Yahoo reaches settlement with target of spam lawsuit

Score one for the anti-spam activists. Eric Head, charged with sending millions of spam e-mail messages in a lawsuit filed in March by Yahoo Inc., has agreed to pay Yahoo at least $100,000 and to avoid engaging in spam, Yahoo says.

Yahoo charged Head, who lives in Canada, and two members of his family in a March 9 lawsuit with violating the CAN-Spam Act, the federal law the went into effect Jan. 1. Yahoo claimed that Head’s businesses, including Gold Disk Canada Inc., Golddisk.net, Netsales Industries and Infinite Technologies World, transmitted “unauthorized, unsolicited and unwanted” commercial e-mail to Yahoo e-mail subscribers in violation of CAN-Spam. The lawsuit, filed in the Northern District of California, claimed that the Head organization sent out 94 million spam e-mail messages in January alone.

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In March, Yahoo filed its lawsuit against the Head organization simultaneously with five other lawsuits filed under CAN-Spam by other leading Internet service providers, AOL, Earthlink and Microsoft.

Yahoo said that Head has agreed to pay Yahoo “a sum in the six-figure range” and to be barred from numerous acts related to sending commercial e-mail. Yahoo said Head’s accomplices in his organization, his father, Barry Head, and his brother, Matthew Head, were released from the lawsuit without liability.

Head has also agreed to provide “reasonable” cooperation in Yahoo’s investigation and enforcement of its anti-spam efforts, Yahoo said. A lawyer for Head did not return a call for comment.