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Air America in Hot Water After Auctioning Off Listeners' E-mail Addresses

by Terrence O'Brien on March 26, 2010 at 05:40 PM

air america auctions off private e-mail list
Liberal talk radio station Air America has had nothing but trouble since it arrived on the scene in 2004. The station was meant to be the progressive answer to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and other conservative radio stars. Yet, either progressives aren't as interested in listening to hyperbolic affirmations of their points of view, or liberals (outside of Michael Moore) just don't know how to craft an entertaining piece of political programing. By 2006, it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, only to be completely shutdown in January 2010 due to a lack of funds.

As part of shuttering its doors for good, Air America was forced to liquidate all of its assets and auction off any potentially valuable property. One of the things that found its way to the auction block, under the guise of intellectual property, was the company's e-mail list. The sale of its listeners' e-mail addresses is troublesome not just because we honestly expected more of Air America, but because it might not even be legal.

Admittedly neither we, nor the folks at Geekosystem who dug this up, are legal scholars. But the EULA from the mailing list sign up page (which can still be found through the magic of Google Cache) reads:
Your e-mail address will be used only by Air America for the distribution of the newsletter and any promotions or marketing that we feel may be of interest to you and will not be divulged to any third party, except as required by court order.
That seems pretty clear -- Air America will never hand your e-mail address over to a third party unless required by law. Again, we're not experts, but we're pretty sure there is nothing about handing over e-mail addresses under Chapter 7 Bankruptcy code.

Gawker located the relevant entry in the auction catalog which you can see here. We can only hope that whoever purchased the mailing list (the auction went off Thursday morning) plans to simply destroy it for the good of humanity. But we can't help but feel that Glenn Beck probably put a bid in on it. Yikes. [From: Geekosystem and Gawker]

Tags: air america, AirAmerica, email, law, mailing list, MailingList, politics, privacy, radio, talk radio, talk show, TalkRadio, TalkShow, top

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