CIS Internet Services sued under a state law that can cost a
spammer $10 per email. Judge Charles Wolle ordered McCalla to pay
$11.2 billion and banned him from using the internet for three
years.
It is the second success for CIS in the same lawsuit: the ISP
won a $1 billion judgment against three other spammers in December
2004. In fact, CIS owner Robert Kramer named 300 alleged spammers
when he filed his lawsuit in 2003 after he was forced to upgrade
his servers in 2000 to cope with a deluge of up to 10 million spam
emails per day. Most of the defendants have now been dropped from
the action.
Speaking to the Associated Press, Kramer admitted that he was
unlikely to get paid, but argued that the ruling sets a new
standard. "Gross abusers of email risk exposure to public ridicule
as well as the economic death penalty," he said.
Graham Clulely, senior technology consultant for security firm
Sophos, welcomed the ruling.
"Spam is not just a nuisance for individual computer users who
find their inboxes clogged up with unwanted mail, but for ISPs who
are hit in the pocket by having to pay for the bandwidth to deliver
and store hundreds of millions of messages," he said.
In the UK, Virgin Net sued a customer, Adrian Paris, for sending
spam from his ISP account. That case, in 1999, alleged breach of
contract and trespass – at the time there were no anti-spam laws in
the UK. It settled out of court, with Paris agreeing to pay Virgin
Net5,000 in costs and damages and undertaking not to send
spam to Virgin Net customers in future.
Under the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations of
2003, a person who has suffered "damage" from spam that originated
in the UK can seek compensation. The first person to exercise this
right successfully was Nigel Roberts, a chartered engineer from
Alderney.
Roberts won an undefended court action against Falkirk-based
Media Logistics (UK) Ltd in December 2005. The company paid him
£300 to avoid a damages hearing. Had that hearing taken place,
Roberts would have faced the difficult task of proving that a
single email received from Media Logistics caused him quantifiable
damage.
