Adrian Paris, the man accused of spamming a quarter of a million people using a Virgin Net email account (CI no 3644) has settled out of court, paying Virgin 5,000 pounds ($7,950) in damages and making a non-spam promise. The ISP said it regretted the fact that it did not get the chance to set an anti-spam legal precedent in the UK courts, but it had had no choice but to accept the settlement under new civil procedure rules. Virgin had sued Paris, who traded under the name ProPhoto UK, for breach of contract and trespass, after he sent out 250,000 unsolicited emails on a number of occasions in late 1998 and early 1999. This succeeded in getting Virgin Net ‘black-holed’, banned from sending email to accounts at other ISPs, by an ISP association. The trespass suit would have been the first of its kind in the British courts.
