Home Is Where the Internet Connection Is: Law, Spam, and the Protection of Personal Space, by Andrea Slane
In this article, Andrea Slane examines how images of home internet access have informed two prominent strands in the development of anti-spam law, namely property-based and autonomy rights-based approaches. Through a comparison of legislative and common law attempts to legally articulate and address the wrongs inflicted by unsolicited bulk email in both the United States and Canada, her article traces slow and halting progress away from an exclusively property-based approach to one which considers part of the wrong to be the invasion of the personal autonomy rights of spam recipients.
The internet-connected home thereby becomes a visual stand-in for the less materially bound personal space within which an individual can exert a right not to receive unwanted messages. Solutions able to address this right directly are therefore most capable of getting at the underlying popular complaint against spam, while validating a larger cultural trend toward more portable notions of privacy.
This article first appeared in the University of Ottawa Law and Technology Journal, Volume 2, Issue 2, 2005, on privacy, copyright and technology. Andrea Slane’s article can be dowloaded in pdf format here (Acrobat Reader is needed). Download file
Andrea Slane is the Executive Director of the Centre for
Innovation
Law & Policy at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Law.
Prior to
assuming this position in the Fall of 2006, she practiced
intellectual
property, privacy and technology law in Toronto. She also
holds a
Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of
California, San
Diego and has published in the areas of film and cultural
studies,
including her book, A Not So Foreign Affair: Fascism,
Sexuality and
the Cultural Rhetoric of American Democracy (Duke
University Press,
2001).
Comments