CAN SPAM and the first amendement
From Venkat at Eric Goldman’s blog we find the federal court has rejected an attempt to claim spam was “protected anonymous speech.”
Related Posts
CAN SPAM preemption of CA law
- laura
- Jan 20, 2011
The California court of appeals returned a ruling yesterday in the Hypertouch v. ValueClick case. This is a case I haven’t talked about at all previously, but I think this ruling deserves a mention.
The short version is that Hypertouch sued Valueclick in 2008 under both CAN SPAM and the California anti-spam law. Eventually the judge in the case ruled that there was no clear evidence of fraud, therefore CAN SPAM preempted the California law.
Hypertouch appealed the case.
Yesterday the appeals court published their opinion and kicked the case back down to the lower court.
One beeelion dollars
- laura
- Oct 14, 2010
Facebook won another round in their court case against a Canadian spammer last week. Their $873,000,000 judgment was upheld by the Quebec Superior court. At today’s exchange rates, the judgment translates to over CDN$1,000,000,000.
In fine spammer style the defendant, Adam Guerbuez, is flouting the judgment and claiming he won’t pay a dime. In fact, he’s already filed bankruptcy and is reported to have transferred a number of assets to family members. From what I’m hearing from some of my Canadian colleagues the courts up there take a very dim view of his behaviour. Like many things that go through the court system, though, it is unlikely that the process will be rapid.
This is one of the largest, if not the largest, fines levied for violations of the CAN SPAM act. I don’t think Facebook will see much, if anything, of the money. But, hey, maybe the Canadian courts will throw this spammer in jail for flouting their ruling.
Buying Lists
- laura
- Jul 9, 2010
One of my email addresses at a client got spammed today offering to sell me appending services. I was going to post the email here and point out all of the problems in how he was advertising it, including violating CAN SPAM.
As I often do, I plugged his phone number into google, only to discover that my blog post from March about this spammer was the 2nd hit for that number. Well, go me.
I can report nothing has changed. He’s still violating CAN SPAM. He’s still claiming I have no right to post, share, spindle, mutilate or fold his spam. Well, in the interest in something, I thought I’d share the whole post this time. Just to warn folks from attempting to purchase services from appendleads.com (nice website, by the way).