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Court Rejects Intel Electronic Trespass Charge
NearlyHeadless writes "The California Supreme Court reversed lower court rulings that ex-Intel employee Kourosh Kenneth Hamidi committed electronic trespass by sending e-mail to Intel employees, reports the San Jose Business Journal. E-mail has the same protection as other communication, according to the court's opinion, available here (PDF link)." We've covered Hamidi's case more than once in the past.
the more cases like this the better of we are. I'm tired of big companies pressing charges on people and winning because judge and jury have no idea about anything technical... nor do they understand our future is dependant on their disicions.
Well frankly, I'm not so eager to lose rights just to fight spam. I'm happy with this court's decision.
I would say this was a victory for everyone except IBM.
Now, if this guy had been trying to sell Viagra
How this affects spam was one of the first things I thought about, as well. But from the ruling:
>nor impairs its functioning
I would argue that spam impairs my ability to use my computer - e.g. when 19 out of 20 messages are spam, and I either have to waste time getting to that one message I want to read, or miss it completely. Such an argument is easy to make, and anyone should understand it, even if they're not tech-savvy.
I suppose the difference is between the ex-employee sending one or two emails to each individual, or mailbombing their inboxes with several hundreds or thousands of messages. Which means part of the spam problem is perspective - from my point of view, I am effectively under attack when I receive a few hundred spam emails; from the point of view of each individual spammer, they're only sending me one email, so how can they be blamed for that?
Idle musings on a Monday afternoon.
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The point of the anti-spam laws is that spam does impair functionality and incur measurable damages, at least in terms of company employees' time spent messing with the junk and high-traffic mail servers which process tons of the stuff.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Yeah, except it's a bad analogy. It was more like having your house number posted and then someone sending mail to it. There was no intrusion, just mail sent.
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"Electronic tresspass," my ass.
It sounds from the case like Hamidi wouldn't stop emailing Intel employees even after the company asked him to stop.
When Intel took measures to block Hamidi from the servers, and Hamidi continued to find a way around them, the appropriate crime to charge him with is "Harrassment."
IANAL, but that would have been a HELL of alot easier to prove than "electronic tresspass" and probably wouldn't have ended up on the front page of Slashdot.
-- Funksaw
Uh, that is trespassing. You should get mad if someone does that. (well, I don't know about the car, but it certainly applies to the house). There's a difference between trespassing and breaking-and-entering. Even if there's no fences or locks or doors, it's still trespassing.
A better analogy would be you putting a fence around your yard, with a big sign that says no trespassing, and then getting upset when the mailman opens your gate, walks up to your front door, and puts a letter in the mail slot. That's what Intel was trying to argue, and rightly, they were told to get bent. Now, if it's not the mailman, but Alan Ralsky walking up your path with a 55 gallon drum full of penis enlargment pills, then that will (hopefully) be a different story.
There is no sig, there is only Zuul.
I disagree. In the ruling the statement was made that the e-mails were, "an electronic communication that neither damages the recipient computer system nor impairs its functioning." The quantity of e-mail sent by spammers can definitely slow down networks, gum up hard disks, and in general cost companies money. This guy was not spamming in the modern sense of the word, and the California court was very choosy with their decision. Spammers will have no luck using this to defend their actions in lawsuits.
--Chag
To paraphrase your concept into the real world:
Not really. On the all the doors of the offices of our business, we have these things called locks that we can use to restrict who can or can't go through a certain door, although why should our company have to go through the trouble of using keys and locking doors just because one person insists on going places he shouldn't?
Duh. Think about it.
You just *GAVE UP* rights with this.
What happened to "My server, my rules"?
hell was Intel thinking?
Trespass to chattels?
They basically argued that if I fire someone and that person emails his friend/coworker, it is as if that person had keyed my car on the way out.
No Intel, you may not use the courts to silence dissent... do not pass go, do not collect $200.
Your server, your firewall rules. However, if a message properly formated (with a truthful header, and no destructive code of any kind) and it gets past your rule set, that's your fault. You can't let the message through, and then decide you didn't like what it said.
Moral of the story, block the home address of a fired employee if you know it...
Exactly. You shouldn't be to have a wide open mail server, and then elect when to sue people because you didn't like the contents of their non-commercial email.
That would let people set up mail servers as traps. As soon as you get your victim to send an email to the server, you could sue them for electronic trespass.
Luckily, this court ruling doesn't allow for that.
"Giving up free speech to fight spam would be a terrible long term trade-off."
Just because you have a right to "free" speech doesn't mean you have a right to force me to pay for your soapbox. It's not that kind of "free."
As for Intel reserving the right to restrict access I don't see anyone denying them that right. They are free to block email addresses or take whatever other measures them deem appropriate. Afterall, if they really objected to it they could simply refuse all incoming external emails or even put in a content filter if they could make one complex enough to catch any Intel based criticism.
All in all I'm amazed that all the courts didn't agree. Speaking as a European isn't one of the major points of the American constitution freedom of speech? (at least that's what you guys keep telling us all the time!) The guy didn't cause any damage and even unsubscribed people who asked to be removed. If he was lying then Intel should have sued him for slander: the fact that they didn't only lends credence to his complaints.
Here is one very informative excerpt:
and another:
So in short, the guy can be sued for those emails, but not on the basis of some "damage" they cause the company mail servers...
This guy was not spamming in the modern sense of the word.
You obviously have a bizarre definition of spam. It was unsolicited. It was bulk. It was email. Hence it was spam.