CAN-SPAM Act - Commercial Advertisement or Promotion CAN SPAM Act requires telling your email recipients where you're located: Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations. The FDC defines the CAN SPAM Act as including &quot;all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” including email that promotes content on commercial websites&quot;. Some emails are sent without explicit commercial content. For example: A user signs up and receives a verification email After confirming account, they receive a welcome email If they request a password reset, they get an email with password reset link When they complete a purchase, they get an email confirmation their purchase When tracking information is available they get tracking After completing a purchase, they're asked to leave feedback or a review for the product they purchased Does any of this constitute commercial advertisement or promotion? Would a business be required to include a business address at the end every email sent from the list above? Thanks
All oif those except perhaps the feedback seem to be &quot;transactional&quot; content to which the CAN SPAM requirements do not apply. The feedback request looks to me as if it first the 'other&quot; class in the linked FAQ, and so also would not trigger the requirements.
There is no requirement that a service company do customer surveys at all, or that it report the results. If they use customer surveys in advertising and the results are falsified or misleading, that might constitute false advertising, and be subject to government enforcement. But if the report survey data as of a particular date, and mentions that date in the ad, that is probably not misleading enough to be unlawful, even if the company knows that later surveys show different results. If the company just tosses all bad survey results and reports only the good ones, that is probably misleading. But they can report specific &quot;customer testimonials&quot; even if they are not typical, as long as they do not claim that they represent the average customer experience.
This has yet to be specifically decided in the federal courts. The Post Office can set &quot;rules of conduct&quot; for its facilities. Prohibiting photographing is plainly a restriction on one's First Amendment rights, and it is established beyond question that a government cannot issue / enforce a blanket prohibition of public photographing. Someone would have to take a case to court to determine whether this limitation on First Amendment rights passes the relevant level of judicial scrutiny. The rationale (as set forth by the USPS) is that such photographing may be &quot;disruptive&quot;. One can perhaps analogize the right to film police with a new-found right to film post office, following from a right to public oversight over the government. DHS gives general guidance of its own (with a pile of redacted stuff), directing you to 41 CFR 102-74.420. Permission is thus required, until the courts find that to be an unconstitutional restriction (I would not expect there to be such a finding). But it is not unthinkable that the courts could at some point so rule. The YouTube aspect of the question is irrelevant: if you have the right, you have the right, and it doesn't derive from nor is it blocked by an intent to distribute on YouTube.
You can write anything you want (basic First Amendment protections): the question is whether one would be liable for damage that arises from what you're written, or whether you can distribute what you've written. Distribution may be restricted, thanks to the Commerce Clause (hence FDA regulations, which figure prominently in the analysis). Most software writers are not medical practitioners, and vice versa, and what the software writer does is implement something described by a competent medical practitioner. It is logically possible that a med. practitioner might also try to write software (no problem) and distribute it (possibly a problem); or, a software writer might read up on something on Wikipedia and try to implement it (again, no problem) or distribute it (possible problem). Damages can be sorted into two categories, implementation errors and scientific errors, and having ruled out deliberate sabotage, we are left with negligence. If the software writer failed to use suitable care in writing code that sums a set of numbers, the software writer has been negligent. If the person purporting to have the qualified scientific knowledge mis-states the formula, that person has been negligent. It is possible for many parties to be negligent (the programmer failed to be diligent in understanding the software requirements; the medical professional failed to adequately explain what was required of the program). The FDA does regulate medical devices, and "device" is construed pretty broadly (condoms are non-exempt class 2 medical devices). There is FDA guidance on medical software which makes it clear that the device manufacturer shoulders the regulatory burden. Anytime you manufacture a tangible thing (which is within the scope of FDA regulation for medical devices), you have to have the thing approved. Many (most?) medical devices implement software, and are thus within the scope of FDA scrutiny. It is not illegal to write software that ends up being implemented in an unapproved medical device, but the unapproved medical device itself is illegal. It is reasonably likely that purported medical software (not a gadget with software build in) would be held to be a non-exempt device. To know if something is exempt, you would look at the exemptions list, and determine that your program (or thing) is not on or implied by anything on that list. The visual acuity eye chart is a class 1 exempt item, as is the manual toothbrush. There is no way to specifically look for things that are only software, or that contain software, so the search through the list would have to be guided by knowledge of the subject area. Canada is helpful in explaining when software is a regulated medical device. This is non-probative w.r.t. US law but gives you an idea what is likely to be considered a "device". Under Canadian law, the software would be clearly a regulated medical device. The FDA has a power-point that attempts to say something about the matter which warns you that you are on your own and "You will need to go back to study and use the source regulatory documents" to make the determination. Eventually, slide 13, they hint that if you intend the software to be used in diagnosis, prevention, or treatment, then it is a device (so, yes, the aforementioned software would be a device, and probably not exempt from regulations). General purpose software (word processors, web browsers, communications software, etc.) are not indented to be used for a regulated purpose, although they can be so used, and thus they are probably not subject to FDA regulation. There is a murky relationship between regulatory approval and liability. Being approved by the government does not convey immunity to negligence suits (see Wyeth v. Levine), but being approved can have weight in determining whether a party was negligent, since regulatory scrutiny ostensibly filters out errors that could have been caught. Federal approval does not preempt state tort law, as the court ruled. Regulations pertaining to medical devices hold for anything that qualifies as a device, and is not defined (negatively) in terms of disclaimers. If you sell a medical device but label it saying "this is not a medical device, it is not created by a competent medical practitioner", that doesn't make it not a medical device. Unfortunately, what counts as a regulated device is based on intended use, and there is an obvious connection between disclaimers and intentions. Taking MS Word as an example, MS does not as far as I know say that "Word is not intended to be used as a medical device". It can certainly be used to diagnose, teat, and prevent medical conditions, but so too can a screw driver or pretty much anything else. The number of non-medical uses vastly outweigh the medical uses, so it would be deemed not to be a regulated device. A program which prescribed a set of prayers to be uttered in case of illness would be subject to First Amendment override of any FDA regulations. Quack medical devices are prohibited (that's why there is regulation of devices in the first place), but discerning the fine line between permitted actions based on nutty beliefs and forbidden actions is not easy. The FDA also has guidance on the distinction between "Complementary and Alternative Medicine", which does not clearly state that, for example, a software reading of your cakra-energies based on a computer program's questions is not a medical device. They do say of mind-body medicine (mentioning yoga, biofeedback and tai chi as examples) that "CAM practices in this domain would not be subject to our jurisdiction under the Act or the PHS Act", but then say "any equipment or other products used as part of the practice of mind-body medicine may be subject to FDA regulation, depending on the nature of the product and its intended use" (hence a yoga-enabling program may be subject to regulation).
