Three companies and one individual were each ordered to pay $500 to Bennett Haselton, although none of these parties were represented in the small claims court. Haselton is quoted in Wired News saying, “This isn’t just to make money. If every time a spammer sent something, they got sued, it would become too expensive for spammers to spam.”
In June this year, the Washington Supreme Court unanimously upheld the constitutionality of the state's anti-spam e-mail law in America’s first case involving a state law designed to protect internet users from deceptive commercial e-mail.
Washington's law, which went into effect in June 1998, was one of the first in the nation to regulate the sending of spam. The law prohibits sending unsolicited commercial e-mail that contains misleading information in its subject line, uses a third party's domain name without permission or misrepresents the message's point of origin.
In March 2000, a county judge dismissed a case against a spammer on grounds that the state law violated the Commerce Clause of the US Constitution. The Attorney General's Office successfully appealed that ruling to the state Supreme Court. In its opinion, the Washington Supreme Court found that, "the only burden the Act places on spammers is the requirement of truthfulness, a requirement that does not burden commerce at all but actually facilitates it by eliminating fraud and deception."