Oracle vs. SAP
I recently read Jennifer Granick’s latest column on Wired about the interesting legal case between Oracle and SAP. Basically, an Oracle customer wanted to switch to SAP and gave SAP their passwords to log into some Oracle systems. Now Oracle is claiming that SAP has broken some computer crime statues for accessing a computer illegally.
Granick’s column looks at this from the perspective of anti-competitive practices. While I agree that this has some implications in that area, my first thought about this case was that it was an information property issue. If I was a customer and I gave my information to a company, I would say that I still own that information and should be able to ask the company to remove it or authorize other people to access it.
This sort of thing crops up all the time in online privacy issues. Of course, I am not a lawyer and Granick is a very good one, but I thought it was an interesting issue that seems like it could be solved based on the simple question of who has more rights: the owner of the information or the owner of the place where the information is stored?
Posted: April 3rd, 2007 under Computer Security, Politics and Law, Technology.
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