I am unsure why you would recommend a cue as being a good tool for someone to possess when running a server room. Is it for asking users "have you ever been poked?" and then giving them a good jab? Or perhaps for turning on the lights or kettle when you cannot be bothered to get up from your desk?
Entering someone's home should be a much more serious crime than, say, walking across the lawn without permission
The intrusion to privacy certainly feels a lot higher in the second case.
If you happened to be interested in the situations in which trespass in itself becomes a criminal activity under English law, there's a one page guide from our prosecutor's office, which explains it pretty well.
what kind of power would that convey to any commercial rights holder seeking the source of, say, shared files?
I'm not sure I understand your question, unfortunately — it seems like an interesting one to consider so, if you happened to think of another way of asking it, please do post back!
If there is intent to commit a crime (of any description beyond the actual entry), this is burglary
This isn't the case under English law — the crime must be one from a set list, which varies according to when the necessary intention was formed, for it to be burglary. (It looks like the example I use above of rape is incorrect too.) We agree, it seems, that, without this element, it's just a matter of trespass.
But I'll bet breaking and entering is still illegal,
I am not aware of a crime of "breaking and entering" under English law — it's possible that there is one which I have not come across, of course.
The nearest I know is the crime of burglary — which is, in effect, trespass plus theft (or a number of other crimes, including rape and criminal damage, depending on whether the relevant intention is there). However, if the only act upon entering the premises is the removal of one's own property, the second part is not made out, so it remains just trespass.
If someone steals your car and drive it to land they own, do you have the right to trespass onto it to get your car back?
Perhaps a fussy point but, if you have a right to be on the land, you cannot be trespassing. Even if you did trespass on the land, what is the likelihood of a court finding that you were trespassing and, even if it did, what would the likely measure of damages be?
""If your house has been robbed, is it legal for you to break into the other persons house and steal your stuff back?"
As long as you do not cause damage, it is probably not a criminal offence under English law; it is more likely to amount to trespass, which is a tort. If the thief wishes to sue you, he/she is welcome, and I doubt a court would look favourably on it.
If MY 0's and 1's are steal-able stuff then THEIR 0's and 1's are the same...
The difference, to my mind, is that theft applies to property (at least, it does under English law), and I'd argue that a 0s and 1s are not capable of being property. Their order may be capable of protection, as copyright, but, in this case, it is the copyright which is owned, not the underlying sequence of bits.
Is it legal for you to steal your stuff back from a robber?
Under English law, you cannot steal something which belongs to you — theft is the dishonest appropriation of property belonging to another with intention to permanently deprive.
How interesting — I often work with my colleagues in the Netherlands on issues of privacy, and I had not realised that the Works Council was as strong in the Netherlands as you indicate here; I'd thought the concept was more focussed on Germany. We do not have a similar concept in the UK; I expect the closest we come are more area-specific unions.
In the UK, interception of communications in the course of business is governed by a particular set of regulations — comply with this (which includes a virtually-impossible-in-reality requirement to take all reasonable steps to make all potentially affected persons aware that the employer reserves the right to do this), and it is permitted.
I bought this a few years back — the , and thought it was a hugely helpful guide to improving the quality of my presentations. I speak on a reasonably regular basis, in all sorts of different places and before a range of different audiences (technical and legal, mostly, sometimes students) and this book gave me more than my money's worth in hints and tips. Nothing groundbreaking, but a good refresher — geared towards sales, but useful for pretty much anything. (Some presentation guidebooks suggest that all presentations are sales pitches, where you are selling an idea or a theme if not a product.) It reinforced that I was not crazy to aim to use slides to support what I was saying, and drive home my message, rather than me narrating a series of screens, nor mad to keep to fewer than five words a slide where possible, in the face of an increasing number of presentations which appear to have been dumps on documents onto slides — so far, this approach seems to get really rather good reactions from audiences.
I found Craig Valentine's "World Class Speaking" rather turgid and disappointing, and I stopped reading about a third of the way through as a result. The style grated on me, and so others may find it more appealing.
Scott Berkun's "Confessions of a Public Speaker" was interesting, and a fair insight into the life of someone for whom speaking was a living, but, in terms of improving my presentations and my approach, Gallo's book was better, in my opinion.
