Hong Kong About to Lay Down the Law on Spammers

Starting May 29th, 2007, Hong Kong is going to get tougher when dealing with spammers. Authorities are currently in the process of giving warning to businesses about the implications.

The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Ordinance provides for some stiff penalties. Those who violate the new laws can find themselves in jail for up to five years. Fines start at roughly $13,000 (US) and can go as high as $130,000. Violators of the law will first receive warning notices from the OFTA, and then be subject to fines and penalties if they fail to come into compliance.

The act addresses almost all forms of unsolicited commercial messaging. The new law covers email messages, text messages, faxes and even automated phone calls. The law also accounts for other forms of audio and video messages. One lawmaker attempted to have the law amended to include person-to-person commercial phone calls, but that measure failed to be included in the final bill.

While comprehensively understanding another country's laws is difficult - it would seem like most other initiatives geared towards stopping spam - this one doesn't fully ban junk messages. It appears to mainly apply to messages where the addressee was automatically generated by software. Commercial phone calls that have their Caller-ID information blocked may be illegal under certain circumstances.

The legislation also mandates that companies obey a national "do not call" list. Several years ago, the U.S. setup a similar National Do Not Call Registry which has proven popular, and surprisingly effective.

While the U.S. is arguably the largest source of spam, few IT departments would remotely consider blocking all traffic from America. While the U.S. sends a lot of spam, a large number percentage of online businesses around the world deal with American customers.

The same is less true of Hong Kong, China, Korea and Russia. Many IT departments located in western countries will simply configure their spam filtering services to delete all email originating from them.

These countries have hundreds of thousands of citizens with strong potential to participate in the international market for IT skills. However, often their email and other network traffic is blocked due to the spam sending tendencies of some businesses within their borders. If these countries can get their unsolicited email problems under control, they may benefit financially.

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