The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) this week has announced the first big bust of spammers under the so-called “plain brown wrapper” provisions of CAN-SPAM.
The plain brown wrapper rules require that, in addition to the CAN-SPAM requirements for commercial email to which all commercial emailers are subject, email which is of an “adult” nature must comply with certain additional requirements, which include that the email must be clearly marked in the subject line as containing adult content, and there must be no graphic images or other adult content in the first “page” of the email, so that when it is first opened nothing offensive defaults to the screen.
The five men comprising six companies who were the target of the FTC’s first thrust into post-CAN-SPAM porn spam slamming included Dustin Hamilton, Gregory Hamilton, Tobin Banks, Philip Doroff and Paul Rose, doing business individually or in concert as Global Net Solutions, Open Space Enterprises Inc., Southlake Group Inc. and WTFRC Inc, all of Las Vegas. In addition, a UK and a Latvian company are also believed to be implicated.
According to Eileen Harrington, associate director of the FTC’s Marketing Practices Division, only one of the five men had actually hit ‘send’ and injected the spam into the Internet stream. The others, however, had hired him to send spam.
“It’s not just people who push the button to send the spam who can be held liable,” said Harrington.
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This gets me really excited, because what this alludes to is the section of CAN-SPAM known fondly in inner circles as “the McCain Amendment”, which says that if you stand to profit or gain from using the services of a spammer, you are just as liable under CAN-SPAM as is the spammer. I helped Senator McCain’s office to draft the language for this section, and so I am very proud to see it in action.
And that’s all the action I want to see from the likes of these guys, thank you very much.
Way to go, FTC!
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This was bullshit. I’m the brother of Dustin Hamilton, so don’t say way to go FTC. Paul Rose was the spammer, his handle is “Odin” – I know him personally because I wasn’t involved with the business. A company shouldn’t be punished unless they are aware of the wrongdoings of an employee while allowing it to happen when it comes to SPAM. How could they possibly know when he hit “Send” on his mailing program? If the ISPs that allowed the spam messages to go through and the email services that didn’t flag it as spam then aren’t they to be held liable as well? If it truly was spam, shouldn’t places like Google & Yahoo, who are both very good at filtering out spam, even Microsoft.. If they’re good at identifying spam, why can’t they be forced to notify the company that the affiliate is spamming for? This way the company can take action against the spammer instead of getting the courts involved over an intangible annoyance like an unwanted email.. All you have to do his delete people. It’s really not that f’n hard. Now, spam in your mailbox at your house? Now THAT should be illegal. You don’t know when you open your mailbox what’s going to be inside, and it’ usually crap. Now, Odin/Paul Rose by himself wrote the spam message out & sent it out to millions of internet users, the other defendants did not. Most of them don’t even know how to operate a computer.