Banning the licking of toads.

This article describes a legislative bill in the United States called Spy Act, which defines civil penalties of up to three million dollars for spyware distributors. The Spy Act was sponsored by Representative Mary Bono of California. The problem with the bill is that it is going to fail in reducing spyware, as much as the CAN-SPAM Act has failed in reducing spam. The bill does not cover all the possibilities of how spyware can act and what it might do. Spyware is hard to identify even if people have a good definition of what it does. Responsibility for enforcement of the civil violations lies with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), but the FTC does not have the adequate resources to deal with something as obscure and complex as spyware.