PreOwned machine privacy - Was: Acclaim Entertainment Indy (with data, emails, etc) on eBay

[JP Hindin]

On Tue, 28 Mar 2017, Michael-John Turner via cctalk wrote:
> 	Own a piece of gaming history! This Indy workstation was once owned 
> by 	Acclaim Entertainment, the legendary game publisher, and was 
> liquidated 	at Acclaim's bankruptcy sale in 2004. It sat untouched in a 
> Brooklyn 	warehouse for more than a decade before being recovered last 
> year.
<snip>
> 	Andy Skalka: More than a hundred e-mail messages about Acclaim IT 
> operations (see photos)
> 	Danielle Papsidero: More than five hundred e-mail messages (see 
> photos)
> 	Rob Zimmelman: Image sequence for Dragonheart game combat
> 	EVa motion capture editing software (unlicensed)
> 	BioMotion motion capture editing software (unlicensed)
> 	Motion captured animation data (Dreamworks, baseball, Batman, etc.)
> 	Licenses: various expired and/or inactive licenses for Nichimen

This guy is on Reddit and has been posting lots of stuff from these 
machines and I can't help but feel a bit suspect about all of this. While 
they're old machines, the information is presumably no longer of any 
commercial value and the company no longer exists... I can't help but feel 
that this is an invasion of someone's privacy. The commercial content is 
one thing - although whether it's truly "abandoned" runs down into all of 
those arguments we see flare up in cctalk about once every two years, so 
let's not go there again...

But... eMails? I dunno. I've been pulling a lot of data off a Cray J90 and 
I've had a lot of people ask me to release it to the public and I just 
can't bring myself to do so. I'm _pretty sure_ that it belonged to NASA, 
which might mean some/all of the information may even be Public Domain - 
but this has people's usernames, and lord knows what kind of effort they 
put into the work. (And that's ignoring how not-qualified I am to make the 
PD assertion)

It just feels _wrong_ to me, personally.

While I'm not specifically crapping on the guy selling this Indy - I'm 
kind of curious how others feel about this sort of thing as it's something 
I've been confronted with personally lately.

Cheers;

  - JP