From: Brad Putnam (bputnamdigitalcomply.com)
Date: Tue Sep 09 2008 - 18:24:07 CDT

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I believe it's been tried by the Freeman nutballs. Think Montana compound
(crappy trailer on some land) standoffs from back in the 90s. I'd have to
research it to find the actual case law, but from memory, a Freeman who was
in prison tried to copyright his SS# and then sue for infringement for every
court document that listed it(literally thousands). If memory serves, the
court found the SS# was issued by the Fed's and therefore owned by the feds
and the feds only granted permission for its use by an individual. Leave it
to someone with a lot of time on their hands to come up with it first...

BP

Brad Putnam
President and CEO
Digital Compliance, LLC
PO Box 792
Billings, MT. 59103
406-325-9737 Phone
406-325-9738 Fax
BPutnamdigitalcomply.com
 

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-----Original Message-----
From: dataloss-bouncesdatalossdb.org
[mailto:dataloss-bouncesdatalossdb.org] On Behalf Of Alessandro Acquisti
Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2008 4:44 PM
To: 'Aaron Titus'; datalossdatalossdb.org
Subject: Re: [Dataloss] SSN as Trade Secret?

>Henry,
>Protecting SSNs under IP law (namely Trade Mark and Trade Secret) is an
>interesting concept.

Pam Samuelson wrote a great article on this topic a few years ago:

http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~pam/papers/privasip_draft.pdf

not sure it was ever used in court, though.

-alessandro

>Are you aware of any instances where a court has
>considered those theories? SSNs seem only marginally analogous to trade
marks or trade secrets. And the theory doesn't seem to cover at least the
main issue in the Ostergren case, namely the government's ability to
prohibit re-publishing information already placed in the public domain.

Perhaps it would begin to address a third party's right to re-publish a
(presumably) private Social Security Number; or even a person's right to
stop his personal information from entering the public domain, remove it
once it's there, or hold a third party accountable for its unauthorized
publication.

-Aaron

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