Connecticut Spam Lawyers

Pornographic Spam Creates Nightmare for Hispanic Business

STAMFORD, Conn The scope of sexual harassment now contains a wide variety of sources under Title VII, including e-mail, spam, instant messaging, and other electronic formats. This could have far- reaching consequences for Hispanic businesses that have yet to update policies regarding such activity or install appropriate filtering devices.

"The law provides that as soon as pornographic material enters a company's network, the company may be deemed to 'possess it or know about it,' and therefore, that company must act," said Mary Gambardella, a litigator with the employment law firm Epstein Becker & Green, P.C. and member of the EBG Hispanic Business Group. "Ignorance is not a valid excuse and does not hold up in court -- nor can a company necessarily defend itself by blaming its employees for such material."

A company must make a "reasonable effort" to curtail spam, and this requires a potentially costly, technological solution. E-mail filters are often effective, but may also reject legitimate messages. This risk can be reduced to a certain extent by fine-tuning, but there is always the chance that vital information could be bounced.

Some software companies involved in anti-spam control predict that pornographic solicitations in spam e-mail represent the fastest-growing category of unwanted e-mail advertising. The percentage has doubled over recent years.

Even reputable sites -- such as vendors, company home pages, forums, and bulletin boards -- make deals with advertisers to turn a profit on hits. It is easily possible that someone along the chain is being unscrupulous and selling addresses to a mass-mailer who specializes in pornographic spam.

Legal experts predict that the combination of lucrative damages and steadily increasing volume of spam will cause an inevitable rise in lawsuits, particularly in relation to pornographic spam existing on workplace networks.

Another, more treatable problem is in-house letter writing that may accidentally contain offensive material, as a result of poorly trained workers who may not know what they are doing or the severe repercussions of even simple jokes.

"In the future, it is plausible that the business world might standardize e-mail hygiene and software will be developed that can tell letter-writers whether their message is clean -- like spell-check for offensiveness," said Gambardella. "But for now, the best way to deal with the problem is a comprehensive training policy that informs employees they are being watched, to stay clean, and to err on the side of caution."

However, as it is still early in the litigation process and precedents are few, juries must still decide what constitutes a company's "reasonable effort" to block offensive electronic communications.

A notable exception is the discovery of child pornography on IT systems. If a company comes into contact with such images, they should contact their local field office of the FBI at once, and assist them with any efforts to track and prosecute such offenses.

Epstein Becker & Green, P.C. is a general practice law firm with more than 350 attorneys practicing in eleven offices throughout the U.S. -- Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Newark, San Francisco, Stamford, and Washington, D.C. -- and affiliations worldwide.

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