With that being said, there's nothing better for learning than getting out there and doing it and trying different things, and trying to get some honest feedback from the audience afterwards.
Here we're talking about privacy, that's an inalienable right,
I wonder if we are talking about different things? I may not be able to renounce my right to privacy, but I can certainly agree to things which, but for my agreement, would amount to an intrusion of my privacy — I can agree to let a third party read my email, for example, even if I cannot (as a matter of law) agree that I do not have a right of privacy.
I wonder if different jurisdictions come into it — under English law, I can see no problem, from a legal perspective, with someone making an informed choice to let a third party access their email and, indeed, consent is not necessary for an employer to monitor an employee's email, providing it's done within the ambit of the statutory framework.
Won't work, a contract can never let you sign away legal rights.
Sure it can — most contracts do. When you buy a paper at the newsagent, your contract gives away your ownership of the sum represented by the coins you hand across, in favour of the newsagent, and, in return, you gain a legal right, being ownership of the property in the newspaper.
There may be some things which cannot be transferred by a simple contract — ownership of copyright is one such thing in the UK, as is transfer of land, each of which require "signed writing" rather than merely a contract — and some things which cannot be transferred not matter how formal the transfer (I cannot grant you the right to kill me, for example, although that's perhaps not a good example of "signing away a legal right"), but, generally speaking, contracts can, and do, operate to transfer legal rights.
I am quite certain that bits and bytes are not an ephemeral concept, they are represented physically on the media that is supplied to the employee. It takes energy to run the media and it takes space to store the data, all of the above requires support to provide uptime, etc. Every bit created and stored on hardware of a company belongs to the company.
I guess I'm not yet in that position — the company owns the media, sure. The company owns the power supplies it has bought for its servers. It may own the copyright over the document sitting, as bits and bytes, on that disk. But that does not mean, in my head, that the sequence of bits and bytes, the magnetic changes in state on the disk, are capable of being property in themselves. I can't point you to anything authoritative on that, though, other than perhaps giving you a general reference in case this sort of thing interests you (and, by "this sort of thing," I mean English law of personalty, a subject which is not taught very often, even at law school, sadly), and that's Michael Bridge's excellent, if now rather dated, "Personal Property Law."
It cost money to produce - it is property - or does this extend to most of the work lawyers produce not being intellectual property?
I agree with you in that I don't see a difference between email, documents, spreadsheets and so on. None of these are inherently property, existing as files on a computer. One might own copyright relating to a given document, but does not own the document itself. Spending money is not one of the tests of copyright (except in terms of a sui generis database right, which protects "investment"), but it is likely that the effort which comes from spending money is sufficient to meet the threshold.
I don't agree that spending money on something necessarily results in a property right arising in whatever it is that you have created:)
If you are the one making the comment how can you not own the statement? Isn't email seen just as a written letter that one has to answer for if something derogatory or defaming said?
There is perhaps an important difference between who is responsible for what is said in an email, and who owns the copyright of the text of an email.
Let's assume that, in the process of leaving a company, I create a email summarising a piece of research I have done for the company, so that others can continue it — I've done this in the course of my employment. Within the note, I have included a message that defames my boss. I send the email company-wide. I am responsible for the defamation but, since I created the email in the course of my employment, the copyright to my email is owned by the company.
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.
Most emails written using a company's email system are done while on the clock. This makes these emails property of the company in my opinion.
Assuming that the email in question meets the threshold for copyright protection, and are created in course of employment, then that's probably true. But if I reply to your email with "lol," I'd argue that this creates nothing which is capable of being owned — in particular, no copyright, unless it was a particularly unusual situation, which is the most likely mechanism for establishing a right of ownership.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like you have no cue
I am unsure why you would recommend a cue as being a good tool for someone to possess when running a server room. Is it for asking users "have you ever been poked?" and then giving them a good jab? Or perhaps for turning on the lights or kettle when you cannot be bothered to get up from your desk?
Entering someone's home should be a much more serious crime than, say, walking across the lawn without permission
The intrusion to privacy certainly feels a lot higher in the second case.
If you happened to be interested in the situations in which trespass in itself becomes a criminal activity under English law, there's a one page guide from our prosecutor's office, which explains it pretty well.
what kind of power would that convey to any commercial rights holder seeking the source of, say, shared files?
