Yesterday, the California Supreme Court decided that the doctrine of trespass to the chattels did not apply to spam emails. At first glance, it looked to me like the trespass to the chattels theory had lost a lot of ground for internet cases, but the court distinguished trespass via spam from trespass via spidering (using an automated method of accessing a site to get information). The NYT article about the case quotes a dissenting judge using the argument I made in my discussion of the “IRAQ’s Most Wanted” phenomenon: spam, in the aggregate, is a huge waste of people’s time. Of course, that doesn’t justify a legal conclusion that spam is trespass to the chattels.
Want more analysis? Read the opinion yourself. It’s late.