The List That Was Never Taken

A union was trying to organize the employees of a large Toronto hotel. The hotel treated its staff list as confidential and had refused to hand it over. The Accused, hired by someone he assumed was working for the union, approached a security guard at the hotel and offered him money to obtain the names, addresses and telephone numbers of the employees. The guard was not authorized to look at personnel files or payroll printouts and knew the hotel considered the information confidential. He reported the approach instead. The case proceeded on an agreed statement of facts: if the scheme had gone ahead, no document, disk or other physical object would have left the hotel. The information would simply have been copied. The Accused was charged with counselling the guard to commit theft and to commit fraud. The question was whether confidential information, on its own, is 'anything' that can be stolen, and whether copying it would have defrauded the hotel.