Timeline for Is it legal to sell emails?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
14 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 13 at 9:01 | comment | added | Therac | Business correspondence, except for the most formal messages, is definitely copyrightable. Meeting minutes, project proposals, powerpoints are definitely business correspondence and definitely copyrightable. The more relevant question is the rights the mail's recepient gets. | |
| Mar 11 at 18:34 | comment | added | JonathanReez | Minor note: in practice, GDPR only applies to you if you're based in the EU or get payments from there. Otherwise the EU might bravado all day long but they've so far failed to enforce anything outside their borders: law.stackexchange.com/questions/81602/…. Just like China failed to enforce their anti-free-speech Internet regulations beyond the Great Firewall. | |
| Mar 11 at 16:56 | comment | added | Barmar | @phoog Of course. "Here's my plan: Blah blah ... Let's meet at 2pm tomorrow to discuss it." All the Blah blah stuff would probably be copyrighted. | |
| Mar 11 at 16:33 | comment | added | phoog | @Barmar if I sell someone a message that you sent me in which you wrote "let's meet at 2 p.m.," the copy of that message retained by the buyer most certainly is a copy. If that's the whole message then there's likely no copyright because of the lack of creativity. But if you had written something more substantial then that would likely qualify, as the creativity test apparently has a fairly low threshold. | |
| Mar 11 at 14:36 | vote | accept | Pamela Galluzzo | ||
| Mar 11 at 14:36 | |||||
| Mar 11 at 14:25 | comment | added | Barmar | Even if you could copyright everyday conversation, someone who makes the same utterance would not be infringing. Unlike patents, independent production is a defense to copyright infringement. No one would think "let's meet at 2pm" is a copy. | |
| Mar 11 at 13:58 | comment | added | nvoigt | @NuclearHoagie I would say an "email" includes at least the email address. The OP themselves said "not just the address", which I take to mean definetely the address and more. | |
| Mar 11 at 13:53 | comment | added | Nuclear Hoagie | A GDPR violation would require that the information is personally identifiable. If the OP is just selling the messages themselves, but not the addresses or names in the valedictions, there'd be no way to link the email to a particular identifiable individual, and therefore no GDPR violation. I don't believe that selling the information that some unnamed businessperson wrote an email saying "Yes, I'll take 40 at $3 each" would be a GDPR violation. | |
| Mar 11 at 13:02 | comment | added | Bart van Ingen Schenau | Then I read more into your last paragraph than was intended. As I see it, a work is protected by copyrights it it took some human creativity to create the work. Just making/confirming an appointment does not take any human creativity. | |
| Mar 11 at 12:41 | comment | added | nvoigt | It's not that sticking "business" to a work would make it uncopyrightable, it is that you need "more than just regular business" for your work to be considered for copyright. | |
| Mar 11 at 12:39 | comment | added | nvoigt | When I said "pure business correspondence" I meant something like my examples. Obviously, if we were in the music industry, lyrics we exchanged via email would still be protected. Germany has something called de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sch%C3%B6pfungsh%C3%B6he, in the US I think it's called "originality". To have copyright, your work cannot be just unoriginal or "every day use". "Lets meet at 2 PM" is not original enough to have copyright. You cannot sue or claim royalties from every other person that meets at 2PM. | |
| Mar 11 at 12:15 | comment | added | Bart van Ingen Schenau | Can you expand why business correspondence is not copyrightable and what you base that on? Both your answer and my comment are protected by copyrights, why wouldn't they be if we exchanged them as part of business correspondence? | |
| Mar 11 at 11:23 | history | edited | nvoigt | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 707 characters in body
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| Mar 11 at 11:15 | history | answered | nvoigt | CC BY-SA 4.0 |