On 3/1/2011 8:58 PM, Matthew Kitchin (usenet/public) wrote:
Sorry for top posting, on a bberry. So, you would say someone can
send me a letter in the mail with the condition I am only allowed to
read it one time?
Yes.
Nobody ever said the law isn't stupid. But in fact the newest
Blue Ray spec, BDXL, will include a WRITABLE area of the disk,
the intent is to allow a BDXL player to write an ID to the disk
so that Hollywood can produce disks that can only be played
on one player, or only be played a limited number of times, etc.
This is because, as I said, copyright law allows the copyright
holder to assert this as a right. And if you made a copy of
a move on one of those BDXL disks and kept it after it expired,
your breaking the law.
I call BS too. The movie example is completely
different. The purchase of a ticket is an agreement to watch the
movie one time. No agreement exists for an email.
The argument that people only have to follow the law with e-mails
when they have bought them isn't supportable. Courts have found that
e-mails are considered "business documents" and if I am suing you,
I can execute discovery against you and get all your stored
e-mail. If you claim you had the right to delete whatever mails
that you got just because you didn't pay for those mails, then
guess again, if any of those mails had anything to do with your
business decisions, then your legally required to hang on to them to
support your other business documentation because of document
retention laws. That is why I said that the businesses might like
the expiration because they can argue that copyright trumps the
retention laws.
The same thing exists for paper mail. Suppose your business gets
2000 letters from customers praising your product and you then go
advertise that you have over 20,000 satisfied customers. You then
get sued for false advertising. In court you argue that you
normally get a 10% response rate and the 2000 letters mean you
really have 20,000 satisfied customers. The court buys the 10%
response but then demands to see the 2000 letters. You claim
because you didn't pay for the letters you can do what you want
with them and you just threw them away.
Guess what, your going to lose.
Ted
------Original
Message------ From: Ted Mittelstaedt To:
users@spamassassin.apache.org Subject: Re: Should Emails Have An
Expiration Date Sent: Mar 1, 2011 10:50 PM
On 3/1/2011 11:55 AM, John Levine wrote:
From a legal perspective I will point out that any e-mail you
receive is (at least in the US, but most other countries too)
considered copyrighted by the sender. Under copyright law the
sender has the right to control expiration of content they
create,
I really think it would be a good idea for people to refrain from
playing Junior Lawyer here.
I know just enough about copyright law to know that this claim is
nonsense.
No, it is not nonsense. Copyright law does allow the content
creator to specify duration of use. If you go view a movie in a
movie theater you buy a ticket for a single viewing, you do not
automatically get to view it multiple times just because you bought a
ticket.
Ted
R's, John
