California Court Exempts Employers From Email Liability

from the breathing-room dept

Thu, Feb 1st 2007 7:38pm — Joseph Weisenthal

For reasons related to regulatory compliance and legal liability, many companies have rather strict policies on how employees can use their company email addresses. Often, the policies seem overly strict, but with the constant chatter over things like getting sued for sexual harassment for failing to block porn spam, we can understand their desire to err on the side of caution. Some California companies may see some relief as a judge has ruled that employers are not liable for the email activity of their employees. It cited the same law the exempts ISPs and sites like Craigslist from the activities of their users. Still, it seems the ruling is likely to open up a fresh can of worms. In this case, things were fairly cut and dry, as the court ruled that Agilent didn't bear any responsibility for harassing emails that its employees sent to an opposing party in a lawsuit. But there are other situations where things could get trickier, particularly if the email seems to have been sent in some official company capacity. So for now, even with the ruling, it's not too likely that companies will loosen the reigns much in terms of email policy.

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4 Comments

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just me, 1 Feb 2007 @ 9:27pm

a little better
If anything maybe this will help cut back on those bogus law suits being filed everyday that are clogging up the Courts.
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Steve, 2 Feb 2007 @ 4:17am

Rules for E-mail and Snail mail should be the same
Rules for E-mail and Snail mail should be the same.
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- Agent Smith, 2 Feb 2007 @ 10:58am
  
  Re: Rules for E-mail and Snail mail should be the
  I'm confused now - I thought they were the same - can't people send me viruses attached to postcards that hijack my file cabinet, steal my identity, empty my bank account just like email?
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|333173|3|_||3, 4 Feb 2007 @ 8:08pm

How do you regulate?
Who gets to regulate the Internet? Ted Stevens? some Uzbek/Kazakh/Bulgarian crook? Jack Thompson? TEH French/Quebecious? THe problem is, that whoever gets chosen to have the right to regulate the net will either be hated or ignored by most of the world, so his regulations will not get obeyed. Give up and get over it.
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