finding *981 that after the defendant sent thousands of unsolicited email messages through Intel’s email system, “[t]he system worked as designed, delivering the messages without any physical or functional harm or disruption”
How later courts described this case
- finding *981 that after the defendant sent thousands of unsolicited email messages through Intel’s email system, “[t]he system worked as designed, delivering the messages without any physical or functional harm or disruption”
- holding that “trespass to chattels is not actionable if it does not involve actual or threatened injury” to property and the defendant’s actions did not damage or interfere with the operation of the computer systems at issue
- holding that the “mere sending” of emails does not amount to actionable trespass to a computer system in the absence of “some actual or threatened interference with the computers’ functioning”
- reversing summary judgment for plaintiff on trespass claim where plaintiff presented no evidence that defendant’s mass emails prevented plaintiff “from using its computers for any measurable length of time” or that plaintiffs “system was slowed or otherwise impaired by the burden of delivering [defendant’s electronic messages”
Written by the judges who cited it.
The opinion
KENNARD, J.—I concur.
Does a person commit the tort of trespass to chattels by making occasional personal calls to a mobile phone despite the stated objection of the person who owns the mobile phone and pays for the mobile phone service? Does it matter that the calls are not made to the mobile phone’s owner, but to another person who ordinarily uses that phone? Does it matter that the person to whom the calls are made has not objected to them? Does it matter that the calls do not damage the mobile phone or reduce in any significant way its availability or usefulness?
The majority concludes, and I agree, that using another’s equipment to communicate with a third person who is an authorized user of the equipment and who does not object to the communication is trespass to chattels only if the communications damage the equipment or in some significant way impair its usefulness or availability.
Intel Corporation has my sympathy. Unsolicited and unwanted bulk email, most of it commercial, is a serious annoyance and inconvenience for persons who communicate electronically through the Internet, and bulk e-mail that distracts employees in the workplace can adversely affect overall productivity. But, as the majority persuasively explains, to establish the tort of trespass to chattels in California, the plaintiff must prove either damage to the plaintiff’s personal property or actual or threatened impairment of the plaintiffs ability to use that property. Because plaintiff Intel has not shown that defendant Kourosh Kenneth Hamidi’s occasional bulk e-mail messages to Intel’s employees have damaged Intel’s computer system or impaired its functioning in any significant way, Intel has not established the tort of trespass to chattels.
This is not to say that Intel is helpless either practically or legally. As a practical matter, Intel need only instruct its employees to delete messages from Hamidi without reading them and to notify Hamidi to remove their workplace e-mail addresses from his mailing lists. Hamidi’s messages promised to remove recipients from the mailing list on request, and there is no *1367 evidence that Hamidi has ever failed to do so. From a legal perspective, a tort theory other than trespass to chattels may provide Intel with an effective remedy if Hamidi’s messages are defamatory or wrongfully interfere with Intel’s economic interests. (See maj. opn., ante, at p. 1347.) Additionally, the Legislature continues to study the problems caused by bulk e-mails and other dubious uses of modem communication technologies and may craft legislation that accommodates the competing concerns in these sensitive and highly complex areas.
Accordingly, I join the majority in reversing the Court of Appeal’s judgment.