By Steve Ragan Apr 27, 2007, 15:40 GMT
The Utah-based Anti-Spam company Unspam Technologies has filed a one billion dollar lawsuit on behalf of over twenty thousand internet users. The suit was filed in Virginia under the CAN-SPAM Act and Virginia law. The question that comes to mind is exactly who is the lawsuit aimed at?
“We are targeting anyone who targets our members with email spam, comment spam, or harvesting. This lawsuit is unique because we believe it is the first major case in the United States to bring a claim against spammers for harvesting email addresses. While this practice has been a penalty enhancement under the CAN-SPAM Act since it was passed, in most cases the data was not available in order to prove an address was harvested. Clearly, Project Honey Pot has a unique insight into harvesting behavior,” the company said.
If you do not know Unspam or Project Honey Pot, where the case originated from a little information is probably needed. Unspam is a software and services company helping governments implement and enforce effective laws to control unwanted messages. They also provide basic as well as expert compliance consulting services to businesses wishing to ensure efficient adherence to the law.
“Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site. If one of these addresses begins receiving email we not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it,” explains Unspam Technologies.
The suit is unique the company says because it was not filed by and ISP but “This suit was brought by you: the volunteer members of Project Honey Pot representing more than one hundred countries around the world. It was brought, in effect, by the Internet community.”
So who gets the money if it goes to trial and if Unspam wins? “We're a long way from that, but we'd like to help out the people who have helped us. Obviously a large chunk would go to paying legal fees. Intriguingly, though, since we will know what Project Honey Pot members provided the data that ends up winning the case, maybe we'll be able to send them a little bonus. :-)”
More details can be found here: http://www.projecthoneypot.org/5days_thursday.php
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