Facebook claims victory in spamming dispute
Facebook has been awarded $3 million in damages after a five-year battle with a website which it claimed unfairly violated copyright and spamming laws.
The social media site accused Power Ventures Inc. (PV) and its website power.com of collecting user information and using it to send more than 60,000 “unsolicited and deceptive” messages via Facebook’s servers.
Facebook claimed the actions were violations of the CAN-SPAM Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
According to the initial complaint, first filed in 2008, PV “accessed the Facebook website in violation of Facebook’s terms of use.”
It adds that when Facebook tried to stop the unauthorised access, PV circumvented technical barriers.
Power.com originally launched in November 2008 and claimed it enabled users to collect data about themselves which is otherwise spread across social networks and messaging services.
As part of a new campaign, the website offered its users the chance to win $100 if they invited a certain number of people to join.
The court heard that users were given a list of Facebook friends to send invitations to and that power.com then sent thousands of spam messages to their accounts via the social networking site, claiming to be from @facebookmail.com.
But Facebook branded the practice deceptive because the messages did “not properly identify the initiators.”
Following a lengthy dispute the court eventually awarded $3m dollars to Facebook on September 25.
Issuing her ruling in a summary judgement at the US District Court for the Northern District of California, Judge Lucy Koh ruled that the defendants had “repeatedly changed its IP address in order to circumvent technical barriers Facebook had installed, and used that information to cause Facebook's servers to send spam e-mails to Facebook users.”
“This court has already determined that Facebook has shown that it was ‘adversely affected’ by the defendants’ actions,” Koh added.
The order also comes with a permanent injunction against PV and its chief executive Steve Vachani, meaning subsidiary or associated companies are barred from similar practices, and that it must destroy any Facebook data it obtained.
Facebook is the world’s most popular social networking site and currently has more than 1 billion registered users.
