California won its first anti-spam judgment on Friday when a court fined a marketing firm $2 million for sending out millions of unsolicited e-mails telling people how to spam, the state's attorney general said.
Attorney General Bill Lockyer brought the case against PW Marketing of Los Angeles County and its owners Paul Willis and Claudia Griffin in 2002 under a 1998 state anti-spam law. The law was strengthened last month to make it easier to sue spammers. . . .
[P]W Marketing and Willis and Griffin were charged with sending out millions of e-mails advertising "how to" guides on spamming and long lists of e-mail addresses.
The judgment, which Lockyer said will be the model for future spam injunctions, forbids PW Marketing from sending unsolicited commercial e-mail, accessing computers that belong to other people without their permission and disguising its identity by sending e-mails that appear to originate from a different address.
The injunction also forbids Willis and Griffin for 10 years from owning or managing any business that advertises over the Internet.
Under the newer law, the prosecution would have been easier and the penalties greater, the article says. Read it here from Reuters via FindLaw.com.