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Spam Government The Courts Your Rights Online News

First CAN-SPAM Lawsuit Filed in California 167

Posted by timothy from the this-old-big-house dept.
rocketjam writes "Foster City, California-based ISP Hypertouch, Inc. has filed the first lawsuit alleging violations of the new Federal CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. The lawsuit was filed against BobVila.com and the spammer they hired, Bluestream Media, for sending Hypertouch customers unwanted, unsolicited email advertisements for Vila's "Home Again Newsletter." The suit alleges the defendents sent spam email ads with fraudulent headers and no physical address. It also alleges the emails were sent to randomly generated and harvested addresses as well as addresses that had replied to opt-out links in other spams. Hypertouch's attorney, John L. Fallat, said the CAN-SPAM Act offers little protection to the public, but they would use the few protections it offers to punish spammers." Reader Clemence links to Wired's coverage of the suit.
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First CAN-SPAM Lawsuit Filed in California More

First CAN-SPAM Lawsuit Filed in California

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  • Fraud (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ScooterBill ( 599835 ) * on Saturday March 06, 2004 @06:43PM (#8487511)
    IANAL so I'll ask this question.

    Faking an email header, return address, etc. is supposedly illegal under CAN-SPAM. If this is fraud, then wasn't this illegal before CAN-SPAM?

    M

    • Re:Fraud (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well, everything's a little weirder with CANned-SPAM around...
      -os

    • Re:Fraud (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tango42 ( 662363 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @07:17PM (#8487714)
      To you and me (and the rest of /.), that might make sense, because we are used to thinking of the internet as just another part of life. For some (most) people, that isn't yet the case. They seem to think that something happening online is inherently different from the same thing happening IRL. That will probably change over the next decade, but until then laws will have to be tested twice, once for real life, and then again for the net.

      • Re:Fraud (Score:2, Interesting)

        by Xiamin ( 120863 )
        To you and me (and the rest of /.), that might make sense, because we are used to thinking of the internet as just another part of life. For some (most) people, that isn't yet the case. They seem to think that something happening online is inherently different from the same thing happening IRL. That will probably change over the next decade, but until then laws will have to be tested twice, once for real life, and then again for the net.

        Kind of like sales tax?
        • So true. I've heard some pretty insane arguments against doing sales tax on the internet. I have no problem with paying my sales tax on all purchases even interstate and international purchases. Of course states have to be careful not to tax internet purchases differently, because it could be interpretered as a tariff and the constitution forbids states from setting up tarriffs. (only the federal goverment can do that). This is because, of course, the states are a union and are generally not supposed to int

    • Yes.... (Score:4, Informative)

      by www.sorehands.com ( 142825 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @07:24PM (#8487750) Homepage
      In many states, there were laws that made using false headers a violation of that state's laws. In addition many states have advertising laws which require the advertiser to be identified.

  • Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 06, 2004 @06:44PM (#8487516)
    At first I was kind of worried that the first target gone after was someone "respectable"-- bob vila-- and not like the people selling penis pumps or something.

    But then I thought about it. How much of the problem is caused by ignorant businesses who just happen to hire the wrong marketing firm, and just say "we want you to increase our exposure on the internet" and don't realize this means millions of spam mails sent illegally through hijacked SMTP?

    Perhaps to some degree education is the answer. If other legitimate businesses see bob vila getting smacked for spam mail, maybe they'll panic and make absolutely certain the people they're hiring aren't sending fraudulently-sent spam.

    • Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)

      by Joe Wagner ( 547696 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @06:55PM (#8487581) Homepage
      Well, we were in contact with them for a bit before we filled the suit. Even after we told them a number of their spam were sent to addresses that were submitted to the opt-out links of other spam, they still refused to promise to never use BlueStream Media again. Shortly before we filed the suit, one of our users recieved another BobVila UCE, this time from a spammer in Florida.

      One of the most compelling aspects in deciding to file this case was that among the various emails messages in their spam run they managed violate nearly every ISP-actionable part of CAN-SPAM. Specifically various email of the spam run had one or more of the following violations:

      1) No street address
      2) False headers, including

      a) SMTP HELO's with names whose IP addresses don't match the originating IP

      b) Domain names used in the headers that were registered with false names...

      3) Addresses that had been submitted to the opt-out mechanisms of other spam
      4) Random and harvested addresses, include domain registration contact addresses.

