More on Intel v. Hamidi

The case of Intel v. Hamidi has been going on for a few years now, and it's now reached the California Supreme Court. Hamidi is an ex-Intel employee with a grievance against the company who sent several mass-emails to most of Intel's staff. Intel attempted to block him from sending email via technical measures, and when that failed filed suit against him claiming that he was causing some harm to their property (company mail servers and computers) - there's an ancient legal concept called "trespass to chattels" which Intel is attempting to use in their case. Now, in real-dollar terms, Intel has suffered very little - a few megabytes of email more or less is a miniscule cost in terms of computer wear and tear, indeed, too small to measure (Intel is not alleging that Hamidi sent any sort of mail-bomb or that his emails caused damage). So the case comes down to an unsettled legal point: if someone has made some use of your electronic equipment, which you may not have desired but which has not damaged your property nor deprived you of its use, do you have a legal cause of action against them?

Comments

Court on spam versus "a few unwanted e-mails"

[Seth Finkelstein]

Again, many of the issues being discussed in these threads have been addressed in the appeals court decision. Regarding the idea of using email as it was intended, this is very relevant:
(emphasis added below)

Hamidi insists Intel's act of connecting itself (and thus, its employees) to the Internet and giving its employees e-mail addresses makes Intel's e-mails a public forum. By the same reasoning, connecting one's realty to the general system of roads invites demonstrators to use the property as a public forum and buying a telephone is an invitation to receive thousands of unwanted calls. That is not the law. (CompuServe, supra, 962 F.Supp. at p. 1024; Cyber Promotions, supra, 948 F.Supp. at p. 442.) Intel is as much entitled to control its e-mail system as it is to guard its factories and hallways. No citizen has the general right to enter a private business and pester an employee trying to work. It may be a few unwanted e-mails would not be sufficient to trigger a court's equity powers. Indeed, such may be an inevitable, though regrettable, fact of modern life, like unwelcome junk mail and telephone solicitations. (See Cyber Promotions, Inc. v. Apex Global Information Svcs., Inc. (E.D.Pa. 1997) 1997 WL 634384, p. *3 [bulk e-mail "annoying and intrusive"].) However, the massive size of Hamidi's campaign caused Intel much trouble , not the least of which was caused by the lost time of each employee who had to read or delete an unwanted message, either out of fear of a virus or a lack of desire to communicate with Hamidi. As we pointed out in another case, "When a camel's back is broken we need not weigh each straw in its load to see which one could have done the deed." (Woodland Joint Unified School Dist. v. Commission on Professional Competence (1992) 2 Cal.App.4th 1429, 1457.)

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