HOME / explainer: Answers to your questions about the news.

Hands Off My Garbage!Once you put something in the trash, do you still own it?

By Juliet LapidosPosted Wednesday, May 13, 2009, at 7:09 PM ET

Garbage cans. Garbage binsA St. Louis beauty salon owner found two scripts for Robert Pattinson films in a trash bin recently—one for a Twilight sequel, one for a forthcoming romantic drama, Memoirs. According to the salon owner's lawyer, she considered leaking them to a tabloid but ultimately returned them to Summit Entertainment, the studio that's making the films and owns the scripts. Once you put something in the trash, do you still own it?

RSS

Probably not. Items discarded in the trash are often classified as abandoned property—meaning the owner has relinquished his claim to the items and doesn't intend to resume ownership. In one Indiana case from 1999, a labor organizer removed several bags of trash from a bin on the premises of a contracting company and searched them for employee contact information (for his unionization efforts). The company alleged that its property had been stolen, but the appellate court ruled that the organizer wasn't liable since the material had been abandoned. Certain states, however, don't have a free-for-all attitude toward garbage. In Texas, for example, the courts have found that depositing trash in a garbage bin does not constitute abandonment, per se, but rather the transfer of property from the owner to a waste-hauling firm.

The salon-owner case is complicated by the fact that whoever dumped the scripts in the trash likely wasn't authorized to do so. (There's speculation that actor Anna Kendrick is responsible since she had stayed in a hotel close to the garbage bin in question.) When actors, agents, managers, and so forth receive a script, they're often under legal obligation not to dispose of it in a manner that might expose it to pirates, the press, or the general public. A court might thus look upon the scripts as lost property (of the studio) rather than the abandoned property (of Kendrick or someone else). In that case, the studio would have a greater claim than the Dumpster diver.

Of course, there's a difference between the physical manuscripts found in the trash and their actual content. Finding a copy of The Catcher in the Rye on the sidewalk doesn't mean you have the rights to J.D. Salinger's story. Likewise, if the beauty salon owner had decided to post a significant amount of the script online, the studio could have gone after her for copyright infringement. Selling the scripts to a tabloid probably wouldn't have gone over well, either, since the studio might have been able to sue her for illegal distribution of copyrighted property. (Whether or not the studio could sue the tabloid would depend on how much of the script was reprinted.)

The Supreme Court did weigh in on the status of trash in 1988 but from a privacy rather than property standpoint. In that case, the court ruled that the police can search trash bags without a warrant because it's "common knowledge" that garbage is "readily accessible to animals, children, scavengers, snoops, and other members of the public." And, therefore, there's no "reasonable expectation of privacy" when it comes to discarded items.

Got a question about today's news? Ask the Explainer.

Explainer thanks Lior Strahilevitz of the University of Chicago Law School, attorney Paul D. Supnik, and Peter Yu of Drake Law School.

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

Juliet Lapidos is a Slate assistant editor.

Photograph of garbage bins by Stockbyte.

COMMENTS

I have heard that once you drop a letter into a US (blue) mailbox it is no longer yours. Is this true?

-- david wayne osedach
(To reply, click here)

I don't know about the US, but that's definitely true here in Canada.

One year I made a few bucks working as a "Christmas casual" at a mail sorting plant. In our orientation, we were told that if we happened to handle a card or letter which was addressed to us, and took it home instead of passing it through the system, we'd be fired on the spot, and perhaps charged with theft. Same if we found a letter we ourselves had written, but had changed our minds about wanting to send. The mail is the property of Canada Post from the minute it's dropped into a mailbox until the minute it's delivered to your house.

As for garbage, the Supreme Court of Canada has just ruled that you have no right to private garbage:

"The Supreme Court of Canada has dismissed an appeal from a convicted ecstasy trafficker who argued police violated his privacy rights by searching through his trash.

"In a 7-0 ruling issued Thursday, the court said Russell Stephen Patrick had abandoned his privacy rights when he put the garbage bags out for collection on the edge of his property behind his house.

"The bags were unprotected and within easy reach of anyone walking by in the public alleyway, including street people, bottle pickers, urban foragers, nosey neighbours and mischievous children, not to mention dogs and assorted wildlife, as well as the garbage collectors and the police," wrote the court.

-- Robert Beck
(To reply, click here)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES