Unsolicited faxes
Excerpted from an article by Ashbel Green in the 2/5/03 Portland Oregonian (forwarded by David Allaway): LAWYER FIGHTS ILLEGAL FAXES WITH LEGAL FACTS A little advice to Oregon businesses: Quit faxing advertisements to Gresham attorney Timothy J. Vanagas. He is not afraid to sue. And the law is on his side. Federal law awards $500 to anyone who receives an unsolicited commercial fax. Oregon law adds another $200 if the recipient tells the business to stop and it doesn't. So far, Vanagas has filed three lawsuits, going after an auto dealer, a mortgage lender and even the city of Gresham over a fax about a seminar that cost $75 to attend. At this rate, he isn't going to get rich in his battle against the junk fax, but Vanagas really just wants to make a point. "You have spam on your computer. You have telemarketers calling you at home during the dinner hour. Your mail box is filled with junk mail. And there are so many things that happen like that where you feel like there is no affirmative action that you can take," he said. "It just fairly tickles me in this limited way that there is something affirmative that the involved person can do where you don't feel powerless to respond." The 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act prohibits faxes that advertise goods and services without consent of the receiver. Congress passed the law because junk faxes were paralyzing computers. The penalty for each junk fax is $500, an amount that can be tripled if the fax-sender knew about but ignored the federal law. Under a similar 1989 Oregon law, the penalty is $200, but the fax receiver can seek punitive damages. The law was challenged in 1993 by five businesses, including two from Oregon, saying it violated free speech. But a federal magistrate in Portland upheld the law. Nationally, the law was little used until 1995, when Hooter's, a restaurant chain, settled a class action for $9 million. Last year, the Dallas Cowboys paid $1.7 million to settle a class action, and a San Francisco law firm filed a $3 trillion class action against Fax.com. In Oregon, the state Department of Justice has gone after several commercial fax operations, but Vanagas said he doesn't know of any other private attorney who has used the law. That's probably because Oregon's class action law does not offer the same payoff as laws in other states. In other states, plaintiffs attorneys can win $500 per class member, which quickly gets into the millions of dollars. In Oregon, Vanagas said, individual plaintiffs can win the whole $500, but in a class action, they can recover only the cost of the fax, which Congress calculated at 7 cents. On Monday, Vanagas filed two lawsuits in Multnomah County Circuit Court, one against a mortgage lender that faxed him an ad offering to refinance his house and the other against the city of Gresham for sending him a fax about a $75 summit on "Building the East Metro Vision." Vanagas said city officials claim that their fax was not a commercial solicitation but a public service.
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