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Lassiter, I agree - it isn't just putting "do not spam" in the ToS, but also actively monitoring ALL refering traffic and looking for the patterns of spam and such (like looking for heavy traffic from a redirect only page, newly registered domains, and such. Plus also taking active steps to not only kill the accounts, but to stop taking the traffic.
No matter what, the internet cannot be held to a higher standard than real life - affiliates and resellers of all sorts of products do very deceptive things in their marketing, it is the wise company that distances themselves from this stuff ASAP and stops doing business entirely with the crooks.
It will always come down to "did you do enough" and "did you really try". In the current case, I think the feds are trying to show that the left and right hands (and the other hands, for that matter) all knew what was going on, and as such, neither the sponsor, the network, nor the mailer themselves took action to stop the non-compliant mailings. That is the sort of thing they are looking for.
NOTE: The boys from e-piccash might want to pay attention to this case, their epicnutz domain is hitting me hard, like an elephant with stomache problems. Lame ass "it's an affiliate" answers just don't cut the mustard.
Alex
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