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Staff Emails Are Not Owned By Firms, UK Judge Rules
Qedward writes "A high court judge has ruled that companies do not have a general claim of ownership of the content contained in staff emails. The decision creates a potential legal minefield for the terms of staff contracts and an administrative nightmare for IT teams running email servers, back up and storage. The judge ruled businesses do not have an 'enforceable proprietary claim' to staff email content unless that content can be considered to be confidential information belonging to a business, unless business copyright applies to the content, or unless the business has a contractual right of ownership over the content. Justice Edwards-Stuart added it was 'quite impractical and unrealistic' to determine that ownership of the content of emails either belongs exclusively to the creator or the recipient of an email."
There will be but one consequence of this: Employers will add the requisite language to contract or IT/acceptable use policy. Many already have this. Absent organized/union efforts, few will refuse. Status quo re-established.
"unless the business has a contractual right of ownership over the content"
We have this extra piece of paper for you to sign; do it or you're fired. Thanks!
Having seen the content of several hundred thousand emails between employees, you do not want to own the content. It is 90% non-sense, 10% work-related and 33% "I can't wait until 5 O'Clock!"?
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
The court did not hold that "email are not owned by firms" as such. Rather, it was a more nuanced (and, in my opinion, very sensible) ruling, albeit one which does not seem to me to extend established law very much.
The ruling essentially holds that only property is capable of ownership — an established position, although, confusingly, capability of being owned is one of the tests as to whether something is capable of being property; defining "property" is no easy task. The court considered whether an email constituted "property" or not, and held that, unless the content of an email was the subject of copyright (a property right), or else constituted confidential information, an email is not intrinsically property — an established position again, to my mind.
The court also held that, even where there was no property in an email, an agreement as to how something should be treated could be binding — I can agree that I must deliver to you any email originating from you which I have on my computer, irrespective of the issue of property and ownership.
If nothing else, this seems to me to be a pretty common sense outcome. If employment contracts do not already reflect this position, I would expect employers to look to amending them pretty quickly.
The decision creates a potential [...] administrative nightmare for IT teams running email servers, back up and storage.
I wonder what nightmare could this decision create for IT admins... sounds like FUD to me.
I for one welcome this decision, similar legislation is in place where i live (EU - Czech Republic).
Personal correspondence belongs to the employee and employer should not be able to legaly read it without the emplyee's consent.
If you create something for a company while being paid by the company, the company owns it,
It's usually a little more nuanced than that.
If you are talking about copyright, where a protectable work is made by an employee in the course of his employment, the employer is the owner. However, if you create the work as a contractor, the law makes you the first owner, although you may agree contractually to assign ownership to the company.
For patents, ownership of an invention by an employee in the course of performance of his duties, where that employee's normal duties include the expectation of invention or else because the employee had a special duty to further the employer's interests, rests with the employer (although, where the invention is of "outstanding benefit", compensation may be payable to the employee notwithstanding that he is being paid to invent). Any other invention made by an employee is owned by the employee.
Definately not. In the Netherlands employers are not even allowed to read such e-mail as employees are also (by law) allowed to use company resources (internet acess, e-mail, phone, printers, ...) for private purposes to a reasonable extent and hence their privacy cannot be violated this way. I may be wrong about this, but I thought this actually has a legal basis in the EU in which case this should also apply to all other EU countries.
that the digital assets, even if they have copyright of the owner ... are not the property of the owner
This is correct, in my view, albeit for a convoluted legal reason. I do not own the document I have just written — rather, I own the copyright which protects that document. I do not own the underlying asset — I would say that a combination of bits is not capable of being property, at least for the purposes of English law — but I do own the copyright, being in itself a property right. All that means, in practice, is that I have an exclusive right to do certain things in respect of the underlying work, and the ability to trade and grant those rights.
Source: http://translate.google.nl/translate?hl=nl&sl=nl&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fblog.iusmentis.com%2F2012%2F08%2F20%2Famsterdam-mag-e-mail-personeel-niet-bekijken%2F (Dutch-language original: http://blog.iusmentis.com/2012/08/20/amsterdam-mag-e-mail-personeel-niet-bekijken/). This does not mention whether there is a EU basis though.
What a difference there is between the US and UK. In the US, emails are the property of D.H.S. whether there is a law protecting against that or not.
In my mind a crucial part of this story is that the guy was forwarding his company emails to a separate account. Where I work, that's been a violation of company policy for as long as I can remember. The email administrator should at least be getting chewed out for allowing mail to be forwarded *and deleted* from company mail servers without any backup in place.
I know for sure that my employer saves all employee emails and instant messages for some predefined amount of time. Had they done this - which I'm assuming should be standard practice for any corporation - they wouldn't have needed to try and access this dude's personal email account.
Mismanagement... but I guess they already knew that since they had let their CEO go.
Here is an analogy: you are a guest at somebody's house, you use their ink and their paper and you write a note. The ink and paper belongs to the your host, not to you. You can claim that the message is yours, but every bit of media belongs to the owner of the house.
I see the case here, and the general principle behind it, as fully agreeing with you. The difference is that, in the case of your handwritten note, the paper and ink are capable of ownership. In the case of an email, the bits and bytes behind it are not — the email itself is not capable of ownership, and thus cannot be owned. Rather, it is the copyright subsisting in the work comprising the message which is owned. A physical world / digital world difference, to my mind, which leads to the same result.
bits and bytes, regardless of how they are stored or communicated to other computers, they are property of the company.
This is where we see a difference, I think — my view is that "bits and bytes" are not, in themselves, cannot be property, and thus cannot be owned (or else cannot be owned, and thus are incapable of being property...). Copyright is a mechanism for establishing a right of ownership which relates closely to that arrangement of bits and bytes, but does not mean ownership of those bits and bytes.
Personal communications are protected by law in Finland as well. An infamous caveat, Lex Nokia, was enacted a few years back. It allows the employer to monitor the email envelope information under some circumstances. Such monitoring must be reported to the Privacy Ombudsman by the company. No company has submitted such a report as yet. Some companies are doing it clandestinely, but that is a punishable crime in Finland.
The Supreme Court of Canada recently ruled that employees have an "expectation of privacy" in emails and files on computers owned by their employers, meaning that private emails and files are
There are limitations: material from a company computer obtained by a warrant issued based on evidence from the company, if the company acted properly.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
How the hell do you do legal discovery data mining on email if it isn't the compan's property? This would be quite a mess for US companies trying to defend themselves.
So you are saying that if I write an email on my company's time then that email is the property of my company? Thus if I send that email to your work address then it is still the property of my company and hence your company has no legal right to a demand another copy of it.
So you are agreeing with the judge's decision.