      • Re:Hmm (Score:5, Funny)

        by pongo000 ( 97357 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @07:09PM (#8487669)
        SMTP HELO's with names whose IP addresses don't match the originating IP

        And all this time I thought HELO DUDE was a perfectly legit way of identifying oneself to an SMTP server...

      • Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ticklemeozmo ( 595926 ) <justin...j...novack@@@acm...org> on Saturday March 06, 2004 @07:54PM (#8487916) Homepage Journal
        a) SMTP HELO's with names whose IP addresses don't match the originating IP

        That's interesting.. when you send a mail from a windows machine, it uses its NetBIOS name as it's HELO.

        Surely, that's name doesn't match the original IP address when you try to resolve it from the recipients computer.

        Is it me, or is this one of those overly broad clauses they only apply when they need to?

        • HELO behavior and greylisting (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Frater 219 ( 1455 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @11:36PM (#8488975) Journal
          a) SMTP HELO's with names whose IP addresses don't match the originating IP
          That's interesting.. when you send a mail from a windows machine, it uses its NetBIOS name as it's HELO.
          ... Well, my mail server does not need to be receiving mail from remote Windows client systems. Windows mail servers, yes, but presumably those can follow the protocol and HELO with their real name, not their Microsoft made-up toy name.

          Indeed, I might be willing to discriminatorily greylist [puremagic.com] all mail from any remote Windows system. (Greylisting: Sending a 4xx temporary failure the first time a host tries to send mail to a particular recipient. This causes a normal MTA to retry in a few minutes, but fire-and-forget spamware and worms generally abort.)

          How to apply this to Windows only? OpenBSD's passive OS fingerprinting would be a start. It allows one to selectively redirect traffic based on the detected OS, and thus to offer different quality of service based on the quality of the client system. Since there is a much greater likelihood that a given Windows host's connection to my MTA is delivering spam and worms than that a given Solaris or Red Hat host is delivering spam and worms, there is a good reason to deteriorate service (as by greylisting) for Windows hosts -- as long as it can be done in a way which retains (eventual) delivery of real mail.

          If Unix mail server admins all chose to greylist remote Windows hosts -- including Windows MTAs as well as client hosts -- then Windows servers would eat the cost of keeping messages in queue during the greylisting period. This would, effectively, be the cost of proving you're a real Windows MTA, not a worm or spamware. This lays part of the burden of the Windows system's susceptibility to malware back upon those responsible for it (deployers of Windows) whereas currently they are able to offload it upon the rest of us in the form of junk mail from worms.

          (Incidentally, yes, the majority of mail exchangers run some form of Unix. Less than half, however, run Sendmail.)

        • HELO HOMECOMPUTER (Score:2, Interesting)

          by csk_1975 ( 721546 )
          After noticing all the spam sent from machines using uppercase non qualified HELO names I hacked our SMTP listener to trap all the mail sent from them.

          I did this in November and so far its trapped tens of thousands of spam mails and less than ten valid mailers. Of these valid mailers, two said they had no idea they were using these names and promptly changed them to FQDNs, one was not happy, and the others didn't respond to my messages so their mail is still trapped/refused - my users didn't want the mail

        • Re:Hmm (Score:2)

          by pod ( 1103 )
          That's interesting.. when you send a mail from a windows machine, it uses its NetBIOS name as it's HELO.

          Surely, this depends on the mail client? Nothing to do with Windows specifically, anyone can send anything they want as the HELO parameter. If some broken mailer chooses to use the NetBios name, then that's a client problem, not OS.

      • Re:Hmm (Score:1, Flamebait)

        by Zeinfeld ( 263942 )
        Well, we were in contact with them for a bit before we filled the suit.

        I don't know what kind of stunt you are pulling here, but I don't really give a whole heap of credibility to someone who files a lawsuit and then goes talking about it on slashdot.

        When the CANSPAM act was being debated at the FTC the big issue everyone was worried about was that the law would be used by gold-diggers against the folk with the deepest pockets. This is apparently what had happened in Utah were the act quickly became a f

    • Re:Hmm (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Masem ( 1171 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @06:59PM (#8487611)
      I've gotten spam from the BlueStream Media group, that appears more legit than other spam (that is, they don't hide the fact they're advertizing something and yet the ad is readible, not mangled text, and so forth; eg it's nearly good enough to get past a number of spam filters because it looks like a legitamite written email), and representing other clients outside of BobVila. I personally think that's the way the fight has to go, is to make sure that the company that is being advertized in the spam, and not just the spam provider, is targetted in the suits, as once these companies realize that even if they don't send spam directly, usign spam to advertize is a bad idea.

