Re: Jim Bell Docket 3

[Martin Minow <minow@apple.com>]

>>On Thu, 24 Jul 1997, Lynne L. Harrison wrote:
>
>I question, however, if is proper/appropriate for a governmental entity to
>retrieve email addresses off of a computer involved in a criminal matter
>and use those addresses to send the type of message that was sent to a
>selected few?  Unfortunately, I have no answer to this query.
>
>Do any other individuals have any thoughts concerning this issue?
>
>

(Since I am not a lawyer, I can pontificate without fear of reprisal.)
Since the message was a "press release" one could, with a reasonably
straight face, claim that it is covered by "freedom of the press."
Extracting addresses from a database would not be permitted, as
near as I can tell, by the Swedish Data Privacy Law. There is an
interesting article, in Swedish, in today's Svenska Dagbladet
<http://www.svd.se/> that suggests that *any* computer-generated
message (including ordinary word-processing letters) may violate
the data privacy law (but this might be a mis-reading of an
article I only skimmed, but didn't read carefully). Misusing
data on a computer file would be improper, irregardless of whether
the computer was involved in a criminal matter. Copyright violation,
if nothing else, even if it might be "fair use."

Martin Minow
minow@apple.com