Ignorance is no defense

A lawyer in Oldsmar Florida is suing a Restaurant owner over Faxes that have been sent out.

OLDSMAR - A sandwich shop manager contends he was only trying to clear some old customers out of his fax machine's speed dial when he accidentally started sending his daily menu specials to a Tampa law office.

The lawyer argues he became fed up with the unsolicited faxes crowding out legitimate correspondence and wasting paper and toner, so he asked a colleague to put a stop to them.

Now, the two are squaring off in small claims court over a law designed to punish those who engage in what has come to be known as "fax blasting."

Ever since I got DSL, I been getting junk faxes at least twice a week. See I have an independent phone line for my computer and fax.

Every one of these faxes are either for insurance or a mortgage. These faxers are bright, they don't supply anything but a toll free number and no name. Probably as legit as a three dollar bill since they won't name themselves because they're breaking the law.

So this year, Ebsary said, he contacted a lawyer with expertise in a law that makes it illegal to fax business advertisements to anyone who is not a customer or has not given written permission to do so.

The law allows victims of fax blasting to collect up to $1,500 in fines per faxed page and is intended to protect recipients from having to pay for unwanted advertisements, Clearwater civil litigation attorney James Thomas said.

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Thomas filed a lawsuit on behalf of Ebsary in February against the Twins Luncheon restaurant in Oldsmar. The lawsuit seeks between $5,000 and $15,000 in compensation for 34 unsolicited faxes sent to Ebsary's office, some after Twins Luncheon was notified by certified mail that the practice was illegal, according to court records.

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Twins Luncheon manager Mike Palazzolo, and the owner, his uncle, Ron Palazzolo, said the $7,500 figure they were offered to settle the matter is anything but reasonable.

If its unreasonable, I'd be more careful about who I send faxes to.

Mike Palazzolo said he routinely faxes his daily special to regular customers. When a couple of them asked to be taken off his mailing list this year, the manager said he was unable to remove the numbers from his fax machine's speed dialer and instead entered a long series of identical digits in their place. He assumed those numbers would be meaningless, but they turned out to be Ebsary's fax number.

When Thomas sent the registered letter Feb. 16 warning of the impending lawsuit, Mike Palazzolo said he immediately called Thomas' law office to ask what number he should remove from the speed dialer.

The number Palazzolo said he was given did not match anything on his machine. He said he finally figured out which number was Ebsary's about the time the lawsuit was filed Feb. 24.

Ronald Palazzolo said a simple telephone call with the correct number would have resolved the matter the first day Ebsary received one of his nephew's faxes.

"If they had just given us the right number, we would have taken it off," the elder Palazzolo said. "Why do they have to make such a big production out of it? We are a small business.".

Sorry Mr. Palazzolo, you're mistaken. Once the fax was sent, you were liable.

Junk faxes like junk phone calls are annoying. Laws were put into effect to protect consumers from these annoyances. Time to pay up Mr. Palazzolo.

Isn't it weird TFM is agreeing with a lawyer? Maybe I need to get some sleep.

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