Legal News

U.S. District Judge Rita Lin has permanently enjoined the California Bureau of Security and Investigative Services from enforcing its private-investigator licensing requirement against anti-spam entrepreneur Jay Fink. The order declares that forcing Jay to get a license to run his business is so irrational that it violates the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment...

Jay's business stems from California's anti-spam act, which allows individuals to sue spammers. But to sue, they have to first compile evidence. To do that, recipients often have to wade through thousands of emails. For more than a decade, Jay has offered a solution: he and his team will scour a client's junk folder and catalog the messages that likely violate the law. But last summer, Jay's job — and Californians' ability to bring spammers to justice — came to a screeching halt when the state told him he was a criminal. A regulator told Jay he needed a license to read through emails that might be used as evidence in a lawsuit. And because Jay didn't have a private investigator license, the state shut him down.

The state of California has since "agreed to jointly petition the court for an order that forever prohibits it from enforcing its licensure law against Jay," according to the article.