Chat, Copy, Paste, Prison

Submitted by jbreland on Tue, 04/13/2004 - 14:45

You are engaged in a chat session with some friends and colleagues, when one of them makes a witty remark or imparts a pithy bit of information. You hit CTRL-A and select the conversation, then copy it to a document that you save. Under a little-noticed decision in a New Hampshire Superior Court in late February, these actions may just land you in jail.

So does that sound as rediculous to you as it does to me? You'll need to read the full story on SecurityFocus for all the details, but needless to say, it's an awful situation. Heck, all major chat clients (including the oh-so-wonderful Gaim include features to automatically save transcripts. This is a selling point. Let's hope this situation gets resolved quickly.

Here's the full story.