

Warren and Brandeis, "The Right to Privacy" (1890) - milesf
http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/classes/6.805/articles/privacy/Privacy_brand_warr2.html

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vy8vWJlco
The fact that this was written over 120 years ago is a little depressing (in
that we still confuse/have a hard time discerning privacy and property, at
great public expense).

A couple quotes I find especially satisfying to read today:

 _"The possibility of future profits is not a right of property which the law
ordinarily recognizes; it must, therefore, be an infraction of other rights
which constitutes the wrongful act, and that infraction is equally wrongful"

"Thus, in Abernethy v. Hutchinson, 3 L. J. Ch. 209 (1825), where the
plaintiff, a distinguished surgeon, sought to restrain the publication in the
'Lancet' of unpublished lectures which he had delivered as St. Bartholomew's
Hospital in London, Lord Eldon doubted whether there could be property in
lectures which had not been reduced to writing, but granted the injunction on
the ground of breach of confidence, holding 'that when persons were admitted
as pupils or otherwise, to hear these lectures, although they were orally
delivered, and although the parties might go to the extent, if they were able
to do so, of putting down the whole by means of short-hand, yet they could do
that only for the purposes of their own information, and could not publish,
for profit, that which they had not obtained the right of selling.'"

"The common law has always recognized a man's house as his castle,
impregnable, often, even to his own officers engaged in the execution of its
command."_

My personal summary and interpretation: privacy is not the formative rational
for copyright, patents, etc, and only for-profit imaginary property can be
considered to be the subject of infringement since everything else is a mere
statement of fact that has already been consensually published (and is
therefor also not an invasion of privacy by those sharing and speaking of
those facts, at their own expense).

The right to privacy has nothing to do with copyright, IMHO. In fact, if
imaginary rights are taken to the extreme, my physical rights are obliterated
by the desire to enforce imaginary rights (by spying and invading privacy - a
physical right as considered by the article - and interference with my own
computer usage and ownership) - IMHO - and I do not accept that.

