The material girl's foul-mouthed revenge on music traders could be interpreted as a deceptive trade practice, or even outright fraud.
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The FTC's theory of liability in the "porn-spammer" cases is that the header information or subject line of a mass e-mail is deceptive or fraudulent, and is intended to induce the recipient to open the file, and thereby see the advertisement that they would not otherwise have seen. The FTC does not -- at least not in these complaints -- allege that the underlying advertisement itself is false or deceptive; just the descriptions.
Similarly, the PROTECT act makes it a federal crime to use a misleading domain name to trick people into viewing obscene materials or to trick children into viewing materials that are "harmful to minors."
The message from these laws (and various anti-spam laws across the country) appears to be that using fictitious headers, names, or descriptions in interstate or foreign commerce in order to induce someone to act is an offense -- either a crime or, at a minimum, a "deceptive trade practice."
This may be bad news for those who post fake files on Kazaa.
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[T]he FTC has general jurisdiction over fraud, false statements, fraudulent pretexts, hucksters, con-artists, and most things deceptive. If it smells bad (and isn't delegated to another agency) and affects commerce, it probably violates the FTC Act.
The actions of RIAA and MPAA in placing files on p2p networks to deceive users of those networks into thinking they're actual music or video files, to waste their time, resources, energy and bandwidth (not to mention hard drive space and CPU cycles) quite likely is "deceptive" and undoubtedly "affects commerce."
