Man wins spam lawsuit

Spammers beware! In what could be a landmark decision, a UK court has ordered in favour of the defendant Nigel Roberts who had sued Media Logistics for sending unsolicited commercial email into his account. The defendant claimed that he received upto 300 messages per day, which required him to dedicate time and money to filter the junk from genuine mail.

As users of email on the Internet are aware, unsolicited commercial email, commonly referred to as "spam", is a major problem haunting their inboxes. An estimated 65 percent of global e-mail traffic is attributed to spam alone, causing billions of dollars worth of damages in manhours and CPU cycles to process and filter them. Although most email accounts offer spam protection, spammers have always been staying one step ahead.

The European Union's 2002 Directive on Privacy and Telecommunications gives everyone the right to seek damages against originators of unwanted email, fax or text messages. This court ruling ordered the plaintiff to pay �300, since the defendant had claimed only that amount to qualify it as a small claim.

If a similar law is passed in the major countries across the world, the problem of spam may be reduced by a significant amount. However,there might be legal glitches about the applicability of a country's law if either the defendant or the plaintiff is from another country. In Nigel Roberts' case, both of them were from UK.