illegal to delete files?

It turns out that there may be legal ramifications for deleting files. Read the article and tell me what you think.

He destroyed what wasn't his. So i guess his employers have a point.

It wouldn't of mattered if it was on his home computer and he owned the stuff...

Sounds a bit like sour grapes to me though - they could of just re-installed what ever he wiped.

The work he had done belonged to the company so it was not his to delete.

When you do computer work for a company then you leave you are only entitled to remove your personal files, not the work that preformed for the company during your employment. It is theft to do this as they have paid you for your time for the work accomplished up to that point.

This is standard procedure in any company or contract.

Citrin pointed out that his employment contract permitted him to "destroy" data in the laptop when he left the company. But the 7th Circuit didn't buy it, and reinstated the suit against him brought by IAC.

Looks to me like his contract said he could do just that. He used this part of his contract as justification. IAC is suing because they can't recover the files THEY SAID he could delete. I have a problem with the district court not accepting this part of the contract. Why bother making stipulations in a contract if they're not going to be followed.

The provision of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act on which IAC relies provides that whoever "knowingly causes the transmission of a program, information, code or command, and as a result of such conduct, intentionally causes damage without authorization, to a protected computer (a defined term that includes the laptop that Citrin used)," violates the Act. Citrin argues that merely erasing a file from a computer is not a "transmission." Pressing a delete or erase key in fact transmits a command, but it might be stretching the statute too far (especially since it provides criminal as well as civil sanctions for its violation) to consider any typing on a computer keyboard to be a form of "transmission" just because it transmits a command to the computer...

This part makes me a little nervous too.

[edit on 10-3-2006 by Rasobasi420]

It was a company computer, not his. He was not free to delete the files on company property.

This is the same as carving his initials in the top of his office desk.

It was in his contract that he could destroy all of his computer files when he left the company. Am I the only one who read the article all the way through?