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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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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...