In addition, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled that the defendants are forbidden to access the social nwetworking website, no matter the reason.
Facebook’s award is the largest judgment in history for an action brought under Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-SPAM).. The previous record was held by MySpace, which was awarded $230 million in a spam lawsuit against Sanford Wallace and Walter Rines.
However, Facebook’s victory is most likely to remain mostly symbolic:
“Does Facebook expect to quickly collect $873 million and share the proceeds in some way with our users? Alas, no,” writes director of security Max Kelly on the Facebook blog. “It’s unlikely that Geurbez and Atlantis Blue Capital could ever honor the judgment rendered against them (though we will certainly collect everything we can). But we are confident that this award represents a powerful deterrent to anyone and everyone who would seek to abuse Facebook and its users.”
All in all, spammers lost the round. Facebook is happy for the time being, until another spammer will hit it hard. And he will, no doubts about it.