This story was originally published by the WND News Center.

A federal judge has agreed to ban the California Bureau of Security and Investigative Services from enforcing its private-investigator licensing requirement against anti-spam entrepreneur Jay Fink forever.

The decision comes from U.S. District Judge Rita Lin after a fight brought by the Institute for Justice on behalf of Fink.

Eventually, the state agreed with the institute's arguments and jointly petitioned the court for a ruling to that effect.

The institute said an order from the state had intended to force Fink to get a license to run his business, but the court decided the requirement was so irrational it violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

"I'm thankful that I won't have to worry about losing my livelihood anymore," said Fink. "But the state never should have shut me down in the first place."

His work involves California's anti-spam act, which lets consumers sue spammers – if they compile evidence of the spam they have to handle.

"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," the IJ said.

"But last year the state announced that it was demanding he get a license as an investigator.

"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 institute said.

The cost of that license was huge. "Aside from paying fees and passing a test, he would have had to spend 6,000 hours training in fields completely unrelated to identifying spam, like arson investigation or investigative journalism," the report said.

That all made the demand from the state unconstitutional, the report said.

After the judge said Fink likely would win his case, the state "agreed to jointly petition the court for an order that forever prohibits it from enforcing its licensure law against Jay. That means he's immediately free to get back to work."

A lawyer for the IJ earlier explained that Fink "reads and writes at his desk," specifically what the First Amendment protects.

Dylan Moore, a litigation counsel for IJ, said, "It doesn't take 6,000 hours of training to learn how to identify spam messages and put them into a PDF. Anyone who has an internet connection and email address probably already knows how to do this, and the state isn't cracking down on them. Jay just takes the hassle and frustration out of the process. Just like reporters or authors who compile information for a living, Jay is protected by the First Amendment."