I'm not sure I understand your question, unfortunately — it seems like an interesting one to consider so, if you happened to think of another way of asking it, please do post back!
If there is intent to commit a crime (of any description beyond the actual entry), this is burglary
This isn't the case under English law — the crime must be one from a set list, which varies according to when the necessary intention was formed, for it to be burglary. (It looks like the example I use above of rape is incorrect too.) We agree, it seems, that, without this element, it's just a matter of trespass.
For a trespass claim to work there HAS TO BE a PHYSICAL barrier to entry.
That's not my recollection of things, but I can't find anything to help either way — do you happen to have a link / citation?
If someone breaks into my house, it is legal for me to break into his?
Illegal, no, but potentially something for which the aggrieved party could sue you if s/he could prove damage? (From an English law point of view.)
But I'll bet breaking and entering is still illegal,
I am not aware of a crime of "breaking and entering" under English law — it's possible that there is one which I have not come across, of course.
The nearest I know is the crime of burglary — which is, in effect, trespass plus theft (or a number of other crimes, including rape and criminal damage, depending on whether the relevant intention is there). However, if the only act upon entering the premises is the removal of one's own property, the second part is not made out, so it remains just trespass.
If someone steals your car and drive it to land they own, do you have the right to trespass onto it to get your car back?
Perhaps a fussy point but, if you have a right to be on the land, you cannot be trespassing. Even if you did trespass on the land, what is the likelihood of a court finding that you were trespassing and, even if it did, what would the likely measure of damages be?
""If your house has been robbed, is it legal for you to break into the other persons house and steal your stuff back?"
As long as you do not cause damage, it is probably not a criminal offence under English law; it is more likely to amount to trespass, which is a tort. If the thief wishes to sue you, he /she is welcome, and I doubt a court would look favourably on it.
If MY 0's and 1's are steal-able stuff then THEIR 0's and 1's are the same...
The difference, to my mind, is that theft applies to property (at least, it does under English law), and I'd argue that a 0s and 1s are not capable of being property. Their order may be capable of protection, as copyright, but, in this case, it is the copyright which is owned, not the underlying sequence of bits.
Is it legal for you to steal your stuff back from a robber?
Under English law, you cannot steal something which belongs to you — theft is the dishonest appropriation of property belonging to another with intention to permanently deprive.
How interesting — I often work with my colleagues in the Netherlands on issues of privacy, and I had not realised that the Works Council was as strong in the Netherlands as you indicate here; I'd thought the concept was more focussed on Germany. We do not have a similar concept in the UK; I expect the closest we come are more area-specific unions.
In the UK, interception of communications in the course of business is governed by a particular set of regulations — comply with this (which includes a virtually-impossible-in-reality requirement to take all reasonable steps to make all potentially affected persons aware that the employer reserves the right to do this), and it is permitted.
Thank you for such an interesting discussion!
£1.92 on Amazon... worth it if only for one tip / thought. Thank you :)
by Carmine Gallo.
I bought this a few years back — the , and thought it was a hugely helpful guide to improving the quality of my presentations. I speak on a reasonably regular basis, in all sorts of different places and before a range of different audiences (technical and legal, mostly, sometimes students) and this book gave me more than my money's worth in hints and tips. Nothing groundbreaking, but a good refresher — geared towards sales, but useful for pretty much anything. (Some presentation guidebooks suggest that all presentations are sales pitches, where you are selling an idea or a theme if not a product.) It reinforced that I was not crazy to aim to use slides to support what I was saying, and drive home my message, rather than me narrating a series of screens, nor mad to keep to fewer than five words a slide where possible, in the face of an increasing number of presentations which appear to have been dumps on documents onto slides — so far, this approach seems to get really rather good reactions from audiences.
I found Craig Valentine's "World Class Speaking" rather turgid and disappointing, and I stopped reading about a third of the way through as a result. The style grated on me, and so others may find it more appealing.
Scott Berkun's "Confessions of a Public Speaker" was interesting, and a fair insight into the life of someone for whom speaking was a living, but, in terms of improving my presentations and my approach, Gallo's book was better, in my opinion.
With that being said, there's nothing better for learning than getting out there and doing it and trying different things, and trying to get some honest feedback from the audience afterwards.
