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BobVila.com in Nation's First Anti-Spam Case

By Samuel Fineman
March 01, 2004

Through his commercial Web site, home improvement guru Bob Vila recently became the nation's first target of the new federal anti-spam law, according to attorney John L. Fallat.

Fallat filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of Foster City-based Internet Service Provider Hypertouch, Inc., alleging Sacramento-based Blue-Stream Media and Boston-based BVWebTies LLC, owner of BobVila.com, violated the Federal CAN-SPAM Act (Control- ling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003) by sending Hypertouch and its customers unwanted and unsolicited electronic mail advertisements for Bob Vila's “Home Again Newsletter.”

“The CAN-SPAM Act provides only the most minimal protections to the public,” says Hypertouch President and Founder Joe Wagner. “But BobVila.com and BlueStream Media failed to observe even those.” The suit alleges that the defendants sent spam e-mail advertisements with fraudulent headers and no legally required physical address. They also sent e-mail to randomly generated and harvested addresses, even to addresses that had been submitted to the “opted-out” links of other spam.

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