Home Is Where the Internet Connection Is: Law, Spam, and the Protection of Personal Space, by Andrea Slane

Clancco  ||   26 October 2006

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).