BNSF sues former employee for Internet related wrong-doing

MINNEAPOLIS -- The Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad is suing a former employee in a case that could help determine whether sensitive corporate information mistakenly sent over the Internet becomes public information, according to the Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune.

South St. Paul, Minn., resident William Purdy claims the railroad's attempt to obtain a restraining order against him amounts to prior restraint and violation of the First Amendment because payroll information the railroad sent to his Web site is already in his hands and thus in the public domain.

Burlington Northern, which formerly was based in St. Paul, also is attempting to stop Purdy from using the BNSF.org Web address, which is similar to the company's BNSF.com address.

Federal Magistrate Judge Donovan Frank will consider the railroad's request for an injunction Monday.

Trademark and computer law specialists said Thursday that Purdy could have difficulty proving that internal corporate documents can be publicly circulated just because they accidentally fell into his possession.

"This is a trade secret question," said Niels Schaumann, a computer law professor at the William Mitchell College of Law. "The fact that a secret has been mistakenly disclosed to one person doesn't mean the beans have been spilled to the whole world."

Stephen Baird of Fish & Richardson said as a work product, the corporate documents probably are protected by copyright laws.

"They're not something of his authorship," said Baird, who practices trademark law in the Minneapolis office of the Boston-based firm.

Railroad spokesman Steve Forsberg said the documents obtained by Purdy contain salaries and Social Security numbers for several hundred company employees, including upper executives.

"This is railroad property. No other party has a right to that information," Forsberg said.

Because Burlington Northern is a publicly traded company, the salaries of its highest-paid executives are filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. But the list of employee salaries obtained by Purdy goes far beyond that.

The restraining order is the culmination of a decade of ill will between Burlington Northern and Purdy, 50, who was fired for insubordination in 1989.

Purdy, a safety advocate who once took his views onto the Oprah Winfrey show, said he was fired for insisting that safety procedures be followed by the book. Purdy said his safety awareness was heightened after an accident in which a co-worker's legs were severed by train wheels.

Purdy's Web site, which features a depiction of dripping blood at the top, is filled with critical comments about Burlington Northern and its executives, including items written by other employees regarding workplace concerns.

He wants to publish management salaries to show how much is being spent on management instead of crossing signals, said his attorney, Norman Friedrichs, a Minneapolis lawyer who specializes in patent and trademark law.

Purdy registered the mark BNSF with the U.S. Patent & Trademark office in 1996, after the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe railroads merged. But he started using BNSF.org after the railroad obtained the domain name BNSF.com. "I own the federal registration. They own nothing," Purdy said.

In addition to mistakenly receiving corporate salary documents, Purdy also received a confidential access code to a corporate conference call among railroad executives to discuss pollution cleanup efforts, according to court documents and Purdy.

In court papers, railroad attorneys said the material was sent to Purdy by accident and that he was able to receive it because as his Web site's administrator, all misaddressed e-mail would come to him.