If the companies he is suing genuinely are spamming people they have no prior business relationship with, he is doing a service. But how often do people get truly unsolicited spam from overtly US based companies? All spam I've looked at recently has no connection to a business with any marketing model other than spam - generally sent through an open relay or compromised computer, with links with nameservers and HTTP hosted on a compromised system, and/or in China or a former USSR country. Unless you happen to know a lawyer in one of those countries, it would be difficult and prohibitively expensive to unmask their identities and still make a profit suing them.
I suspect, however, it is not genuinely unsolicited mail that he mainly goes after, but rather, solicited commercial mail which potentially fails to meet the requirements under California law. Suing companies not based in California who someone has initiated a relationship with on a technicality of Californian anti-spam law is, in my opinion, unfair - the companies had no say in the Californian law, and it is simply wrong to try to require every Internet business to comply with the laws of every jurisdiction in the world.
As with any business in the world of capitalism, the spammers are free not to send their email to people in California. The difficulty of this is immaterial, companies have to deal with the uneven landscape of state laws all the time.
I would support a regulatory regime that would require all commercial email to include the provenance of the sender's relationship to the recipient, whether first-party or third, whether the recipient's address is rented, sold, acquired via corporate acquisition, or otherwise. Also, companies would be required to retain records of recipient acquision, such that if a recipient actually did create an account or other kind of direct relationship that the sender should be able to supply proof of the existing relationship. This could be implemented as simply as retaining all outgoing registration emails.
> As with any business in the world of capitalism, the spammers are free not to send their email to people in California. The difficulty of this is immaterial, companies have to deal with the uneven landscape of state laws all the time.
Note that this isn't always true. For instance, credit card companies in the US can ignore usury laws of the state their customers reside in. Rather, the laws of the company's state are applied.
While I'm not sure if the spam I recieve is from a US company or not, I suspect some of it is. I regularly recieve unsolicited emails (which make it through my filters) trying to sell me scientific equipment, high purity materials, and other research things. I assume these are from US based companies, but I've never read through them enough to find out.
I suspect, however, it is not genuinely unsolicited mail that he mainly goes after, but rather, solicited commercial mail which potentially fails to meet the requirements under California law. Suing companies not based in California who someone has initiated a relationship with on a technicality of Californian anti-spam law is, in my opinion, unfair - the companies had no say in the Californian law, and it is simply wrong to try to require every Internet business to comply with the laws of every jurisdiction in the world.