Could there be a lawsuit against actionnetwork.org for sending unstoppable spam? actionnetwork.org is a mass-email tool for politics. Once a user has signed up for ANY campaign newsletter that is built on actionnetwork, all other campaigns on actionnetwork are free to spam the user. There is no way to unsubscribe from all actionnetwork emails. They will only let you unsubscribe from one newsletter at a time - and there are thousands. Is this illegal in the US? Can they be sued?
Such a lawsuit will fail The CAN-SPAM act applies to commercial emails. The emails you describe are political emails and outside its jurisdiction. All you can do is tune your junk mail filter.
Just the email in such a list is annoying but not really concerning. There are millions of people who put their email into publicly available contact data, and after a couple of years of use any email is going to be exposed some way. That's why websites use passwords in addition to just the email and why mail programs have spam filters. Your email was probably not used to sign up anywhere. Instead, spammers pretend that you signed up to slow attempts to prosecute them. A bit of a joke, really, considering how hard it is to prosecute spammers. The valid/invalid remark is used to facilitate spamming, no need to send mails to long-inactive addresses. More concerning than a 'leak' of your email would be a leak of your email plus password. (Such things also happen, and they are a reason why one should use different passwords and 2FA/MFA on important sites.) If it is just the email, see my first bullet point. There is a significant likelihood that the 'website owner' you think you identified is another victim of the address trader. Getting to the real culprit will require significant forensic effort. That effort is unlikely to happen for just emails.
Given a large database of email addresses that you can't prove have given consent to receive email, the only legal thing to do with it, is to (securely) delete it. (I am going to switch your question about a larger company to a bank: in the UK, big pharma is forbidden from advertising to individuals.) In principle the rules are the same for a huge bank and everything down to a self-employed plumber. In practice the plumber will be told "don't do that again" rather than fined. This case was treated under the Data Protection Act, which has a maximum fine of £500,000&nbsp;&ndash; so a big bank would probably have been fined more, but not necessarily much more. Under GDPR, fines are related to turnover, so the fine would be a lot bigger for a large bank. The incident is a year old now. Details here.
Is it illegal to ask a company for money in exchange for information on a bug in their software/website? That in itself is legal. Indeed, the company would incur unjust enrichment if it coerced you to disclose your discovery for free. Only if you threatened the company to divulge to others your discovery unless the company pays you, it would be illegal and trigger charges such as extortion (likewise, legislations outlaw the unjustified delivery of programs or instructions for hacking a software/network/etc., although this goes beyond your actual question). Can the company take legal action against me? That seems doubtful, futile, and it could backfire (please note I have not done any research on legal precedents about this). Although the terms and conditions of the website or the End User License Agreement (EULA) of software might prohibit you to reverse engineer (RE)/decompile/etc. the application, anti-RE clauses are unenforceable and the remedies therefor are indeterminate because the sole act of conducting reverse engineering does not subject the company (or third parties) to any losses. The company's decision to take legal action for your discovery could backfire from two standpoints. First, it calls attention to the fact that the software at issue is defective and unsafe. And second, the bug is likely to be detected by someone else anyway, thereby potentially compromising customers' systems.
No enforceable contract can contain illegal clauses and work Contracts can not remove some rights and never can bypass obligations. Talking to the police at times is a requirement by law, as is taking to the labor board. Responding to a subpoena is legally forced by the court. An NDA might limit the amount what you can say, and a contract might limit who you can sue, but can not ban you from suing at all. In germany, a contract that tries to curtail such requirements would be Sittenwidrig and make all clauses that try to limit the rights fully Void and nill ab initio - in fact, it can be used as evidence against the drafting party that they tried to do so. So to stay legal and keep the clause working in the limited fashion where it is not demanded, the clause cuts the contract to explicitly exclude such situations.
Can't we get a legal action about AdBlocker as web masters? No. I assume that by "web master" you mean a server admin who contracts with entities which are seeking to advertise their goods and services. An advertiser pays the server to transmit (or send(), in terms of a socket API) certain content to whoever submits a GET or POST request ("the client"). The scope of the contract ends there, and the end consumer or client is not a party to that contract. Any point beyond the server admin's routers, it is perfectly lawful for end users to run some program on the client side where the purpose of that program is to (1) parse any packets received in the client socket, (2) filter out some of it, (3) and forward the rest to a browser. Bringing legal action against AdBlocker would be somewhat akin to suing producers of TV remote controls under the allegation that the mute button functionality blocks advertisement content.
it would violate law? It would be very dependent of what your jurisdiction is and what the software does. I would expect most software that would be lawful to install at your home would be lawful to install at your company, but there may be exceptions. To put an hyperbolic example, if you work at the CIA and you install some remote access software that allows you to access your workstation from a non-secure PC through non-secure methods, I am pretty sure that would be illegal, even if you had the best of intentions. A recent scenario taken from real life involves some members an organization who are required to use official e-mail servers for FOIA purposes setting up their own private mail servers. Of course, YMMV. can I purchase it for myself, and then use at workplace Even if the software is legal it does not mean that it is ok to use it at the workplace. Most business have rules about what software may be installed in the PCs, who may install it and how to manage it. Your software could introduce security vulnerabilities that your IT team may need to be aware of, or incompatibilities with other software. It may introduce legal liabilities (you install a "home edition" licence in a corporate environment where that licence is invalid). Your company may discipline you if you breaking those guidelines and install software without authorization, even if there is no harm for them for this action. On top of that, if your actions cause some damage to the company, it can sue you to get you to pay for those damages. Before taking any action you should inquiry about your company's IT policy and, if your company does not have one or if the policy is not clear about allowing you to install the software, ask the people in charge (preferably in writting).
No. This would not be illegal. There is considerable case law holding that a mere link to a website is not itself actionable, either civilly or criminally, for wrongdoing by the operator of the destination site. This said, even though it would not be a breach of copyright, per se, in some circumstances one could imagine the link, together with other actions to give the link more context and substance (e.g. a revenue sharing agreement with the illegal website operator based upon clicks referred from your site) to support a claim of civil conspiracy to violate copyright laws, or even a criminal conspiracy to do so. But, it would be very hard to make out a civil or criminal conspiracy claim against someone who maintained a &quot;warning&quot; site. Similarly, it would not be actionable to have a webpage that linked to a website that used to be legitimate when the webpage was set up, if the link then rotted and the site at that address was replaced by a website that streamed videos illegally or promoted child pornography, without your knowledge.