Jeffrey Kilbride of Venice, Calif., was sentenced to more than six years and James Schaffer of Paradise Valley, Ariz., was sentenced to more than five years in prison after they were found guilty of embedding hardcore porn in mass emails, making it available and visible to anyone who opened the messages.
Adult attorney Gary Kaufman told XBIZ that the pair filed appeals to their cases Thursday to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and that he is “optimistic that our clients will be vindicated.”
“Every adult website operator in this country should be losing sleep wondering if they will be the next target of an overzealous government prosecution,” Kaufman said. “These gentlemen were convicted of obscenity based on only two photographic images that are tame compared to what is currently available on the Internet.”
Kaufman of Los Angeles-based the Kaufman Law Group represents Schaffer; Greg Piccionelli of Los Angeles Piccionelli & Sarno represents Kilbride.
Kilbride and Schaffer began their spamming operation in 2003, using international servers and mismatching "reply to" and "from" addresses, making it difficult to trace the spam emails.
The Justice Department said they registered their domains under the name of a "fictitious employee at a shell corporation" and that the two had set up in the Republic of Mauritius, another serious CAN-SPAM violation. They also used overseas banks to launder and hide money from the IRS.
Kilbride and Schaffer initially were charged in 2005. Schaffer also was charged with 2257 violations, after officials discovered he had not maintained appropriate records for the adult performers featured on Boobs.com, CumShots.com and FaceSat.com, three websites he operated overseas through The Compliance Company and Ganymede Marketing.
With the convictions, both were fined $100,000 and forced to hand over $1.1 million of their $2 million in spam profit.
They also were ordered to pay America Online $77,500 after the conglomerate claimed to have had 1.5 million customers complain about spam.
“This notice of appeal is the first step in obtaining reversal of what we believe to be wrongful convictions,” Kaufman said. “We are looking forward to having the opportunity to present our briefs to the 9th Circuit.
The 9th Circuit has not decided whether to hear the cases.