Senate Bill No. 633
(By Senator Plymale)
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[Introduced February 23, 2004; referred to the Committee on
Education; and then to the Committee on the Judiciary.]
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A BILL to amend the code of West Virginia, 1931, as amended, by
adding thereto two new sections, designated §18B-2A-6 and
§18B-2A-7, all relating to higher education; protecting as
confidential electronic mail addresses in the system; and
protecting against unwanted electronic mail to institutions of
higher education.
Be it enacted by the Legislature of West Virginia:
That the code of West Virginia, 1931, as amended, be amended
by adding thereto two new sections, designated §18B-2A-6 and
§18B-2A-7, all to read as follows:
ARTICLE 2A. INSTITUTIONAL BOARDS OF GOVERNORS.
§18B-2A-6. Legislative findings.
The West Virginia Legislature finds that:
Electronic mail has become an extremely important and popular
means of communication, relied on by millions of Americans on a daily basis for personal and commercial purposes. Its cost and
global reach make it extremely convenient and efficient and offer
unique opportunities for the development and growth of frictionless
commerce.
The convenience and efficiency of electronic mail are
threatened by the extremely rapid growth in the volume of
unsolicited commercial electronic mail. Unsolicited commercial
electronic mail is currently estimated to account for over half of
all electronic mail traffic, up from the estimated seven percent in
2001, and the volume continues to rise. Most of these messages are
fraudulent and deceptive in one or more aspects.
The receipt of unsolicited commercial electronic mail may
result in costs to recipients who cannot refuse to accept the mail
and who incur costs for the storage of the mail or for the time
spent accessing, reviewing and discarding the mail, or both.
The receipt of a large number of unwanted messages also
decreases the convenience of electronic mail and creates a risk
that wanted electronic mail messages, both commercial and
noncommercial, will be lost, overlooked or discarded amidst the
larger volume of unwanted messages, thus reducing the reliability
and usefulness of electronic mail to the recipient.
Some commercial electronic mail contains material that many
recipients may consider vulgar or pornographic in nature. The
growth in unsolicited commercial electronic mail imposes
significant monetary costs on providers of internet access services, business and educational and nonprofit institutions that
carry and receive the mail that the providers, businesses and
institutions can handle without further investment in
infrastructure.
Many senders of unsolicited commercial electronic mail
purposefully disguise the source of the mail and many senders of
unsolicited commercial electronic mail purposefully include
misleading information in the messages' subject lines in order to
induce the recipients to view the messages.
While some senders of commercial electronic mail messages
provide simple and reliable mechanisms for recipients to reject
receipt of commercial electronic mail from the senders in the
future, other senders provide no such mechanism or refuse to honor
the requests of recipients not to receive electronic mail from the
senders in the future, or both.
Students, staff and faculty at West Virginia institutions of
higher education use electronic mail for many purposes that
include, but are not exclusive to, intradepartment communication,
interdepartment communication, personal communication and student
to faculty communication.
On the basis of these findings, the West Virginia Legislature
determines that:
Senders of unsolicited commercial electronic mail should not
mislead recipients as to the source or content of that mail;
Recipients of unsolicited commercial electronic mail have a right to decline to receive additional commercial electronic mail
from the same source; and
Institutions of higher education shall provide electronic mail
services as free from unsolicited commercial electronic mail as
possible.
§18B-2A-7. Electronic mail addresses protected in state higher
education institutions; penalty.
(a) No West Virginia higher education institution may sell,
give or otherwise distribute or possess with intent to sell, give
or distribute the electronic mail address or related information of
students, faculty or staff to any person or entity without prior
consent.
(b) It is unlawful for any person or entity to initiate the
transmission of an unsolicited commercial electronic mail message
to an electronic mail address of any West Virginia higher education
institution unless the sender establishes a valid sender-operated
return electronic mail address where the recipient may notify the
sender not to send any further commercial electronic mail messages.
(c) Upon notification or confirmation by a recipient of his or
her request not to receive any further unsolicited commercial
electronic mail messages it is unlawful for a person, entity or
anyone acting on that person's behalf to send any unsolicited
commercial electronic mail message to that recipient. That request
shall be deemed to terminate a preexisting business relationship
for purposes of determining whether subsequent messages are unsolicited commercial electronic mail messages.
(d) It is the responsibility of the higher education
institutions' governing boards to adopt rules that prevent
violations of this section.
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(NOTE: The purpose of this bill is to prevent disclosure of
the electronic mail addresses of higher education students, faculty
and staff; to screen electronic mail coming into state institutions
of higher education; and to provide a penalty for persons who
persist in sending unsolicited commercial electronic mail after
having been requested not to do so.
These sections are new; therefore, strike-throughs and
underscoring have been omitted.)
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