Giving judgment last month, Mr Justice Lewison said there was evidence that a business trading as Bizads had been offering lists of email addresses for sale.
Although Bizads claimed on its website that the owners of these addresses had agreed to receive business offers, the evidence established that this was not true.
In his defence, McDonald, of Milton Keynes, Bucks, claimed that the owners of the email addresses might have inadvertently consented to their use.
But this was "incredible", the judge said. Some of the email addresses had been set up by Microsoft as decoys in the hope of catching spammers. It was "inconceivable" that consent had been given.
Mr Justice Lewison said: "The evidence plainly establishes beyond any realistic controversy that Bizads was supplying email addresses of persons who had not consented to receiving unsolicited emails and that it was encouraging those to whom it supplied the emails to use them in order to contact the addressees."
McDonald also claimed that Bizads was operated by "somebody called Mary Ross". But there was no documentary evidence of her existence apart from the fact that the Bizads website had been registered in her name at McDonald's address.
There was an "overwhelming inference" that Mary Ross was an alias for McDonald — as was "Gary Webb", the name in which his payment arrangements were registered.
Microsoft had suffered "considerable damage to its goodwill" through unwanted emails, the judge said. If subscribers to its paying services were not protected against spam, they would be less willing to subscribe. In addition, Microsoft had to invest in additional servers to cope with the sheer volume of spam.
Granting summary judgment in favour of Microsoft, the judge said it was entitled to compensation and an injunction restraining further breaches of EU regulations.
Chris Parker, Microsoft's senior legal director in Britain, said he thought that this was the first ruling anywhere in the EU under the Privacy and Electronic Communications directive of 2003.
He added that Microsoft investigators targeted every level in the spamming chain. |
