Forum Moderators: open
Your own outbound email is fine. However, if it was a good topic going out, then there is no reason to frame it as an email - just frame it as a post.
Inbound:
We can't know of private agreements between people. Take for example an email you receive from a search engine or directory where you have purchased services. That email is covered under the TOS or Licensing agreement you signed when you purchased/sold listings with that search engine. How can we here know that it is a private communication covered by that agreement?
You're right - we can't know what is and isn't covered under privacy, non-disclosure, or trade secrets agreements. If we do allow a email with trade secrets in it to be posted, we might be liable. Once that genie is out of the bottle, you can't get it back in - the damage is done even if the post is removed at the request of the engine.
The only way I know how to make it work is to have one rule forum wide for every one.
[webmasterworld.com...]
You have copyright rights to anything you write as the author. The recipient owns the medium that contains the email.
To make it clearer, if I write you a letter, I retain the copyright to the words of the letter. You are not free to republish them. You only own the paper and ink medium that the letter is written on.
From the point of view of a copyright you may always quote your own material.
If there is a legal issue, I urge you to get competent legal advice.
Inbound, is a whole different deal.
If I receive an e-mail from someone I am not allowed to publish or quote any part of that e-mail as they own the intellectual property?
So what about a virus that we receive by e-mail? Does that mean we're not allowed to post...
Watch out for the "I Love to Hate you virus" . If you get an email with the subject "hey hows it goin?" and the message says "here's that document you requested"
A post just got deleted because I quoted an e-mail from BT.
The ones we as the site have to watch out for, are emails from businesses. Those _can_ contain trade secrets. That is an entirely different situation from copyrighted material. Copyrighted material falls under copyright law and you can remove anything in violation after notice. A trade secret is a different situation, where you can't stuff the genie back in the bottle after it's been let out. That's why we can't allow email you receive to be quoted at all.
Your own work, is your own work to do with what you want - as always. (I think that's why the original poster in this thread removed his post - he knew the situation as soon as he left it. I was already head long into a reply when I see he had second thoughts)
