August 23, 2002 5:39 AM PDT
"Junk fax" lawsuits seek $2.2 trillion
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The suits, filed in both California state and federal court, seek class action status and punitive damages against privately held Fax.com and its telecommunications provider, Cox Business Services, as well as Fax.com's advertisers.
"The right to free speech stops at the entrance to my house. You are not allowed to invade my privacy and to use my resources to send your message," said Steve Kirsch, a longtime Internet entrepreneur and philanthropist who announced the lawsuits on Thursday.
The lawsuits accuse all the named companies of violating federal laws prohibiting "junk" faxes--unsolicited advertisements or announcements that "broadcast" to millions of personal, corporate and government facsimile machines.
Fax.com, in a statement, rejected the lawsuits as "unfounded and absurd" and said it had the constitutional right to advertise by fax.
But in a decision earlier this month, the Federal Communications Commission proposed fining Fax.com $5.38 million for sending unsolicited advertisements by fax, the largest fine ever proposed for such a violation.
Lawyers in the California lawsuits said they would seek a minimum statutory remedy of $500 per fax from every advertiser who used Fax.com to send out unsolicited advertisements over the past four years.
"We believe that there are companies with substantial assets in this group. We will seek treble damages of $1,500 per unsolicited fax from Fax.com and Cox Communications," Kirsch said in a statement.
Fax.com's president, Kevin Katz, said the suit was aimed at intimidating his company's customers--many of whom are small-business owners who rely on faxing as an affordable and effective method of advertising. He also said the suits ignored the public service Fax.com performs by mass-faxing missing-children alerts.
"I am dismayed by the outrageous charges leveled in the suit," Katz said. "To claim that a single fax endangers lives is bizarre."
Officials at Cox Communications, the parent of Cox Business Services, did not return calls seeking comment Thursday.
"War dialing"
The lawsuits were announced at a news conference at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, Calif., where officials said they had also been bombarded with junk fax advertisements sent by computer "war dialing" programs that can target numerous facsimile machines simultaneously.
"We have between 80 and 100 different fax machines in the hospital. In one fax machine which we monitored for a period of about four months, we received over 500 junk faxes," said Mark Zielazinski, the hospital's chief information officer.
Kirsch, who founded Infoseek before it was acquired by Walt Disney, and now heads Propel Software, has launched a Web site to tell people how to get off fax marketers' lists.
Story Copyright © 2002 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.