      Unfortunately, more than half of the spam I'm getting lately is now from the fake viagra ones, that, while using viagra, have nothing to do with pfiser, and the actual company isn't mentioned at all, so all you can do is go after the spammer, and not their source of funding.

    • Re:Hmm (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Smidge204 ( 605297 )
      A valid point. Unless they can proove that BobVila.com knew or explicitly ordered advertising in this form, then shouldn't the company that actually DID the spamming take most of the heat?

      Although, in the long run, this might work out if BobVila.com loses. If hiring non-compliant spammers for advertizing becomes a liability, maybe they'll go out of business!
      =Smidge=

      • Re:Hmm (Score:2, Informative)

        by tftp ( 111690 )
        No, in civil lawsuits you go after everybody who has any relation to your problem. Unrelated people will be dropped from the suit by the judge. The reason for that is simple: it's very easy to remove someone from the lawsuit, but next to impossible to add one. So you begin with the widest audience.

    • Re:Hmm (Score:4, Insightful)

      by rixstep ( 611236 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @07:40PM (#8487826) Homepage
      I don't know good ol' Bob Vila. For all I know, he's just another Nathan Arizona. But it's his business; he's ultimately responsible, as are Blue Stream. I say 'good' if it helps reduce spam.

      Bob Vila might not have known, true, but that's highly unlikely. Blue Stream are in it up to their skinny necks. In either case, they're all responsible under the law, and be glad for that. Otherwise the classic defence will be 'we didn't know, and the employee who did that terrible thing for us is long gone, and we don't have a forwarding address'.

      • Re:Hmm (Score:4, Funny)

        by iminplaya ( 723125 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @08:37PM (#8488180) Journal
        If they ever find him guilty of anything, they can make him do community service, like, for instance, he can build "This old Half-way House" for Martha Stewart.

      • Re:Hmm (Score:3, Interesting)

        by jadavis ( 473492 )
        An employee is different than a subcontractor. A subcontractor should take the responsibility, and the "we didn't know" is a valid defense. You can enforce company policies among your eployees, but not subcontractors.

        It defeats the whole purpose of a subcontractor if you have to micromanage them.

        Now, if you are micromanaging a subcontractor and you encourage them to do something illegal, it may be a different story.

        Also, it seems sufficient to deter us-based spamming if the person doing the spamming is h

    • ignorant businesses (Score:3, Interesting)

      by DavidDeLux ( 650471 )
      Only yesterday I got some UCE from a local company... a nice large PDF file containing details of a promo they were doing for photocopiers. This company clearly think its OK to send out such junk... whilst they included in the message their email address to request to get off their list, the replyto address was a placebo... so for that alone they're breaking the acceptable use policy of the ISP that they sent from... who got a suitable complaint from me (and I hope they yank their account!). Now, this compa

  • Show how useless it is (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lord_Dweomer ( 648696 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @06:45PM (#8487522) Homepage
    "Hypertouch's attorney, John L. Fallat, said the CAN-SPAM Act offers little protection to the public, but they would use the few protections it offers to punish spammers."

    If this case gets a lot of press coverage, it might help show people how utterly useless the CAN-SPAM act really is.

    If a lawyer says its near useless, you know it must be bad. Hopefully the NY Times covers this in depth.

    At least for once they are suing the company who uses the spammer and not just the spammer.

    • Re:Show how useless it is (Score:5, Funny)

      by gravyfaucet ( 759255 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @06:50PM (#8487558)
      useless. couldnt they have picked a more suitable target? Its not like Bob Villa employs cloned machines and offers to sell you a "legal" building permit, or promises "add three to five stories to your house - naturally and without a contractor". sheesh
    • If this case gets a lot of press coverage, it might help show people how utterly useless the CAN-SPAM act really is.

      Maybe it will, but when it's over, everybody will forget it like was yesterday's slashdot story. The FUD about the "benefits" of CAN-SPAM will continue to be printed every day.

      Hopefully the NY Times covers this in depth.

