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camwynbut once in a while they print an article that has to do with IT and law, and I stop to have a look. This week's issue (July 7, 2003) featured the headline: Who Owns Your E-Mail? Court decision may make it harder to fight spam. Naturally, I had to have a look.
The case in question is about a disgruntled former Intel employee named Ken Hamidi who, unlike some disgruntled people I could mention, did not shoot anyone. What he did do was send E-mails - long ones - from multiple IP addresses to something like thirty five thousand Intel employees. Naturally, Intel went berserk and brought the man to court.
The California Supreme Court came through with a ruling on it last week. It was kind of a mixed ruling. Ken's messages criticized Intel's employment practices; he argued that they constituted free speech under the First Amendment. The court did not particularly agree, but they did note that Intel seemed to be judging the mailings differently from mass commercial mailings based on the fact that they had critical content and opinions. They said Intel was more complaining about the contents than the functioning of the e-mail system and that Intel did not take economic harm in this particular case, and that the messages didn't cause damage to the e-mail system "any more than the personal distress caused by reading an unpleasant letter would be an injury to the recipient's mailbox".
I'm not sure how far I agree with that, but then, I don't have the facts. I don't know what Intel's systems are like, what the messages were like, why Ken felt he was justified in bombarding people he didn't know with messages saying in essence 'your boss and everyone above your boss is eeeevil', or any of it. What caught my attention was the Court's statement that Intel didn't take economic harm from this, because - and this is now a direct quote from page 26 of this particular Information Week issue - "the court ruled Intel couldn't claim a property right to employees' time".
I had to stop and stare at that statement for a while. And then I had to grin an awful lot. SuperGiantMegaCorp just got told that no, they do not own an employee's time. At least, not when they're reading email.
I wonder exactly how that was phrased, and what the surrounding paragraphs of the decision (it's 29 pages long) said to limit that. But for just a brief and shining moment, I had to smile when I saw that, because it's like the Anti-Pointy-Haired-Boss legal decision. They might be able to give their employees all kinds of tasks, they might impose all kinds of onerous duties, but so long as the job gets done they do not own the worker's time.
Oh, I hope the AFL-CIO and the Bush administration alike get a good long look at that!
The case in question is about a disgruntled former Intel employee named Ken Hamidi who, unlike some disgruntled people I could mention, did not shoot anyone. What he did do was send E-mails - long ones - from multiple IP addresses to something like thirty five thousand Intel employees. Naturally, Intel went berserk and brought the man to court.
The California Supreme Court came through with a ruling on it last week. It was kind of a mixed ruling. Ken's messages criticized Intel's employment practices; he argued that they constituted free speech under the First Amendment. The court did not particularly agree, but they did note that Intel seemed to be judging the mailings differently from mass commercial mailings based on the fact that they had critical content and opinions. They said Intel was more complaining about the contents than the functioning of the e-mail system and that Intel did not take economic harm in this particular case, and that the messages didn't cause damage to the e-mail system "any more than the personal distress caused by reading an unpleasant letter would be an injury to the recipient's mailbox".
I'm not sure how far I agree with that, but then, I don't have the facts. I don't know what Intel's systems are like, what the messages were like, why Ken felt he was justified in bombarding people he didn't know with messages saying in essence 'your boss and everyone above your boss is eeeevil', or any of it. What caught my attention was the Court's statement that Intel didn't take economic harm from this, because - and this is now a direct quote from page 26 of this particular Information Week issue - "the court ruled Intel couldn't claim a property right to employees' time".
I had to stop and stare at that statement for a while. And then I had to grin an awful lot. SuperGiantMegaCorp just got told that no, they do not own an employee's time. At least, not when they're reading email.
I wonder exactly how that was phrased, and what the surrounding paragraphs of the decision (it's 29 pages long) said to limit that. But for just a brief and shining moment, I had to smile when I saw that, because it's like the Anti-Pointy-Haired-Boss legal decision. They might be able to give their employees all kinds of tasks, they might impose all kinds of onerous duties, but so long as the job gets done they do not own the worker's time.
Oh, I hope the AFL-CIO and the Bush administration alike get a good long look at that!
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Date: 2003-07-09 08:16 pm (UTC)I woke up at 7, called to finally settle the score with the radiologists and insurance company (East coasters with 9-5 EST hours), then called in to say that I was taking care of the insurance biz even though I had already done so, just to get more sleep.
So I wound up working from 11:?? to nearly 7:00 p.m. today. But on my way out, my roommate said that his uncle used to work for company X, which got bought out by company Y. X let him set weird hours, but Y didn't. So when Y mandated regular hours for him, he ignored them and kept working at odd, irregular hours. He did this for a year without getting paid, until they fired him and gave him a year's salary or something.
This doesn't necessarily mean anything, but I thought it was amusing anyway.
Spam is not costless; it clogs up bandwidth and chews through server time.