Controlling the menace of unsolicited electronic mails – Contemporary developments and Indian perspectives

The tremendous growth of the Internet as a vehicle of communication in the 1990s to its transformation to a tool with incredible potential has meant that the marketing nuisances of the physical world have also transferred to the digital world in the form of unsolicited commercial electronic messages or simply ‘spam’. Majority of spam messages are concerned with commercial advertising and in some ways is analogous to “junk mail” which people receive through the postal system. Unsolicited Commercial Electronic Messages or spam remains undesirable for several reasons. Consumers hate it because it shifts the cost of advertising onto them as they effectively have to pay to download the message. Internet Service Providers dislike spam because it clogs up their systems and slows the traffic down by reducing storage space and bandwidth. Also, spam or unsolicited commercial electronic mail generally contain useless information that one never needs, or market products that one may not require.

The menace of unsolicited commercial electronic mail is relatively new and much before the enactment of spam specific legislations by some countries, liability was imposed only through various tort law concepts, like those of trespass to chattels and nuisance which have been applied by courts in the absence of any statutory regulation. The concept of trademark dilution has also been extended to the act of sending spam using the domain name of some trademarked entity by spammers. Considering the rise of India in the Information Technology sector it is worth mentioning that the need for such a legislative measure to counter this ever growing menace of spam is dire. The industry leaders today who use cutting edge technology to compete with competitors from around the globe cannot afford to waste time on the nuisance posed by unsolicited commercial electronic messages or spam, and therefore we require our laws to take effective measures to neutralize this problem. The present article has delved into the legislative developments in US, EU, Australia and Singapore with regard to spam and emphasized the need for timely action in the Indian sub continent to counter immediate future fallouts.