David Lennon, 18, used an e-mail-bombing program called Avalanche to send approximately 5 million messages to his former employer in 2004. The flood crashed the company's e-mail server.
The case against Lennon, brought under the Computer Misuse Act, was dismissed in November by District Judge Kenneth Grant at Wimbledon Magistrates Court in London.
At the time, Grant said that Section 3 of the act, which concerns unauthorized modification of data, had not been breached, as e-mails sent to a server configured to receive e-mails could not be classified as unauthorized.
But on Thursday, judges at the Royal Courts of Justice in London sent the case back to the Magistrates Court, saying Grant "was not right to state there was no case to answer," reported ZDNet.
The U.K.'s Crown Prosecution Service, which had appealed against the original judgment, said it was pleased by Thursday's ruling. "We have sought to clarify a point of law, to update the interpretation of that law to cope with contemporary high-tech crime. As technology develops at an ever-increasing pace the law may sometimes need to be interpreted in new ways," it said in a statement.
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