I'm sure a lot of people are now familiar with the ebay revenge story posted on the (in)famous B3TA.COM.
It was picked up by the Daily Mail:
Revenge of the eBay customer sold 'faulty' laptop
and then by the BBC:
Police investigate 'hate' website
Whatever your views about whether the guy deserved it or not, technically, the p!ssed-off buyer should have taken his case, first to ebay, then if that wasn't resolved, then to the small claims court.
This Amir guy is claiming he has been libelled - although I was under the impression that libel was when you made unsubstantiated claims about someone (in print). Here it seems that the buyer has simply published the contents of the laptop's harddrive.
Now my question is: what legal protection is there about data stored on a PC harddrive, or any personal information stored in something that you then sell?
Say you sold a stack of old family photo albums, but the buyer then found some rather 'private' pictures of you - does the new owner of the photoalbums have the right to publish the photos without your (as the origianl owner) consent?
So, you sell your PC, but forget to clean the harddrive - what legal protection do you have over the data stored there?
A personal aside: If you sell a working PC with harddrive and do not take precautions to clean the drive, I think you're, at best, niave, and at worst, pretty damned stupid.
But, if you sell a non-working PC (whilst claiming it does work) and haven't bother to clear the harddrive because you don't think it will ever be used again, then you really are a f'ing idiot and you're just begging for trouble!