Trespass To Chattels in The Electronic Age
The antiquated common law tort of trespass to chattels has been invoked in the modern context of electronic communications to combat the proliferation of unsolicited bulk email, commonly known as spam. In addition, several companies have successfully used the tort to block certain people, usually competitors, from accessing their servers. Though courts initially endorsed a broad application of this legal theory in the electronic context, more recently other jurists have narrowed its scope. As trespass to chattels is extended further to computer networks, some fear that plaintiffs are using this cause of action to quash fair competition and to deter the exercise of free speech; consequently, critics call for the limitation of the tort to instances where the plaintiff can demonstrate actual damages.
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Famous quotes containing the words trespass, chattels, electronic and/or age:
“Lay not that flattering unction to your soul,
That not your trespass but my madness speaks;
It will but skin and film the ulcerous place,
Whilst rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“... with autumn falling over everything;
The plush leaves the chattels in barrels
Of an obscure family being evicted
Into the way it was, and is.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“The war was won on both sides: by the Vietnamese on the ground, by the Americans in the electronic mental space. And if the one side won an ideological and political victory, the other made Apocalypse Now and that has gone right around the world.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The age of puberty is a crisis in the age of man worth studying. It is the passage from the unconscious to the conscious; from the sleep of passions to their rage.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)