FWD:Everyone

There was an IOTA "random" wallet generator where they posted the codebase online, but they had additional code on the page that made the range of generated wallets really narrow. The owner eventually robbed everyone.

I'd still be skeptical.

Hard to say, because the law is new. My guess is that it is legal as long as it is not in a professional/commercial context, or you remove my PII, or you have a clear and legitimate business reason, e.g. forwarding to a colleague within the company who is responsible for the subject matter.

Examples of illegal behavior would be publishing it, forwarding it to a marketer, or eg. for a recruiting agency forwarding to a company fir which I haven’t given permission.

> Is there any precedent you're basing this opinion on?

There's no clear precedent. Clearly a judge isn't going to let us host a PDF of Harry Potter or whatever. If it ever came down to it I think there would just be a multi-pronged test, along the lines of the current test for fair use and securities law.

In the case of Harry Potter it's an exogenous work that was created and copyrighted outside of an email client, it has significant economic value on its own, and there would be substantial economic harm done from us hosting it. In the case of normal email conversations most of those factors wouldn't apply, especially since in many cases seeing how people interact with one another is more valuable that the content of any individual message.

Regardless, I paid my $6 to the library of congress to become a registered DMCA agent, so the copyright issue really doesn't apply unless we A) start ignoring DMCA takedown requests B) actively induce people to violate copyright.

"Gmail has a reply all button and a forward button"

Last I checked, neither of those buttons are designed to publish the whole conversation to the whole world via the World Wide Web. Your product is. Therefore:

"we're changing the product to make it possible to upload stuff without permission"

Then you're changing the product in a way that is absolutely unacceptable for privacy reasons.

"we're not trying to induce bad behavior"

I'm not trying to induce meth addiction; I'm just selling it and hoping it won't be abused.

"And for the most part it works, since there are only so many times you can abuse those features before people stop sending you emails."

Then you're missing the point: I want to minimize the potential for abuse to ever happen in the first place. Hence the ultimatum in my top-level comment: if I know someone is using this service, then I'm going to refuse to communicate with that person via implicitly/semantically-private channels (in fact, it'd be nice if there were some way to programmatically get a list of email addresses registered with this service so I can maintain a blacklist on my SMTP servers and prevent myself from sending anything to them by accident). I might waver from that if FWD:Everyone offers the ability to preemptively register my email address(es) in an "automatically deny permission" list.

"There are many times when it's easy to get verbal permission from someone, but difficult or impossible to get email permission, e.g. if their email address has changed."

Then that request for verbal permission should be along the lines of "hey, I want to post our conversation from a while back to FWD:Everyone; do you mind logging in real quick and approving it since the request probably went to your old email?". Even better if FWD:Everyone would keep track of who owns what emails and send requests to alternate emails if not approved in a certain amount of time.

Otherwise, tough beans. Just because Disney didn't respond to my email asking for permission to sell bootleg copies of Frozen on the black market (e.g. because I sent it to the wrong address or because it's obviously going to be a "no") doesn't mean I'm automatically allowed to do so.

In other words: if I'm unable to provide consent, then assume that I do not consent. Inconvenient, sure, but that ain't my problem.

Disclaimer: IANAL. This comment is not a substitute for legal counsel.

"Are you sure about this? I doubt that communication can be copyrighted. Once you sent me your email, it's mine, not yours."

If you and the recipient both reside in countries which are signatory to the Berne Convention, then this is very much incorrect. Copyright is automatic, and goes to the author. The medium by which I distribute my copyrighted works does not somehow invalidate that automatic copyright.

"Otherwise email forwarding in general is completely illegal."

In a strict sense, yeah, probably. This is why the FSF and OSI don't consider programs without any license to be suitable for FOSS: in the absence of a license, most countries - thanks to the Berne Convention - assume no permission from the copyright holder at all by default unless otherwise established via a license agreement.

Of course, the average person is not going to start suing you for every email from said person you've forwarded without explicit permission; indeed, the average person probably won't know you've ever violated that implicit copyright at all if you're only forwarding it privately. That dynamic changes entirely, however, if you then go on and publish that email as part of a blog post.