tachyon, excellent information. As a US citizen who has worked for large corporations, I have a typical US slant on the law. You wrote:

This is not to say that you could not easily have your life made miserable and be sent broke defending yourself in court against a well funded corporate legal attack.....but that, as they say, is a different story.

That reminded of an incident I was involved with that may shed some light on the US attitude. I worked for a company that posted the firewall logs that our firewall retained for "unauthorized accesses". These logs were posted to our internal Web site and I discovered certain individuals in our company were trying to get to sites that were, to say the least, rather compromising. I'm not just talking about *pr0n* (sic) sites. I'm talking about sites so potentially offensive that, were word of these individual's interest to get out, could permanently destroy careers.

I immediately went to one of the people involved and insisted that the logs be taken down (which was rather amusing as I was a junior programmer in a company of over 5,000 people). I was told that (paraphrasing) "since our company policy forbids this behavior and since the individuals in question signed agreements that they would not violate these policies, our lawyers have assured us that we are not violating any laws and will win any lawsuits." My reply:

Do you know what a Pyrrhic victory is? How much will it cost us to win a lawsuit?

He sat there stunned (I wish I had that effect more often!) and then said "Good point". The logs were taken down the next day.

One of the things that I do not care for about my country is that one can sue for anything. I, for one, am rather concerned about these things being on Perlmonks. Perhaps I am overreacting, but living in the US has made me paranoid.

Cheers,
Ovid

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