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Lawyers Responsible for a Key Internet Milestone: Spam

By Carolyn Elefant

Later this week the Internet will celebrate its 30th birthday, and to mark the occasion the Associated Press rounds up some of the key milestones in Web history. Not surprisingly, engineers and scientists are primarily responsible for the technological developments that helped the Internet grow from a primitive interconnection between two computers into a global, publicly accessible system. But lawyers, too, have played a key role in shaping the Internet that we know today -- by introducing the world to spam. That's right. Back in 1994, the husband-and-wife law firm of Canter & Siegel came up with what was then a novel approach to advertising their firm's immigration services. They contracted with a computer developer to create a program to generate advertising for the firm's Green Card Lottery service and to spread it to 6,000 Usenet discussion groups. Users rebelled, sending so many complaints to Canter & Siegel's Internet Service Provider that the company's servers crashed, leading the ISP to terminate Canter & Siegel's account and the Tennessee Board of Professional Responsibility to open an investigation of the pair. The firm remained unrepentant, claiming that their low cost ad generated 1,000 new clients and $100,000 in revenue. But at what...

Full post as published by Legal Blog Watch on August 31, 2009 (boomark / email).