Staff Emails Are Not Owned By Firms, UK Judge Rules 111
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."
Re:right decision (Score:5, Funny)
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."
Re:i see what you did there (Score:4, Funny)
What about the other 50%?