Canadian firm fined $1.1m for breaching anti-spam law

First success story for long-awaited CASL.

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), the agency responsible for enforcing Canada’s anti-spam law (CASL) has issued a $1.1m dollar fine to

Compu-Finder

, a Morin-Heights, Quebec-based firm, for violating the law.

Anti-spam legislation plays an important if usually fairly invisible role in the fight against spam. It might not help much against the majority of spammers, who are breaking the law in various other ways anyway (for instance by using botnets, or selling illegal goods), but it does stop legitimate companies from making the situation far worse.

Canada was relatively late to the party when it came to anti-spam legislation, but the CASL has been praised by many in the anti-spam community. Not only is it much stricter than the US equivalent, but many also expect it to have implications for email senders in the United States, almost all of whom have clients north of the border as well.

Writing about the CASL

for

Virus Bulletin

in March 2011, John Levine, one of the people who was involved in the development of the law, wrote:

Although Canadian law clearly does not apply in the US, the economies of the two countries are so intertwined that all but the smallest US companies do business in Canada. Their internets are equally intertwined.

More on the fine against

Compu-Finder

can be found at

CAUCE


here

. Details on the CASL itself, including helpful advice on how to comply with the law, can be found

here

.

Posted on 06 March 2015 by

Martijn Grooten