      Oh, no! Not the NY Times...I've already forgotten the last three thousand names I used to register:-)

      If a lawyer says it's near useless, it's because he/she doesn't see
      • 'Oh, no! Not the NY Times...I've already forgotten the last three thousand names I used to register:-)"

        You jest, but few on here realize the sway the NY Times holds. Many business professionals read it daily in print form. Hell, I'm a college student in Minneapolis and I have a subscription. The NY Times is one of America's biggest news sources, and that was BEFORE they had online access.

  • Say it ain't so! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 06, 2004 @06:46PM (#8487529)
    Bob Vila sending spam?!?! Next you'll be telling me Norm Abrams wants me to have a longer penis.

  • This Old Dot-Com (Score:3, Informative)

    by AndroidCat ( 229562 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @06:48PM (#8487548) Homepage
    General article on Bob Vila's ebiz [bizforward.com]
    • From that article:

      Vila, whose wife, Diana Barrett, is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School...

      Uh, where was she when hubby decided to get involved in spamming? This is very interesting...

  • California's tougher law still has some effect (Score:5, Informative)

    by anonymous cowfart ( 576665 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @06:49PM (#8487549) Journal
    California's tough spam law is mostly preempted by the new Federal law. But not entirely. The preemption clause reads
    This Act supersedes any statute, regulation, or rule of a State or political subdivision of a State that expressly regulates the use of electronic mail to send commercial messages, except to the extent that any such statute, regulation, or rule prohibits falsity or deception in any portion of a commercial electronic mail message or information attached thereto.

    So for any spam that has a forged header or a misleading subject, California's new law, with the $1000 per spam penalty, will still apply. California allows private suits in small claims court by any party. So you can haul the bozos into court. Maybe even across state lines.

    A year or two from now, we'll be rid of the chickenboners, but we'll be getting even more spam from "legitimate businesses".

    • You can also get attorney's fees under the California law:

      "(a)(1) In addition to any other remedies provided by this article or by any other provisions of law, a recipient of an unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement transmitted in violation of this article, an electronic mail service provider, or the Attorney General may bring an action against an entity that violates any provision of this article to recover either or both of the following:
      (A) Actual damages.
      (B) Liquidated damages of one thousand dollars ($1,000) for each unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement transmitted in violation of Section 17529.2, up to one million dollars ($1,000,000) per incident.
      (2) The recipient, an electronic mail service provider, or the Attorney General, if the prevailing plaintiff, may also recover reasonable attorney's fees and costs.

      California Business & Professions Code sec 17529.8



    • Argh. :) Too true.

      Meanwhile, the lawyers are ecstatic. No job security there, nossirree bob...

      SB
    • So for any spam that has a forged header or a misleading subject, California's new law, with the $1000 per spam penalty, will still apply.

      Actually, any feature designed to defeat spam filtering inherently consitutes "falsity or deception" (its entire purpose makes spam appear to be non-spam). Proper enforcement of this law would give spammers the choice of insuring that their spew is trivially easy to filter or paying the penalties.

  • Opportunism (Score:5, Interesting)

    by StuWho ( 748218 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @06:50PM (#8487556) Journal
    "Even if Hypertouch succeeds in its case, the message to spammers and the companies that hire them might not be loud enough to make a difference. The ISP is asking for $100 in damages -- the maximum allowed by the Can-Spam Act -- for each of the approximately 100 messages that it claims were sent by BlueStream Media."

    Sounds like there could be money in setting up as an ISP, and sueing any spammers who use you for $100 per message. Given the millions of messages an individual spammer can send, even one victory against them would result in a cash windfall for the ISP concerned.

  • Who pays for the spam? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by d474 ( 695126 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @06:52PM (#8487568)
    Until they start punishing the companies that benefit from the ads this is never going to stop. It should be handled like the drug war. If your company is benefitting from ads spammed to millions of people, you go down unless you reveal who you hired to do it.

    • Re:Who pays for the spam? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by crackshoe ( 751995 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @07:08PM (#8487663)
      Wait... something should be handled like the drug war? that highly succesful siphoning off of american tax dollars that accomplishes next to nothing? If it was handled as such, i wouldn't be suprised if spammers starting simply directing minors to do the actual spamming, much like the crack dealers that recruited under-age dealers because they wouldn't get the same jailtime.

  • Spammers "can" spam (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ElliotLee ( 713376 )
    It's going to be very difficult to prove this. I could send spam and make it look like Slashdot sent it, routing it through some foreign country.
    • Yes, but in your example, Slashdot would be cleared once they reveal who they hired, the investigation goes from there.

