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Your reply may be monitored . . .
Posted by Jed Adam Gross on Tuesday, January 11 @ 20:33:57 EST Privacy
Ken Belson has an article in the Business section of today's NY Times about quality assurance monitoring of telephone calls. According to the article, company management or outside contractors listen to roughly two percent of calls to call centers. The conversations are often recorded for later review, rather than monitored in real time. The president of a firm that audits calls is quoted as saying, "You could have a show on broadway just playing the calls." I presume that actually doing something like this without the permission of the voices recorded would provoke a swift public backlash. Nonetheless, I wonder if those ubiqitous warnings that "your call may be recorded/monitored for quality assurance or training purposes" legally restrict the use to the stated purposes (and other narrowly defined ones, such as reporting evidence of a heinous crime) in the relevant jurisdictions. Even if no general ban on recording conversations without permission applied, capitalizing on the recordings for commercial purposes could conceivably raise "right of publicity" (vs. conventional privacy) issues, as with the use of celebrity likenesses.
 
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Re: Your reply may be monitored . . . (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Wednesday, January 12 @ 16:43:55 EST
Is there any reason why ownership would be different than, for example, music recordings? Maybe a nightclub could get away with recording the shows for internal purposes, such as quality control. But they couldn't sell or exhibit them without permission.

Is my commercial speech and copyright different than a rock bands?


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Re: Your reply may be monitored . . . (Score: 0)
by Anonymous on Thursday, January 13 @ 09:20:25 EST
I don't see much of a right of publicity issue since that involves capitalizing on a famous person's attributes without their permission. Hence, you would need a phone call identifiable with a celebrity and then you would need to be capitalizing on that celebrity's likeness to try and earn money by using the recording. Not impossible but not very likely. In addition, by consenting to the potential recording of the phone call, the celebrity may have waived some or all of their rights in and to the recording.

The restriction/warning before the recording does sound like it might limit the potential uses of the recording. Even so, it's difficult to place a cause of action on any infringement. You can try for a contracts-related claim but that just sounds and feels very thin. In addition, what harm would a caller have suffered? If the phone call is not identifiable, that is if they do not tell you whose voice it is, then what injury does the caller sustain? Without solid responses to these questions, I doubt a case like this would stand. (Though someone would undoubtedly bring it to court regardless. In the long run, it's probably worth not finding out what would happen unless the company that records the calls *wants* to pay more money to lawyers.)


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