In Yahoo! Inc. v. Xyz Cos., 2011 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 139848 (S.D.N.Y. 2011), Yahoo! alleged that the defendant sent hoax emails using the Yahoo! name and mark notifying the individuals that they had won a lottery. In all, 11,660,790 emails were estimated to have been sent. A default judgement was entered for Yahoo! after a finding of violations of the CAN-SPAM Act and trademark counterfeiting, awarding damages of $610,039,500 plus attorneys' fees.
The CAN-SPAM Act, 15 U.S.C. § 7701. et seq. allows liability where an e-mail contains headings that are misleading, does not contain an unsubscribe feature, and is not clearly identified as an advertisement.
Yahoo! originally requested the statutory maximum of $100 per violation of CAN-SPAM ($100 per e-mail) and trebling because the act was willful for a total of approximately $3.5 billion. However, the court found $50 per violation sufficient and trebling unnecessary because of the large amount of the award.
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