ReverseAuction has agreed to pay $1.2 million and to quit harvesting emails from eBay's site as part of a settlement agreement.
"This settlement sends a clear message that eBay will not tolerate spamming, and that we will take the necessary steps to protect the privacy of our community," said Jay Monahan, an eBay attorney.
EBay filed suit in January of this year after it discovered ReverseAuction had harvested the names, email addresses, and eBay user IDs of millions of eBay users, Monahan said.
The email eBay users were then spammed with had a subject line that tricked them into believing their eBay accounts would expire soon, Monahan said. The subject line included each user's eBay user IDs.
"We ended up getting thousands of complaints," Monahan said. "It cost (us) thousands and thousands of dollars to respond to these individuals."
As part of the settlement, ReverseAuction agreed to pay eBay $1.2 million and to quit using automated agents known as spiders to harvest email addresses from eBay's site.
EBay alleged a number of claims in the suit, including fraud, unfair competition, and trespass to chattels -- an ancient doctrine of the law defined as intentional interference with a person’s use or possession of physical possessions like objects, animals, and servers.
Harvesting users' email addresses from eBay servers was an act of trespass, said Monahan.
"In order to do this, they had to come in with a robot," he said. "The invasion was the way in which they acquired the email."
The ReverseAuction case is not the first time eBay has turned to an ancient legal theory to resolve its modern woes. The company recently scored an injunction against Bidder's Edge, an auction listing re-aggregator, on trespass grounds.
Bidder's Edge also used what Monahan called "rude robots" to cull auction listings from eBay's server. A court sided with eBay and said that, as a preliminary matter, Bidder's Edge spiders should be enjoined from crawling eBay's site.
On the same day eBay filed suit against ReverseAuction, the Federal Trade Commission did the same. The FTC's suit alleges claims similar to eBay's, but also charges ReverseAuction with invading users' privacy.
ReverseAuction did not return calls or emails for comment.
