Notorious spammer Robert Soloway will get his day in court next month when
his criminal trial kicks off in Seattle.

Soloway was arrested in May and charged with sending out tens of millions of
unsolicited messages; so many, in fact, that investigators called him the "Spam
King," and his arrest was hailed as a major blow in the fight against spam.
Many of Soloway's unsolicited messages were sent out using hacked "zombie"
computers infected with botnet software, prosecutors allege.

The United States Attorney's Office is seeking more than US$770,000 in fines,
but Soloway is also facing fraud and identity theft charges that could result
in jail time.

If U.S. attorneys can get money out of Robert Soloway, it will be a first.
In 2005 Microsoft was awarded a $7.8 million [m] judgement against the Spam
King, but it has yet to collect a penny, according to Aaron Kornblum, a senior
attorney with Microsoft.

In a May 2005 discussion group post, Soloway
correctly predicted that Microsoft would be unable to collect. "I've
been sued for hundreds of millions of dollars and have had my business running
for over 10 years without ever paying a dime regardless to the outcome of any
lawsuits," he wrote.

With Soloway now facing criminal charges under the 2003 CAN-SPAM (Controlling
the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) law, however, his
case may serve as a deterrent to other spammers, Kornblum said. "There
have not been a large number of criminal CAN-SPAM prosecutions in the U.S.,"
he said. "This is significant."

To date, Microsoft has filed 131 lawsuits against spammers in the U.S. Most
of them have ended up in a settlement or a judgement against the spammer, Kornblum
said. Of those cases, 52 remain open or have been dismissed.

"We have helped change the economics of spam and we've done that across
multiple fronts," he said. "Spammers now sit in jail."

Soloway isn't the only accused spammer going to trial in Seattle next month.
Also coming up in March is a civil case against Impulse Media Group, which is
charged by the U.S. Department of Justice with spamming computer users with
pornographic e-mails.

Many Internet users may be happy to hear about Soloway's criminal prosecution,
but law enforcement shouldn't necessarily rush into these criminal cases, said
Eric Goldman, an assistant professor with Santa Clara University School of Law
who blogs about technology
and marketing. "Spam is principally about speech and we should be very
reluctant to criminalize speech-based behavior," he said.

"There's such an antipathy towards spam that there's almost a sense that
anyone who ever engages in spam is… so evil that they should be punished,"
he added.

Goldman calls this attitude "spam exceptionalism." If people really
thought about the issues, however, they wouldn't necessarily find spam any more
invasive than other forms of advertising, like television commercials or junk
postal mail, he said.

If criminal prosecutions like Soloway's are deterring spammers, you wouldn't
know if from looking at your inbox. Security
vendor IronPort said that spam volume on the Internet was up 100 percent
in 2007, jumping to 120 billion unwanted messages per day.

"I'm not sure that we should be suppressing them from a legal standpoint,"
he said. "I’m troubled by many of the prosecutions that I've seen
of spammers."

Soloway is set to face a trial by jury on March 24 at the United States District
Court for the Western District of Washington.

IDG News Service

• Email
• Print
• Share
  • Slashdot
  • Digg
  • Stumble
  • Reddit
  • Newsvine