Theodore Kaczynski, the infamous unabomber whose 18-year terror campaign killed three and injured 28, is now embroiled in a legal battle with the U.S. government for control of his writings.

Kaczynski, 64, is serving a life sentence for a string of murders from 16 mail bombingscarried out from1978 to 1995 in the UnitedStates.

The former mountain hermit is citing the First Amendment in his attempt to salvage more than 40,000 pages of his scribblings and manuscripts.

The protest from Kaczynski comes after a federal appeals court in San Francisco decided to auction off the Chicago-born anarchist's diaries, correspondence, and drafts of his Industrial Society and Its Future, commonly referred to as the unabomber's manifesto.

The federal government ruled the funds raised should be paid out to four of Kaczynski's bombing victims, who are owed $15 million by a court order in a civil suit.

That ruling raised controversy even before Kaczynski objected.

Kaczynski's younger brother David,whose tips led the FBI to finally arrest the unabomber in 1996, said his family had reservations about the sale, although hesaid he was in favour of anything that would help his brother's victims.

"In a personal sense, having these letters treated as murderabilia is appalling to us. How do you balance the need for human decency and dignity with doing the best thing?" David Kaczynski said.

Even the four victims were at first divided over whether the documents should be sold.

In an interview with the New York Times, one of the four victims seeking restitution, Gary Wright, spoke about the difficulty in reaching a consensus with the other victims.

Wright became the 11th unabomber victim when he was seriously wounded in 1987 by a bomb disguised as a piece of lumber.

"How do you take four people and try to come to an agreement when they have been wronged in different ways and are in different stages of healing with different types of losses?" Wright said to the New York Times. "I'm sure that emotions were running rampant and that people were reliving it."

The appeals court had ordered that any references to the victims and musings on their suffering — topics Kaczynski had touched upon in his journals — be edited out of the originals.

But a lawyer for Kaczynski, John Balazs, said Kaczynski had wished for his writings to be preserved and donated to a library at the University of Michigan that houses materials documenting the history of anarchism and other radical movements.

Confiscating and altering his work is not within the government's rights, Kaczynski argued in a handwritten motion. He challenged that deleting anything from the writings would violate his right to free expression.

"Did he worry about the rights of Hugh Scrutton, Tom Mosser or Gil Murray, from whom he took the right to live?" Susan Mosser countered in an e-mail to the New York Times. The widow, whose husband, Tom, died 12 years ago, after opening one of Kaczynski's mail bombs, is one of the parties seeking restitution.

David Kaczynskihas reached out to dozens of his brother's victims, expressing through personal letters and one-on-one meetings the grief the Kaczynski family has suffered with them.

"I'm in favour of anything that would help the victims," he said in an interview with the New York Times.

But hehas acknowledged his family "has a stake in preserving our privacy and dignity," since a collection of letters he had sent to his brother over 25 years will be among the documents. "But our dignity is compromised by having our letters to Ted transformed into letters of curiosity for some collector of celebrity murder cases."

Between 1978 and 1995, Theodore Kaczynski planned a series of deadly mail bombings from his remote Montana Cabin as an onslaught against modern technology.

Hetargeted university professors, scientists and business executives who he believed could bring about dangerous advances in technology, earning him the FBI moniker unabomber, for "university and airline bomber."

He was captured in 1996 and pleaded guilty in 1998, avoiding the death penalty but receiving a life prison term without possibility of parole.