America Online on Monday declared victory in court against three junk-email firms. At the same time, the world's largest online service filed nine new lawsuits against spammers in five states -- the first time it has filed suits outside of its home state of Virginia.
"The idea is to make it more difficult to send junk email," said America Online associate general counsel Randall Boe. "It's to persuade people that it is not a legitimate activity and to discourage people from starting."
In the courtroom victories, judges awarded AOL substantial, but unspecified, monetary damages.
The defendants were LCGM Inc. of Madison Heights, Michigan, Prime Data Systems of Bowling Green, Kentucky, and IMS of Knoxville, Tennessee.
LCGM and Prime Data were both ordered to pay AOL damages and costs for sending millions of pieces of junk email to members.
"This is proof yet again that there is a quantifiable cost of spam and that it has the potential to really damage a network," said John Mozena, spokesman for the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email. "It shows that AOL thinks it is cost-effective to spend money on lawyers, rather than just letting people spam their members."
The cost of spamming directly affects investments in servers and network equipment required to handle the extra traffic of spam, Boe said.
"The numbers are staggering in terms of how much money spam is costing them in terms of network capacity," Mozena agreed. The totals can be in the eight-figure range for big companies, he said.
Over the last 12 months, AOL filed 17 suits against alleged spammers, including the nine new cases. The company said it won favorable judgments or out-of-court settlements in six of the cases so far. The rest are either pending or have just been filed.
America Online prides itself as an active Internet service provider in the fight against spam. "We are in this for as long as it takes," said Boe.
