Side note... the user on Twitter that originally reported this had his account locked by Twitter for posting the LinkedIn message from the Canonical sales guy.
https://twitter.com/LucaBongiorni/status/1359885001844744195
https://twitter.com/LucaBongiorni/status/1359885001844744195
Some devs have complete disconnect from reality.
(ofc he screams #censorship)
Also if you believe privacy is a right, you should ask that person before sharing this digital content he created that has hid identity in it, otherwise you should hide it.
For a paper letter it’s obviously different, once you received it it’s obviously yours.
Fair-use affirmative defence (under US law), fair dealing (UK),or equivalents elsewhere, may apply. Infringement claims, if any, would rest on thin grounds. Under the specific circumstances here, privacy claims likewise.
There is no copyright protection in the fact of communication. Nor in the details of who did so.
Generally I'd argue for a legitimate public interest in sharing the communication in cases such as this.
Only at the most primitive level of morality. Over that basic layer, I'd still consider how the publication of the message may affect the other person.
For example: Do you think it's morally OK to publish nudes that your partner sends you? I don't think it should be illegal, but only a massive asshole would publish their (ex) partner's nudes.
If you send me unsolicited commercial messages, I'm gonna feel no compunction about publicizing that you're a spammer.
In fact, by publishing his name you're giving the company an opportunity to throw him under the bus. It redirects culpability. Microsoft and Canonical should be the only focus.
Regardless, it seems abundantly clear that this is his _job_, and he is not at fault for following the directions of his corporate overlords. No one's saying to go trash his house, and all the information he posted (name, photo) is publicly attached to his linkedin profile that is accessible to any authenticated LinkedIn user.
Think it through for a second; if he had, instead of posting the name and avatar of the user in the screenshot, at-tagged the sales rep's Twitter account; would he have gotten banned? I think not. That's totally normal behavior on Twitter; it happens a billion times every day. And its exactly the same thing.
Twitter has, in the past, left Trump's account up for far, far worse offenses. They need to get their act together. The word I'm hearing around Wall Street is that Twitter's moderation strategy is one of the bigger reasons why the company is so undervalued, and investors are becoming concerned that there's too much Emotion, not enough Process, in their decision making, well, process. Its a critical thing to get right in a social media platform; too little and you get Parler or russian election interference, too much and it becomes unusable. Twitter is getting it wrong; very very wrong.