A Stranger Bought a Set of Highly Personal Letters. Can I Call Him Out?; The Ethicist, The New York Times Magazine, January 25, 2024

  Kwame Anthony Appiah, The Ethicist,The New York Times Magazine ; A Stranger Bought a Set of Highly Personal Letters. Can I Call Him Out?

"From the Ethicist:

It was thoughtless, I agree, to sell off a cache of letters that included some that were intimate and came from living people. The thought of strangers’ digging through letters written in the spirit of love and friendship can be upsetting. That the person who has acquired these letters has failed to grasp this suggests a certain lack of empathy. But it doesn’t establish that he lacks a moral sense, because you don’t really have any idea what he plans to do with this material. 

And there are constraints on this. When you acquire letters, you don’t thereby acquire the copyright in those letters, and copyright protection typically lasts until 70 years after the author’s death. So he has to deal with the murky issue of what counts as the “fair use” of such intellectual property. There are also a few privacy torts that individuals can try to pursue in the courts (e.g., intrusion upon seclusion; public disclosure of private facts). Even though he isn’t a party to a covenant of confidentiality, as someone in A.A. is, it remains true that, as you imply, exposing details of the intimate lives of private people is generally wrong."