Kodak pays up. A digital photo-sharing service connected with the Eastman Kodak Co. opted to settle and pay for roughly $27,000 in penalty for violating a U.S. Law aimed at lessening and completely eradicating spam mail. Kodak Imaging Network, formerly known as Ofoto Inc., allegedly sent spam emails to two million recipients without giving them a way to opt out of future messages. And now they just chose to pay the price.

U.S. Law prohibits false or misleading headers on e-mails and requires commercial e-mailers to give recipients an option to opt out of the solicitation. According to a Kodak repspresentative, "this incident, which took place over a year and half ago, was a simple technical malfunction that caused the customary text to be removed from the e-mail...We identified the problem, took steps to correct it and are confident it won't happen again."
 

The Kodak Imaging Network lets consumers upload and share digital photographs and buy photo books, cards, coffee mugs and other products. And although $27K is merely peanuts to a multi-billion company like Kodak, let this incident be a lesson to spammers everywhere so that they could stop flooding our emails with useless stuff.