Following the much-publicized case and subsequent release of “Spam King” Jeremy Jaynes by the Virginia Supreme Court on Sunday, the Virgina anti-spam law was thrown out as unconstitutional by the state.

The law was rejected by the court on the grounds that it violated the right to free speech, as guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in that e-mails with news, opinions or political speech fell under the incidence of the law as well as commercial e-mail.

Furthermore, according to the law it was illegal to falsify IP addresses or domain names when sending the e-mails. The court ruled that this infringed on the right to anonymous speech.

According to presiding judge G. Steven Agee, the law "is unconstitutionally overbroad on its face because it prohibits the anonymous transmission of all unsolicited bulk e-mails including those containing political, religious or other speech protected by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution."

Jeremy Jaynes was prosecuted in Virginia, because he had sent more than 10,000 messages in 24 hours to AOL subscribers, using AOL servers in Virginia. He could not be prosecuted by the Federal CAN-SPAM act because it was not in effect at the time.

Due to the fact that generally, other states’ spam laws as well as the CAN-SPAM act only concern themselves with commercial messages, the ruling is not considered to have broad impact outside of Virginia.

Although following the repeal of the Virginia law Jaynes has been acquitted of the 2003 spam charges, he remains in prison on unrelated security fraud charges.