    • Not really (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      For the most trivial example which you have cited, if you try to admit spam as evidence in court, and it's labelled as coming from slashdot.org, but the Recieved: smtp routing headers show that it came from somewhere outside the U.S., it should be pretty obvious that slashdot.org did not send that letter, and someone just forged the slashdot.org return address, since slashdot.org is located, well, inside the U.S..
  • There have been a lot of complaints that the CAN-SPAM acto does not make filtering easy, but, I think that bayean filters may be quite effective if trained properly.

    The physical address of a spammer is more difficult to change cheaply and, if trained properly, will find it's way into bayean databases.

    I guess we will see over time.

    Incidentally, my mailserver (and my company's mailservers) reject any emails with "bluestreammedia.com" in the body and have done so for some time.

    • Unfortunately, the CAN-SPAM act does not, by itself, specify how the snail-mail addresses have to be specified. I have heard (though I have not seen myself) "legitimate" spam which includes the snail-mail addresses as an image.

      Similarly, the CAN-SPAM act requires UCE to be marked, but doesn't specify how, which makes filtering hard.

      But it's not over. The FCC has the authority to enforce CAN-SPAM, and they are (supposedly) working on standards. Of course, any slashdotter could have come up with a workab

  • CAN-SPAM, Politrix, and the unsuspecting victims (Score:3, Insightful)

    by segment ( 695309 ) <sil&politrix,org> on Saturday March 06, 2004 @06:59PM (#8487612) Homepage Journal

    Firstly CAN-SPAM is nothing more than a political tool used by a tool this election year nothing more. For the US to claim to have made a law in places where laws mean nothing - e.g. about those pesky APNIC/LACNIC domains. Now, considering a huge portion of spam gets sent by users whose machines are infected with annoying ass viruses, what is the government going to do aside from possibly bringing in innocent victims - users whose machines were infected or rooted - to court and make them stand trial for something they didn't even know they did.

    Secondly, with every Joe Blow dot com stepping on the scene, how many companies with misconfigured mail servers fall victim to going to court?

    • Re:CAN-SPAM, Politrix, and the unsuspecting victim (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Now, considering a huge portion of spam gets sent by users whose machines are infected with annoying ass viruses, what is the government going to do aside from possibly bringing in innocent victims - users whose machines were infected or rooted - to court and make them stand trial for something they didn't even know they did.

      They can sue the person the spam mail was sent on behalf of, and subpeona the names of the actual spammers, then charge them with hacking the computers used to send the spam.

      For it
      • and subpeona the names of the actual spammers, then charge them with hacking the computers used to send the spam Did you miss something I posted? Again if someone has their machine broken into, how the hell are they supposed to find out who it was that broke into it if they didn't know how to protect it from the jump? As for your subpoena point, makes little sense, again what are you going to do if Shaka Zulu from Niger broke into your machine, go searching for him? Sure waste 2million tax dollars as oppose
        • who it was that broke into it

          I am suggesting that they would subpeona the end person who hired the people to break into it. I.E. the person selling the product or service advertised in the spam.

          Obviously this isn't going to do much good if this person is some kind of crime organization running a scam out of nigeria or something. However, it's not like 100% of spam is sent by organizations performing scams in countries which are unwilling to cooperate with a fraud investigation in the U.S.. I would say we
    • I think running Windows is already legally aiding and abetting spamming. I wonder whether this is punishable...

  • Question (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Killjoy_NL ( 719667 )
    Ok, what if I send some US-based companies/people spam. Since I'm from the Netherlands they can't really do anything about it, right??

    • The idea here (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Remember: If the U.S. can get to the point that all spam is coming into the U.S. from the outside, that is a major win.

      The idea here is to increase the accuracy of filter-based spam fighting techniques. If we can assume-- because the CAN-SPAM act requires it-- that e-mails sent within the U.S. have accurate header information, we can set up much stronger e-mail filters based on that assumption.

      We can't assume email from the netherlands has this assumption, but this just means that these filters are going

  • great publicity (Score:3, Interesting)

    by KingJoshi ( 615691 ) <slashdot@joshi.tk> on Saturday March 06, 2004 @07:03PM (#8487638) Homepage
    regardless of if they win or how much (little) money they get in return, this is great publicity and it also keeps in the public limelight somewhat the issue of spam and needing better legislation. I'd assume other ISPs would sue, but I wonder which ones are making money off of the spammers...

