1st Trial Under California Spam Law Slams Spammer

www.sorehands.com writes "In the first case brought by a spam recipient to actually go to trial in California, the Superior Court of California held that people who receive false and deceptive spam emails are entitled to liquidated damages of $1,000 per email under California Business & Professions Code Section 17529.5. In the California Superior Court ruling (PDF), Judge Marie S. Weiner made many references to the fact that Defendants used anonymous domain name registration and used unregistered business names in her ruling. This is different from the Gordon case, where one only had to perform a simple whois lookup to identify the sender; here, Defendants used 'from' lines of 'Paid Survey' and 'Your Promotion' with anonymously registered domain names. Judge Weiner's decision makes it clear that the California law is not preempted by the I CAN-SPAM Act. This has been determined in a few prior cases, including my own. (See http://www.barbieslapp.com/spam for some of those cases.)"

Comments

Re:2010 a bit late? -- The wheels of justice

[ameline]

The wheels of justice grind very slowly, but they grind extremely finely too -- this guy is finding that out.

Overboard

[Spykk]

I hate spam as much as the next guy, but $1,000 per e-mail is just as rediculous as the rewards we are seeing for pirating music. Can't we work to solve this problem without making up huge numbers that no one will ever be able to pay anyway?

Re:Overboard

[frosty_tsm]

$1,000 per e-mail is similar to $10,000 per call to someone on the do-not-call registry. This is about taking away the financial benefit of these obnoxious business activities. Pirating music is not a business activity.

Re:It's Not Going To Make A Difference

[SpeedyDX]

I didn't RTFPDF yet, but here are my preliminary thoughts. I understand the rationale that the fine of $1000 per email is that it is punitive, but why $1000? $1000 per email seems like an awfully exaggerated fine. Didn't we agree that fines or other cash penalties should be at least roughly tied to the amount of harm done? For example, sharing a $1 song should not amount to thousands upon thousands of dollars in fines. Likewise, a single spam email that costs the victim almost nothing but time, annoyance, and/or fractions of a cent in bandwidth costs probably shouldn't warrant a $1000 fine.

Now if a scam email actually defrauded someone of money (the victim could either be the person spammed or an ad agency), the punishment should be relative to the amount defrauded, plus some significant punitive penalty.

If we think that outrageous fines are unjust and unwarranted, shouldn't we apply this rule across the board? Figure out the actual damages and go from there instead of just slapping a $1000 price tag on each email. Doesn't that make more sense?

Re:It's Not Going To Make A Difference

[CannonballHead]

No, we shouldn't, because we really dislike spam - thus we feel that we can adjust our punitive damages required to fit our dislike. On the other hand, we like illegal file sharing, therefore we feel that punitive damages there should be zero.

At least, I'm fairly certain that's how a lot of people's "logic" goes. :)

Re:It's Not Going To Make A Difference

[PRMan]

Littering is $1000 in California, too. What's the harm to anyone if someone throws a piece of (biodegradable) paper out their window?

The harm is not the 1 piece of paper, it's the 1,000,000 that result if there is no fine. The fine has to be punitive enough to stop the 1,000,000.

Think of this as littering in someone else's inbox.