[alt.comp.acad-freedom.talk] Is the Information the User's?

pmoloney@unix1.tcd.ie (Paul Michael Moloney) (06/27/91)

dpassage@soda.berkeley.edu (David G. Paschich) writes:

>BTW, at my site, whenever I'm forced to turn off a user's account, I
>always do it by changing their shell to a program that tells them why
>their account has been turned off, and I always make them able to
>extract their files via FTP, or some other solution if they don't have
>other net access.  I consider that information their property and I
>don't have the right to keep them from accessing it.

That last line is interesting. I don't know much about law, but I've heard 
it claimed, at least in Ireland, that copyright exists on something you've 
written the moment you write it. So keeping files of writing from a user is 
in effect illegal. So should a sysadmin at least give a user whose account 
has been suspended some way of retrieving their files, at least hard copies 
of them?

P.
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