  • Real Time Filters (Score:3, Interesting)

    by d474 ( 695126 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @07:04PM (#8487642)
    Couldn't huge email centers (yahoo, msn, etc.) in real time compare source IP's from all emails moving into their systems, identify SPAM as massive amounts of identical email coming from identical IP addresses, load that data into a filter and then block? Some would always get through, say 100,000 but the rest of the 1.4 million get blocked? Isn't anything like this possible?
    • identify SPAM as massive amounts of identical email coming from identical IP addresses, load that data into a filter and then block?

      Two things make this difficult:
      1) zombies - many of the trojans install spam-sending zombies so the IP addresses are different
      2) random nonsense is inserted into consequitive spams to make the non-identical

      Of course filters are getting better and no doubt will deal with these techniques in the ever-escalating arms race that is spam.
  • So how do I find a good anti-spammer lawyer to initiate some lawsuits and cash in on the 30 spamm I receive a day from forged address? I try to bounce as many as possible, but most are fake email. I even got a UCE from one of my OWN email address, so I know they are harvesting as fast as possible.

  • Hah! (Score:5, Funny)

    by niko9 ( 315647 ) * on Saturday March 06, 2004 @07:08PM (#8487662)
    I can see the Warden welcoming Bob Villa to the big house: "Welcome to this old Penitentiary"

  • you can be sure... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Roger Keith Barrett ( 712843 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @07:09PM (#8487671)
    ...than Bob Vila isn't personally involved. Ever watch "This Old House"? The guy never does ANY projects himself. He always passes it off to that other guy! "Hi, I am Bob Vila for Sears Bulk Mail Services. For just $19.95...."

  • I wonder whose cell would be nicer... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Toxygen ( 738180 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @07:18PM (#8487716) Journal
    ...Bob Vila's or Martha Stewart?
  • At the end of the day, we can only continue to hope that as more and more of these cases are highlighted, that the people that are supposed to represent us in government decide to pull their fingers out and put in some proper laws with proper penalties. If all companies that used spammers to advertise their company were fined and repeat offenders given jail sentences, how long before these unscrupulous companies stopped using spammers. And of course as mentioned above, very heavy penalties for hiding the

  • FYI: lawsuit homepage... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Joe Wagner ( 547696 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @07:20PM (#8487735) Homepage
    Hi All, Just FYI, We will be posting updates to the case as they happen at http://legal.hypertouch.com [hypertouch.com]. We think the CAN-SPAM Act is an open license to spam with very little protection for the public, but we are attempting to use what few protections are available to punish some unrepentant spammers.

    One of the biggest problems with CAN-SPAM Act that we are hoping to educate the press so they can inform the public is that the Act says end users _must_ contact each spammer and opt-out. This is of course exactly the opposite of what ISPs have been tell their customers to do. "Opting out" merely gives the spammer have a live address. Some of the email addresses defendants sent spam to were unique addresses submitted to a "virus software 90 % off" spam. In no uncertain terms, "opting out" of spam signs you up for more spam.

    We were surprised when even after we told BobVila.com about the quality of the lists their hired spammer was using, they still refused even just to promise they'd never use BlueStream Media again... Right before we filed the action, one of our users received a new BobVila spam, this time sent through a Florida based spammer.

    • Why didn't you sue in California state court and allege both the Fed and State law?
    • BobVila.com's reply can be found here [bobvila.com] and says:

      The following statement is released by Jack Hill, chief executive officer of BVWebTies LLC, owner of BobVila.com, in response to media inquiries involving the anti-spam lawsuit against BVWebTies LLC filed by Hypertouch Inc.:

      BOSTON (March 5, 2004) - "BVWebTies LLC, owner of BobVila.com, takes the issue of junk e-mail seriously and believes it has operated in full compliance with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. We remain committed to respecting and serving our custo

  • Bob Vila is more or less fictional... (Score:5, Informative)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Saturday March 06, 2004 @07:21PM (#8487737)
    Yeah, he does exist and that is his real name. However, his association with home improvement is purely a creation of television.

    He was a nobody until a PBS series called This Old House came along in 1979. He was hired as the host of that show. His job duties there were to read the opening and closing sequence lines, and to interview the experts who really did know what they were doing. He was not one of those experts, he was just asked questions to the experts.

