U.S. Fighting California Spam Fax Law

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with the assistance of fax company Xpedite Systems, won an injunction on Wednesday in California that would prevent the state's tough "junk fax" law from taking effect until at least January 31, 2006.

The new rules were originally to start at the beginning of the year, however several groups took issue with how strict the California law was to be. While federal laws passed last summer allow people or businesses to send bulk faxes to those parties that they have had business with in the past, the California law doesn't.

Opponents of the law claim that this would hurt small businesses. A hearing to discuss the legislation will occur on January 23, 2006 in a Sacramento federal court.

"The Chamber firmly believes that the California law is pre-empted by federal law and therefore invalid," said Stephen Bokat, executive vice president of the National Chamber Litigation Center, the Chamber's public policy law firm. "States cannot regulate interstate communications and this law clearly would attempt to do so."

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce came out in support of the federal law. It stated that the amount of paper and toner wasted due to these faxes were hurting the bottom lines of businesses.

Democratic State Senator Debra Bowen, the bill's creator, is confident that the courts will eventually side with the legislature and allow the bill to pass, expressing dismay with the Chamber of Commerce over its decision to fight the law.

"Californians have said over and over again how much their privacy means to them and how they want to control who has access to their information, and that includes controlling who has the right to fax them at 3:00 in the morning," Bowen argued.

Bowen also asserted that states have the right to enact tougher laws if they so desire, and blamed the need for the law on the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress, who "blew it by gutting the 14-year-old federal ban on junk faxing this summer."