Axed Intel Man Loses E-Mail
Axed Intel Man Loses E-Mail Case
Kourosh Kenneth Hamidi remains barred from targeting Intel employees with bulk e-mail. A California appeals court this week ruled against Hamidi, who was fired by the computer chip giant -- then replied by airing his grievances in an e-mail campaign that targeted up to 35,000 Intel employees at a time. In a split decision on Monday, the state appeals court upheld a lower court's decision against Hamidi, saying his avalanche of angry e-mail was equivalent to trespassing. "Hamidi's conduct was trespassory," the 2-1 majority ruled. "(Intel) showed he was disrupting its business by using its property and therefore is entitled to injunctive relief based on a theory of trespass to chattels." Many courts have ruled that unsolicited commercial e-mail is trespass. It's the legal club that large companies such as AOL Time Warner have used to thwack spammers when their e-mail snarls servers and eats disk space. But Hamidi is engaged in political -- or at least anti-Intel -- speech, not commercial activity.
The majority got it wrong.
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