The Supreme Court of California handed down its ruling in in Intel v. Hamidi today, finding for Hamidi and setting a strong limit on the grown of trespass to chattels.
Hamidi, a disgruntled ex-Intel employee and founder of FACE Intel, had been sending thousands of email messages to current Intel employees. Intel sued him, and won in lower-level courts on a theory of "trespass to chattels." That is, Hamidi, by using Intel's servers in a way Intel didn't like, had interfered with Intel's legal right to control those servers.
The California Supreme Court, though, by a vote of 4-3, would hear nothing of it. Rejecting the analogy to real property, the court said that a trespass to chattels claim on servers cannot stand where the offending communication "neither damages the recipient
computer system nor impairs its functioning." The harm Intel complained of -- lost productivity and its workers seeing unwanted messages -- was not harm to the computers.
The majority was careful to distinguish the spam and spider cases, such as Ebay v. Bidders Edge, on the grounds that there, the trespassees produced eveidence of actual disruption to their computer systems.