| American spammers face unprecedented fine A breakthrough has emerged in the fight against one of the scourges of the computer age - unauthorized distribution of advertising correspondence. Last Friday, Judge Charles Wall from the US state of Iowa issued an unprecedented verdict, according to which three companies that imposed information about themselves on unsuspecting Internet users will have to pay $1 billion 220 million. So far, no one has suffered from the flow of advertising , which clogs up email boxes, it was not possible to sue such a gigantic sum from spammers. The billion dollar compensation came as a surprise even to public organizations involved in the fight against spam and spammers. In any case, SpamCon Foundation President Laura Atkins described her emotions to the Associated Press very simply after the trial: “This is something incredible.” In her opinion, this is the largest compensation ever paid for spam. Ms. Atkins herself believed that the final fine at this trial would be about $100 million.
However, with his verdict Judge Wall did not protect ordinary users, who for the most part have to deal with unnecessary advertising. The plaintiff in the billion-dollar lawsuit was a small company from Eastern Iowa engaged in “providing Internet services to the public.” Back in 2000, the servers of this company were subject to a spam attack: a total of up to 10 million advertising emails landed in the mailboxes of clients of the Iowa Internet provider per day. After this, the head of the affected company, Robert Kramer, decided to stand up for his clients and brought legal action against 300 spammers. Now the judge has decided that three American companies will be responsible for this attack: AMP Dollar Savings Inc. from Arizona must pay $720 million, and two Florida firms - Cash Link Systems Inc. and TEI Marketing Group - 360 and 140 million, respectively.
The court calculated these incredible amounts on the basis of two laws. Local law in Iowa allows you to claim compensation at the rate of $10 per spam email. Plus, recently in the United States, spam cases have begun to fall under a long-standing anti-mafia federal law called the Corrupt and Racketeering Organizations Act. He allowed the judge to triple the amount of compensation he had calculated.
Kramer himself called the court's decision "a victory for all of us who open our email every day to find fraudulent and obscene messages there." However, his lawyer Kelly Wallis said that he is not sure that the entire amount will be recovered from the defendants. Indeed, the payment of such compensation can be a strong blow even for large corporations, and the firms that lost the process are clearly not among the companies with billion-dollar turnover. In addition, it is very likely that this victory for Kramer will be revised downward through appeals to higher authorities (if, of course, the fined firms decide to litigate further).
And in the worst case, in the future, these compensations may be canceled altogether. So, last week in another state, Maryland, a court considering a similar lawsuit declared that the local anti-spam law is unconstitutional because it goes beyond the jurisdiction of the state judiciary and attempts to regulate commercial relations beyond its borders. The problem was that the defendants in the anti-spam lawsuits were not in Maryland, but in other states. A similar situation has now arisen in Iowa: Judge Wall calculated the initial amount of compensation based on local legislation, although all the defendant companies are located in Arizona and Florida. However, the propaganda effect of defeating spammers in Iowa should not be underestimated - it is not so easy to calculate in dollars, but perhaps it will save someone from having to empty their mailbox once again. Mikhail MANSKOY |
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