http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/12/18/spam.lawsuit.ap/index.html
What a nice present for the holiday season 
-Hank
Hank Nussbacher wrote:
http://www.cnn.com/2004/LAW/12/18/spam.lawsuit.ap/index.html
What a nice present for the holiday season
-Hank
Indeed! If it will hold after the appeal.
Thing is, the spammers are not there to be found for paying, so they might not exist for appealing. Meaning this might become a real legal precedence.. so maybe there will even be a second.
Gadi.
While it is a victory in the Legal sense, it doesn't actually have any
consequence to the spammers:
"Kramer's attorney, Kelly Wallace, said he is unlikely to ever collect the
judgment, which was made possible by an Iowa law that allows plaintiffs to
claim damages of $10 per spam message. The judgments were then tripled
under RICO.
"We hope to recover at least his costs," Wallace said."
They did sue 300 spammers, so it's possible that some of them are still around,
either as individual proprietors or as corporate entities, but they're
only responsible for
their individual spamming totals, not the whole billion.
Most of the billion dollars was in two big awards, and the other numbers that
got into the article were like $140K. But even if there are a dozen
that are on the hook for $10K each that still exist and have seizable
assets, that's enough to pay the lawyer bills. For the small fry, you
probably can't seize their double-wides, but you might get to take
their computers and get their DSL shut off.