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August 9, 2004 3:54 AM PDT
FTC squashes firm's pop-up ads
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> applications to freeze, and some computers to crash.
The sending of one message in pop-up window to one recipient (or few) might be completely legal, but the sending of millions is different: one can expect things to go go wrong, and when the same action is repeated millions of times, one can be sure that what can go wrong will go wrong, not because it's a nice cliche, but because staistics can be used to predict what precentage of these millions of times an action is repeated would cause different kinds of complications, and the damage can be assessed in advance. So the cummulative damages caused by openning millions of pop-up windows in random situations could be estimated in advance, and the company that did it should be accountable.
This logic can be applied in lots of other situations, and I don't see it done enough. In many cases it should be taken into account when deciding on legal responsibility/liability. For instance, a spam run of 50,000,000 messages can be expected to cause a few hundred thousand mailboxes to go over quota. A single sender sending a single message also has a certain low probability of being the last message causing the recipient's mailbox to overflow, but for a single sender it's a very low probability. For the spammer it's a certainty that a few tens or hundred thousand recipients would realy lose legitimate mail whose storage space was occupied by spam. So spammers should be held accountable for these damages, that are predictable.