July 21, 2005 | The Biz

Porn sites fight spam accusation

Most online porn companies work with thousands of individual affiliates to help them market their sites. When one of these affiliated webmasters convinces a surfer to buy a site membership he then receives a commission from the company. 

So what happens if one of those affiliates breaks the federal CAN-SPAM law by sending bulk unsolicited emails which are not marked "sexually explicit" and have no option for recipients to opt out of future e-mails? Should he be the one to take responsibility for his actions or is the company that he is affiliated with equally guilty?

That is the question to be determined in the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) latest crack down on seven adult companies connected to porn spam. According to the FTC, the porn  companies did not send e-mails directly to consumers but operated affiliate programs, "paying others to send unwanted messages to drive Internet traffic to adult Web sites."

Yet most online adult companies take a zero tolerance approach with affiliates that break anti-spam laws. TopBucks, one of the accused companies (which runs HisFirstHugeCock.com  among others), has refused to settle with the FTC. TopBuck's policy is to terminate the account, without pay, of any webmaster caught violating CAN-SPAM. The company has approximately 8000 active affiliates.

�We don�t tolerate webmasters who violate the law, and we intend to fight these accusations because it�s ridiculous to be expected to police every webmaster when we have no control over their actions,� a spokesperson for TopBucks told AVN Online.

So while the FTC says that TopBucks "pays others to send spam," TopBucks says it takes all reasonable measures to prevent spam and punishes any affiliate it catches doing so. Which view will prevail? The Department of Justice has filed suit against TopBucks on behalf of the FTC; the courts will determine the issue.  

FTC hits seven companies for spam [AVN Online]
Feds accuse firms in porn e-mail schemes [Yahoo! News]