Five years after setting off a precedent-setting legal feud with an avalanche of nasty e-mail, a disgruntled former Intel employee's crusade against the Santa Clara chip giant lands this week in the California Supreme Court.

By reaching the state's highest court, the grudge match between 56-year-old Ken Hamidi and one of Silicon Valley's mightiest companies has escalated from a simple case of bad blood into a case that will establish groundbreaking Internet law in California for years to come.

Much to Intel's dismay, Hamidi has refused to go away since the company first hauled him into court for bombarding its e-mail system with thousands of missives related to his firing and the chip giant's labor practices. Undaunted, Hamidi set up a Web site, FaceIntel.com, as a platform for anti-Intel information. When a court ordered him to stop sending e-mail to Intel employees, he packed up his message and delivered a bushel of printed e-mail to Intel's Santa Clara headquarters -- on horseback.

The state Supreme Court on Wednesday will hear arguments in Intel vs. Hamidi, which could determine how far First Amendment protections extend to company and other private e-mail systems. Lower-court rulings forbid Hamidi from flooding Intel with e-mail, based on laws that essentially give companies the right to police their private property.

Unlike government efforts to regulate unwanted commercial e-mail, known as spam, Hamidi's case pits an individual's right to express an opinion on the freewheeling Internet against a company's right to control what happens to its property.

Originally on his own against Intel and its fleet of lawyers, Hamidi is now backed by a number of major civil liberties organizations and dozens of law professors who warn that the orders in place against him amount to censorship that will "threaten the future of the Internet."

"They thought I was going to be overwhelmed and that I'd just give up," Hamidi said during a recent interview. "I wouldn't have freedom if I let this happen."

Intel, meanwhile, has much of the nation's business community behind its arguments. Rather than a free speech case, it views the matter as, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce puts it, "whether a private company can filter what it wants." Intel insists that while Hamidi has a clear right to express his views about the company, the company has an equally strong right to control access to its private e-mail system.

"For us, it's not a First Amendment issue and never has been," said Intel spokeswoman Tracy Koon. "Ken has been very persistent and creative in exercising his right to speak out. But our view is that, in exercising his rights to free speech he needs to protect the property rights of Intel, including our e-mail system."

All the attention is sweet satisfaction to Hamidi, who was fired by Intel in 1995 after a worker's compensation dispute over injuries he suffered in a car accident. Often questioned about why he has kept after Intel, Hamidi views the company's attack on him as an attack on the freedom he sought when he fled Iran in the late 1970s to become a U.S. citizen.

The dispute boiled over in 1998, when Hamidi on a number of occasions tested the limits of e-mail freedom by sending e-mail critical of Intel to 8,000 to 30,000 of the company's employees. The company struck back with a lawsuit, obtaining an injunction that barred Hamidi from sending any more e-mail to Intel.

A divided state appeals court upheld the injunction two years ago, concluding that Intel "is as much entitled to control its e-mail system as it is to guard its factories and hallways." That set the stage for the case to reach the state Supreme Court.

The case rests on an age-old legal theory known as "trespass to chattels," which has governed private property rights since long before the Internet was a twinkle in any inventor's eye. Chattel is private property -- aside from real estate -- and courts in the past have determined that property owners must prove they were harmed in order to establish a "trespass" on their rights.

Intel insists Hamidi's e-mail harmed the company by flooding its servers with unwanted and distracting information. The e-mail, typically warnings to workers facing transfers or other labor issues, offered up quick, attention-grabbing statements like "you will be terminated -- we can help."

Intel's critics say the e-mail was the equivalent of water cooler speech, and that Intel cannot claim it violated its property rights.

"There is no harm to Intel's servers -- it's the communication of the message that Intel considers the harm," said Jennifer Granick, director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society. "That's not the kind of harm the courts should be in the business of protecting people from. It undermines the nature of the Internet as a place to exercise free speech rights."

Lawyers who back Intel counter that free speech advocates have turned a basic property rights case into a First Amendment cause célèbre.

"This to me is an open-and-shut case and I'm astonished this has gone this far," said Richard Epstein, a University of Chicago law professor who wrote a friend-of-the-court brief on Intel's side.

For his part, Hamidi isn't particularly surprised. He always believed Intel's lawsuit violated his First Amendment rights and is prepared to take his fight to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary.

Hamidi's battle has been costly, although a prominent Philadelphia law firm has agreed to represent him for free because of the high stakes in the case. After his firing, Hamidi, once a well-paid engineer with a six-figure salary and stock options, had to declare personal bankruptcy.

Several years ago, Hamidi, who lives in Folsom with his wife and two children, got a job with a state agency, but he nevertheless works nights and weekends maintaining his anti-Intel Web site. In fact, he says he often responds to e-mail from current and former Intel workers as late as 3 a.m.

No matter how Intel vs. Hamidi plays out in the law books, Hamidi vows to keep a watchful eye on the company's conduct and continue to ply the Internet with his anti-Intel messages.

"If I lose, I'll just be 10 times more serious about it," Hamidi said. "I've dedicated my life to going after this type of thing."