A recent decision by the District of Columbia Court of Appeals addressed whether a private right of action under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) required a separate act of enabling legislation. The Court found that private causes of action may be brought in the Washington D.C. Superior Court under the Act without the need for enabling legislation. CyberLaw PC attorney Eric Menhart was on the brief for Read More

  Saturday, May 3, 2008 was the 30th anniversary of bulk e-mailing, popularly known as spamming. On May 3, 1978 an employee of Digital Equipment Company mass-mailed some of his colleagues an advertisement for a computer for sale over ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network), which was a technological precursor to the Internet. Unsurprisingly, many of the recipients found the unsolicited Read More

  CyberLaw Attorney Eric Menhart recently testified as an expert guest before the Council of the District of Columbia on the Council’s proposed Spam Deterrence Act of 2007. A copy of his testimony is available here. Menhart recommended that the proposed bill calculate damages on a per message basis, eliminating exceptions for “an established business relationship,” and including liability for “rogue” ISPs Read More

  The new front in the war on spam: text messaging to mobile phones.   While the “classic” spamming techniques via e-mail are as strong as ever, the wireless phone and the ever-increasing fascination with text messaging is accelerating the use of text spam. According to this article, consumers in the United States are expected to receive about 1.5 billion spam text messages this year, up from 1.1 Read More

  Updating a previous post in CyberLawg, the U.S. House of Representatives has easily passed a bill that would make phone numbers on the FTC’s Do Not Call list permanent. The list is available at donotcall.gov.   The ease with which this passed was somewhat surprising, but new facts appear to have contributed to its passage. First, the FTC has hired a contractor to review the registry regularly and Read More

  A new bill has been introduced in the United States House of Representatives that would amend the "Do-Not-Call" Implementation Act to eliminate the automatic removal of telephone numbers registered on the registry. The bill remains in the early stages of the legislation process.   Approximately 132 million home and mobile telephone numbers have been added to the database since its Read More

  The nation of France is leading the way in providing new methods for combating spam e-mail. The French government is sponsoring the development of an open-source toolbar for Microsfot Outlook and Mozilla Firefox that makes it easier for users to report to ISPs that spam is coming from their networks. The project, called Signal Spam, also takes into account legitimate mailing practices. If a message comes Read More

In a move that was imminent given the rise in unsolicited commercial e-mails, some internet service providers have begun to start charging for the privilege of sending e-mail. Internet service providers Comcast, Cox Communications, Road Runner and AOL will now charge legitimate mass-mailers, such as banks, inestment firms and retailers, for the privilege of delivering their legitimate e-mail messages to the ISPs’ Read More

  MySpace recently settled an anti-spam lawsuit brought against TheGlobe.com for $2.55 million. TheGlobe appears to have used the mass marketing as a last gasp attempt to survive bankruptcy, according to its recent corporate reports.   Bulk marketing practices are often seen as last ditch attempts by failing companies to right the ship. Another circumstance that tends to breed bulk marketing campaigns Read More

  Robert Alan Soloway, allegedly one of the world’s most prolific spammers, was arrested this week on a variety of charges including mail fraud, wire fraud, e-mail fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. The potential jail time for all of the charges could be 20 years or more. The arrest of Soloway is good news for legitimate marketers, Internet Service Providers and other law-abiding e-mail Read More