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