mo@uunet.UU.NET (Mike O'Dell) (03/18/88)
The USENIX Association does NOTE sell its membership list. It does do mailings for companies who pay for it, but the Association goes to some lengths to prevent the list from falling into "inappropriate" hands. Materials must be delivered to the Assocation "mail ready" except for mailing labels, which are then affixed by Association personnel and then delivered to the Post Office by Association personnel. How come you are getting mail from what appears to be the Attendees's List?? It is not at all unlikely that a person from some company registers for the conference and then takes the list which he gets for doing so and then gives it to a group of data entry people who simply type it in. Quite frankly, that is a very, very cheap way to get what is probably a very high-quality maling list. There is very little the Association can do about that since the list was acquired completely legally. What was inappropriate was the use to which it was placed. If you are quite sure some solicitation is a result of misuse of your USENIX registration information, by all means tell the offending company about it. Telling them that you would never buy anything from someone who misuses information will get their attention if enough people say it. As for info from Dallas, it is quite possible that /usr/group sells their registration list from UNIFORUM via some mechanism, and since they know which registrations were cross-registrations from USENIX, that information might be available in the list, too. Also, the person writing the solicitation might not know the difference between USENIX and UNIFORMUM. So, USENIX ain't doing it, but there isn't a lot the Association administration can do about it. You, on the other hand, can tell companies you don't appreciate their marketting tactics. Sometimes that gets their attention, sometimes not. -Mike O'Dell Board Candidate
bcn@june.cs.washington.edu (Clifford Neuman) (03/19/88)
I believe that all (or at least most) attendees of the Usenix conference were automatically signed up for registration at Uniforum. I know that I had a Uniforum badge included with my Usenix registration. I would expect that it is the Uniforum list which made it out to the vendors. ~ Cliff
ado@elsie.UUCP (Arthur David Olson) (03/20/88)
< How come you are getting mail from what appears to be < the Attendees's List?? It is not at all unlikely that < a person from some company registers for the conference < and then takes the list which he gets for doing so and then < gives it to a group of data entry people who simply < type it in. Quite frankly, that is a very, very < cheap way to get what is probably a very high-quality < maling list. There is very little the Association can do < about that since the list was acquired completely legally. A group I'm associated with copyrights such lists to at least make known its intention that the lists not be used this way. Usenix, being big enough to afford lawyers, might even be able to make a few bucks off of copyright infringement using this technique. :-) -- ado@vax2.nlm.nih.gov ADO, VAX, and NIH are Ampex and DEC trademarks
ed@mtxinu.UUCP (Ed Gould) (03/22/88)
>A group I'm associated with copyrights such lists to at least make known >its intention that the lists not be used this way. Usenix, being big enough >to afford lawyers, might even be able to make a few bucks off of copyright >infringement using this technique. :-) Yes, Usenix has laywers. And they've said that such copyrights afford essentially no protection. -- Ed Gould mt Xinu, 2560 Ninth St., Berkeley, CA 94710 USA {ucbvax,uunet}!mtxinu!ed +1 415 644 0146 "`She's smart, for a woman, wonder how she got that way'..."