Seattle-based attorney Brady Johnson filed Washington State’s first “anti-spam” lawsuit against WorldTouch Network Inc. in Los Angeles and the company’s owner, Christopher Lee Knight.
WorldTouch Network allegedly sells Bull’s Eye Gold, a program designed to
collect e-mail addresses and generate spam, usually unsolicited sales-related
e-mail messages.
Washington’s new anti-spam statute outlaws commercial e-mail that contains
false routing information about how it moved across the Internet, or
misleading information in its subject line. According to Johnson, most spam
falls into those categories. He said he believes WorldTouch Network’s products
do too.
“WorldTouch Network advertises Bull’s Eye Gold by repeatedly sending unsolicited e-mail advertisements that extol the program’s virtues,” he said. “They use spam to promote spam.”
Johnson represents the owner and three editors of TidBiTS, an electronic newsletter for Mac users with a circulation of 150,000. The plaintiffs received nearly 100 identical copies of the Bull’s Eye Gold advertisement since June 11, the day Washington’s anti-spam law went into effect.
According to TidBITS owner Adam Engst, WorldTouch uses randomly generated
bogus return addresses that claim to originate from large Internet service
providers run by IBM, MCI, Sprint, or AT&T. In reality, the spam is routed
through servers in Europe. In most cases, the spam contains no actual subject
line in the message header; instead it includes one in the message body where
e-mail programs don’t recognize it and thus won’t display it in a mailbox
window.
Johnson said he is seeking an injunction or court order that will force Knight
to stop spamming Washington State residents. In addition, he seeks statutory
damages of $500 per violation for each individual plaintiff and $1,000 per
violation for Engst. Total damages approach $100,000. There was no immediate
word from WorldTouch.
