On Thu, Jan 14, 2021 at 6:10 PM Herb Johnson via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
Well, while I have a lot I could post on these matters, I won't. I'm not a lawyer and these are legal matters. The rest is discussion not advice.
Certain content one might obtain from others accidentally on an abandoned computer, is outright illegal to own and distribute. Delete it - period. Other content is proprietary and still in distribution, thus an actionable issue by the active producers of that content.
Herb, I respectfully contest your statement First of all, I believe (my belief) that one should try to leave a vintage computer as-is if possible, to preserve it's providence. Unless the owner specifically says to delete everything I don't make a point to do so. Content authored by a person is owned by that person, i.e. "copyright ". True, copyright is retained even after sale or abandonment of the vessel that stored that content (notebook, computer, tape recorder, etc.), but it's not a blanket thing. One who obtains a computer legally will not be guilty of a copyright violation solely by failing to delete the content, nor is it a copyright violation for using the content privately. It's not illegal to retain the content that came with an abandoned computer per se, and there is no law that requires the deletion of such materials, even if ethically it may be the right thing to do. Private letters, resumes, letters to the editor, transcripts, poems, computer programs, thesis...they all have different copyright standards so it depends what materials we're talking about. It also depends on the type of legal entity who formally owned computer (company computer, individual's home computer, public computer from a library, etc.). For example, let's say a person wrote their doctoral thesis and stored it on the hard drive pf an old computer, and years later that the person donated the computer as-is to Goodwill. If I was to extract that file somehow and publish it, no violation of copyright law would occur as long as the thesis had been published exactly as it appeared on the computer and was therefore already public. Unless it was a privately-published journal, and so on. If an earlier, unfinished revision of the final thesis was also found on the computer, that's a different story and it's easier to prove copyright violation perhaps. In short, once the information has been made publicly available, and a few other caveats, it's "less protected", so the rule generally-speaking is that it has to be otherwise unavailable content as well as originally authored. Further, if one were to anonymize the content before publishing that would likely be ok, if the names and personal info was sanitized from the published version. Bill