    In 1989, when he left This Old House, he created his own TV production company, and used his association with home improvement to get endorcement deals. His primary sponsor is Sears, and his Home Again series can more or less be seen as a Sears infomerical at times. (Sears has always been a title sponsor, and controls a large chunk of the ad space within the program. The content portion of the show might not hit you over the head as an ad, but notice the clear bias when it comes time to select which company's products to work with.)

    His primary line of work these days isn't as a home improvement expert, it's in being the pitch man for Craftsman tools and other Sears brands. He'll endorse other products too, but that's really the only skill people pay him for. You never see him doing any of the work on his TV shows, and that's for good reason...
    • His primary sponsor is Sears

      From a Dec 2001 article: [bizforward.com]

      Bobvila.com was initially a joint venture with Sears, which held a majority interest. But that relationship ended earlier this year when Sears, no longer enamored of the Internet, unceremoniously pulled out.
      Perhaps that's when the slide to the spammy side started?
    • As I recall, he was asked by PBS to leave "This Old House" because of the increasing amount of time he was spending promoting the Sears Craftsman tools. It was too much commercial identity for the "non-commercial" PBS.

    • He was a nobody until a PBS series called This Old House came along in 1979. He was hired as the host of that show. His job duties there were to read the opening and closing sequence lines, and to interview the experts who really did know what they were doing. He was not one of those experts, he was just asked questions to the experts.

      I'm no fan of Bob Vila, but if you were on job sites for 10 years asking questions of experts all that time, you'd be bound to learn a thing or two about homebuilding.

      I'm j

  • What else is new? (Score:3, Offtopic)

    by Guppy06 ( 410832 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @07:24PM (#8487753)
    Fraud isn't something new to Bob Vila. He pretends to be a carpenter all the time.

    Seriously, ever notice that he does nothing but talk to the people doing the work, and the few times he actually picks up a tool he even makes me seem coordinated?

    A while ago some friends and I caught an old episode of This Old House when Vila was still on it, and in this particular episode he was talking to Norm Abram as he was putting on some wooden shingles. Bob decided to show show his ineptness by putting up a few himself. Comparing the two would have been sad if it hadn't been so damned funny...
    • This is in part why the This Old House Classics that run on commerical channels are only from the post-1989 seasons after Vila left the show, the first 10 seasons are something WGBH would rather forget.

      Vila was not hired because he knew about construction. He was hired because he looked credible, and could speak well to the camera. He was the host of the show, and that's it.

  • Will it help any? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bagheera ( 71311 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @07:31PM (#8487783) Homepage Journal
    It's nice to see someone at least trying to get something from this Law, since it did such a good job of crippling the stricter state level laws. While I agree that a single national level law is a good idea, they took it in the shorts with this one. CAN-SPAM was a waste of paper.

    The sad thing is during a recent review of my spam trap account (11800+ email in 3 months) a grand total of 30 of them were from "legitimate" business. The rest were for your usual run of penis pills, bad mortgages, "Stop spam now" software, and herbal vi@gra.

    Now, if I could collect on each and every one of them, I'd be a wealthy man. But the vast majority are coming in through open proxies or trojaned Windows boxen, and are annoyingly difficult to track back to their source - which is often off-shore and out of reach of the CAN-SPAM act in any case.

    Going after a legitimate" company like this is may put a slight damper on SPAM sent by "real" companies, but it does little or nothing to stem the flood tide of crap we get from the low lifes who are at the root of the problem.

    • Tracking Spammers (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Detritus ( 11846 )
      One way to find out the identity of the spammers is to follow the money. Someone with the power to issue subpoenas should be able to find out where the money is going. An old trick is to write a check to the person under investigation and see where it goes.

  • Just imagine for a sec (Score:3, Funny)

    by st0rmshad0w ( 412661 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @07:50PM (#8487885)
    Imagine the sweet livin on the cell block with Bob and Martha!

    Wow. The mind boggles.

    Prolly never would have happened if Norm were still on board.

  • My seemingly obvious method of getting rid of spam (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Killswitch1968 ( 735908 ) on Saturday March 06, 2004 @08:40PM (#8488193)
    What I never understood is instead of going after the spammers, can't we go after the companies hiring the spammers? They would be far easier to track down. They must have websites to solicite their garbage, with credit card payments and lots of contact info.
    I can see the potential for people to 'fake-spam' and get a company into trouble, but is this the only problem?

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