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."

Comments

Not so much that "emails are not owned by firms"

[Neil_Brown]

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.

Re:Only in the UK

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:right decision

[mrgrey]

No nightmare. From my standpoint it would make my life as an admin easier.

Employee: "Hey. I lost this email from so and so a while back"
Me: "Oooooo... Ya. Sorry about that. We don't back your email up. We only backup company data."

Employee: "Hey. I keep getting spam."
Me: "Sounds like a personal problem to me. It's your email. Fix it."

Not just the UK: this is the law in Canada, too

[davecb]

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

• not the property of the company
• cannot be snooped without a warrant
• are not considered to be "in plain sight"

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