industry’s major marketing tools for making that enormous profit is email, and many of the emails they send are hitting the inboxes of children and teens.”
While Prince launched Unspam to capitalize on the needs trying to comply with the federal Can-Spam Act and email registry laws in Utah and Michigan, he also is helping legislators in other states to draft similar laws and developing programs to help law enforcement officials prosecute violators.
One such program, Project Honey Pot, uses of a distributed system of decoy email addresses website administrators can include on their sites in order to gather information about the robots and spiders spammers use.