In the UK and USA (and I imagine other jurisdictions) there have been laws that explicitly provide for orders obliging entities to (A) provide access or information and (B) keep the order secret. For example, in the USA the Stored Communications Act, Fair Credit Reporting Act and Right to Financial Privacy Act authorise the FBI to issue National Security Letters (Wikipedia, EFF, EPIC, Lawfare). These are an administrative subpoena, without prior approval from a judge, for meta-information (e.g. phone numbers dialed or email recipients addressed but not the content) of communications relevant to national security investigations. They typically contain a non-disclosure requirement prohibiting the recipient of the NSL from disclosing its existence or the FBI's demands. There have been challenges on First Amendment grounds to the non-disclosure aspect but, so far as I'm aware, they have all ultimately failed. Some of their non-disclosure requirements may eventually expire under other laws. In response, so-called 'warrant canaries' (Wikipedia) have been developed (and gone a bit further than the original idea) - these are intended to allow entities to relatively passively warn of such an order having been received if not the detail of the order. However, they can be legally risky in that they might be seen by a court as trying to circumvent the non-disclosure requirement and therefore breaking it.
Do not throw away mail that is not addressed to you. If you receive misaddressed mail, write "Not at this address" on the envelope and put it in a mailbox, or give it to the mailperson (source: United States Postal Service - Reporting / returning misdelivered mail). Also, if you contact USPS they may redirect the misaddressed mail for you. 18 U.S. Code § 1702 - Obstruction of correspondence Whoever takes any letter, postal card, or package out of any post office or any authorized depository for mail matter, or from any letter or mail carrier, or which has been in any post office or authorized depository, or in the custody of any letter or mail carrier, before it has been delivered to the person to whom it was directed, with design to obstruct the correspondence, or to pry into the business or secrets of another, or opens, secretes, embezzles, or destroys the same, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.
The law doesn't work like that. You don't need a law to allow you to send someone a letter, just as you don't need a law to allow you to do anything at all. You are free to do anything you like unless there is a law which says you can't do that thing. There is no law which specifically says that TV licensing cannot write to unlicensed properties. More generally, there is Section 1 of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997 which provides at sub-section 1: A person must not pursue a course of conduct — (a) which amounts to harassment of another, and (b) which he knows or ought to know amounts to harassment of the other. Sub-section 3 provides that the above rule is not breached if &quot;in the particular circumstances the pursuit of the course of conduct was reasonable.&quot; Section 7 provides that &quot;course of conduct&quot; means there must be at least two occasions of that conduct, and that harassment includes alarm and distress. It is a fast and straightforward matter to notify TV licensing that you don't need a TV Licence. You are free to do that at any point before or after you receive a letter. If you do so, they will stop writing to you for two years. It seems unlikely therefore that a court would make a finding of harassment. It is reasonable conduct for TV Licensing to write to properties which its records show are unlicensed given that they will stop doing so if you ask them to. &quot;What is the worst that can happen due to ignoring these seemingly empty threats?&quot; If you do not do any of the following: Install or use a television receiver. Have in your possession or control a television receiver which you intend to install or use or which you know or believe someone else intends to install or use, then you can safely ignore the letters free of consequence. If you do any of the above then you will commit an offence under Section 363 of the Communications Act 2003 and you can be prosecuted.
We can start by looking at the text of the law. US federal law 18 USC § 2252A(a)(3)(B) says: Any person who... knowingly... advertises, promotes, presents, distributes, or solicits through the mails, or using any means or facility of interstate or foreign commerce or in or affecting interstate or foreign commerce by any means, including by computer, any material or purported material in a manner that reflects the belief, or that is intended to cause another to believe, that the material or purported material is, or contains— (i) an obscene visual depiction of a minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct; or (ii) a visual depiction of an actual minor engaging in sexually explicit conduct... shall be punished as provided in subsection (b). I'm not sure how much posting the name without the link would protect you, given that you posted it with the explicit intent that someone would go and look at it. On the other hand, your intent was not to "advertise" or "promote" it, and you didn't actually "distribute" the material.