In another small victory for the fight against spamming, Microsoft has recently won a lawsuit filed in the UK. Paul Martin McDonald was selling lists of email addresses, many of which were Hotmail addresses, which earned the ire of Redmond. Since he was based in the UK, U.S. laws didn't apply, so they took the case overseas and made the claim that his activities were damaging the service:

Microsoft said that the activity breached the Privacy and Electronic Communications (EC Directive) Regulations. It argued that because a high proportion of the people receiving the emails complained about them it was suffering loss and damage to the goodwill it had as operators of Hotmail.
It doesn't specify if he will have to compensate Microsoft for the damages or how much they'd entail, but it is a clear sign of the increasing recognition as spam as more than just “Advertising”, and actually a detriment.