Relief for marketers? Washington email law amended
If you've been following the legal landscape for email marketing, you're likely aware of the "litigation gold rush" happening in Washington State. Thanks to a strict interpretation of the Washington Commercial Electronic Mail Act (CEMA), even the smallest technical inaccuracies in a subject line could trigger a wave of lawsuits. (Mickey Chandler blogged about this back in February over on his Spamtacular blog. Smart guy. You should hire him. But I digress.)
Back to the law: There is finally some (relatively) good news to report. Recent amendments to the law have been signed into effect, aimed at curbing the predatory nature of these filings and providing a bit more breathing room for legitimate senders.
What changed? The update introduces two key shifts that help mitigate risk for email marketers:
Knowledge Standard: Liability now requires that a sender "knew or reasonably could have known" that a subject line contained false or misleading information.
Reduced Damages: Statutory damages have been lowered from $500 per violation to $100 per violation. While this can still add up to big money in a class action, it significantly lowers the "bounty" that has driven so many recent cases.
Others are saying yay, the problems with this law have now been addressed. I'm not so sure about that, in my layperson's view. The law still doesn't require a recipient to prove they were actually harmed or even that the misleading info was "material" to their decision to open the email.
And I feel like this law might be leading some law firms to salivate a bit; as recently it seems that a number of the ads I was seeing on social media seemed to be from law firms looking to invite email recipients to report violations, perhaps hoping that people will enable or join class action litigation.
But, still, smart folks are saying that this is an improvement.
For a deep dive into the specifics of these changes and what they mean for your compliance strategy, I highly recommend reading the full breakdown over at JD Supra:
If you've been following the legal landscape for email marketing, you're likely aware of the "litigation gold rush" happening in Washington State. Thanks to a strict interpretation of the Washington Commercial Electronic Mail Act (CEMA), even the smallest technical inaccuracies in a subject line could trigger a wave of lawsuits. (Mickey Chandler blogged about this back in February over on his Spamtacular blog. Smart guy. You should hire him. But I digress.)
Back to the law: There is finally some (relatively) good news to report. Recent amendments to the law have been signed into effect, aimed at curbing the predatory nature of these filings and providing a bit more breathing room for legitimate senders.
What changed? The update introduces two key shifts that help mitigate risk for email marketers:
- Knowledge Standard: Liability now requires that a sender "knew or reasonably could have known" that a subject line contained false or misleading information.
- Reduced Damages: Statutory damages have been lowered from $500 per violation to $100 per violation. While this can still add up to big money in a class action, it significantly lowers the "bounty" that has driven so many recent cases.
Others are saying yay, the problems with this law have now been addressed. I'm not so sure about that, in my layperson's view. The law still doesn't require a recipient to prove they were actually harmed or even that the misleading info was "material" to their decision to open the email.For a deep dive into the specifics of these changes and what they mean for your compliance strategy, I highly recommend reading the full breakdown over at JD Supra:
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