Forgive Us Our Trespasses

California courts don't seem to think much of my telecom/trespass analogy from a few days back; they've ruled that blast-emailing is not trespass, in this instance with respect to a disgruntled former employee of Intel who was sending critiques of the company to his ex-colleagues en masse via the Intel email network.

Comments

[joanne]

Hamidi is an example of why your analogy doesn't work, except maybe from a tech-phobic standpoint. The more court rulings that recognize telephony and internet as something intangible -- and therefore something to be policied differently -- the better.

There's something immediatly suspicious about using obscure ninteenth century tort action to policy spam (though Hamidi wasn't exactly a spammer.) Not to mention, POPfile and MailWasher are widely (and freely) available.

Same goes for telecom and the Don't Call list. As far as policymaking goes, one can do more harm that Don't-Call, but the point is it isn't a *physical* property and regulating it as such allows for a host of potential abuses later on. And that threat is real; technology bridging telephony and the internet, like voice-over IP, may be harmed later by even the simplist current regulations.

After all, the failure to make that distiniction between tanigible and intangible goods is what made intellectual propertry law the archaic burden it is today

[Kevin Carson]

Yet another reason why the state shouldn't be intervening in problems of phone solicitation and spam. Someday, God willing, *I'LL* be a disgruntled former employee mass emailing my former co-workers. Please don't spoil it for me.

[The Lonewacko Blog]

I'm not familiar with anything that's happened regarding Hamidi in the past year or two, but this was clearly just a SLAPP suit; perhaps that had something to do with it.

[Neb Okla]

It's odd that I never see mention of the security implications of Spammers with billions of email addresses on their systems.

This means that when they get a virus that propogates through email, it might spread to more people than when it is opened by a normal user (who might only have a hundred or so addresses).

Most of the viruses I recieve come from Spammers.