[Air-l] ethics - aol data

[burkx006 at umn.edu]

On Aug 30 2006, Nancy Baym wrote:

>I don't recall making that claim.

I don't recall you making it either -- if you had, I (or Julie, or Eric 
Goldman) probably would have said something.

>My understanding is that in the case of snail mail letters, at least 
>in the US, the object belongs to the recipient, but the content 
>belongs to the author 

With a couple of caveats, absolutely right. Generally true outside the 
U.S., too.

>(hence the controversy about the selling of the 
>JD Salinger letters a few years ago which ended up not happening -- 
>if I remember correctly, though the objects could be sold, the 
>purchaser would be prohibited from releasing any of their contents).

Sort of. The letters were in many cases donated to archives and libraries, 
which could grant access to the physical items they posessed and could 
alienate the physical items (recall my discussion with Jeremy about the 
horse and the barn). But the libraries had no authority to permit 
reproduction of the contents; that right devised to Salinger's estate.

>Legally, if that is an accurate representation of the law, I don't 
>know how it translates into email (or any other kind of 
>individually-addressed electronic message).

Well, I suppose that the recipient of an e-mail "owns" the electrical 
impulses or magnetic flux resident on media in the recipient machine. But 
probably the sender "owns" the expression encoded by the flux on the media.

There also has to be some implied permission to make at least a limited 
number of copies of the message -- that is how computers work, by making 
copies in cache, RAM, etc. -- in order to even be able to read the message. 
But an implied license for necessary copying isn't ownership, or carte 
blance to redistribute the message.

-- 
Dan L. Burk
Oppenheimer, Wolff & Donnelly Professor
University of Minnesota Law School
229 19th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN  55455
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