Here we're talking about privacy, that's an inalienable right,
I wonder if we are talking about different things? I may not be able to renounce my right to privacy, but I can certainly agree to things which, but for my agreement, would amount to an intrusion of my privacy — I can agree to let a third party read my email, for example, even if I cannot (as a matter of law) agree that I do not have a right of privacy.
I wonder if different jurisdictions come into it — under English law, I can see no problem, from a legal perspective, with someone making an informed choice to let a third party access their email and, indeed, consent is not necessary for an employer to monitor an employee's email, providing it's done within the ambit of the statutory framework.
So how do you do quality monitoring for people who are judged based on the emails they send?
As has been shown here, different countries have different rules — in the UK, it is relatively easy to monitor someone's email in the course of business, provided that you comply with The Telecommunications (Lawful Business Practice) (Interception of Communications) Regulations 2000, which forms an exception to the general prohibition on interception.
Won't work, a contract can never let you sign away legal rights.
Sure it can — most contracts do. When you buy a paper at the newsagent, your contract gives away your ownership of the sum represented by the coins you hand across, in favour of the newsagent, and, in return, you gain a legal right, being ownership of the property in the newspaper.
There may be some things which cannot be transferred by a simple contract — ownership of copyright is one such thing in the UK, as is transfer of land, each of which require "signed writing" rather than merely a contract — and some things which cannot be transferred not matter how formal the transfer (I cannot grant you the right to kill me, for example, although that's perhaps not a good example of "signing away a legal right"), but, generally speaking, contracts can, and do, operate to transfer legal rights.
See CCNV v. Reid [wikipedia.org].
If you are in the US, or are just interested in this sort of issue and are happy with a US perspective, there's an interesting discussion in Mattioli's "The Impact of Open Source on Pre-Invention Assignment Contracts."
I am quite certain that bits and bytes are not an ephemeral concept, they are represented physically on the media that is supplied to the employee. It takes energy to run the media and it takes space to store the data, all of the above requires support to provide uptime, etc. Every bit created and stored on hardware of a company belongs to the company.
I guess I'm not yet in that position — the company owns the media, sure. The company owns the power supplies it has bought for its servers. It may own the copyright over the document sitting, as bits and bytes, on that disk. But that does not mean, in my head, that the sequence of bits and bytes, the magnetic changes in state on the disk, are capable of being property in themselves. I can't point you to anything authoritative on that, though, other than perhaps giving you a general reference in case this sort of thing interests you (and, by "this sort of thing," I mean English law of personalty, a subject which is not taught very often, even at law school, sadly), and that's Michael Bridge's excellent, if now rather dated, "Personal Property Law."
It cost money to produce - it is property - or does this extend to most of the work lawyers produce not being intellectual property?
I agree with you in that I don't see a difference between email, documents, spreadsheets and so on. None of these are inherently property, existing as files on a computer. One might own copyright relating to a given document, but does not own the document itself. Spending money is not one of the tests of copyright (except in terms of a sui generis database right, which protects "investment"), but it is likely that the effort which comes from spending money is sufficient to meet the threshold.
I don't agree that spending money on something necessarily results in a property right arising in whatever it is that you have created :)
If you are the one making the comment how can you not own the statement? Isn't email seen just as a written letter that one has to answer for if something derogatory or defaming said?
There is perhaps an important difference between who is responsible for what is said in an email, and who owns the copyright of the text of an email.
Let's assume that, in the process of leaving a company, I create a email summarising a piece of research I have done for the company, so that others can continue it — I've done this in the course of my employment. Within the note, I have included a message that defames my boss. I send the email company-wide. I am responsible for the defamation but, since I created the email in the course of my employment, the copyright to my email is owned by the company.
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.
Most emails written using a company's email system are done while on the clock. This makes these emails property of the company in my opinion.
Assuming that the email in question meets the threshold for copyright protection, and are created in course of employment, then that's probably true. But if I reply to your email with "lol," I'd argue that this creates nothing which is capable of being owned — in particular, no copyright, unless it was a particularly unusual situation, which is the most likely mechanism for establishing a right of ownership.
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.
We have this extra piece of paper for you to sign; do it or you're fired. Thanks!
Better to link it to a non-contractual payment or additional benefit, or else just ride the hope that no-one ever looks to question it!