"Louis J. Judice 04-May-1991 0845" <judice@sulaco.enet.dec.com> (05/04/91)
It's a tribute to the wide circulation of this Digest and the popularity of BBS systems - here at DEC, I received no less than twelve copies of the "Prodigy/Fraudigy" article from various sources in my internal E-mail. When I looked at the headers, I found that most originated in one place, but ended up being routed virtually all over the company - I bet 50% of our E-mail subscribers received a copy of it one way or another. I sent the well written counter-argument (by the Hayes person, whose name escapes me) to the top level of each routing chain, so it will be interesting to see if a less hysterical article gets fowarded so rapidly. What worries me is - let's say Prodigy was a startup company, and it was ruined by the negative publicity generated by this nonsense. Could the ORIGINAL poster be responsible? Could intermediate mail systems or BBS's be held liable? The oddest thing about this is when you ask someone who flies into your office "would you REALLY believe that IBM/Sears would REALLY do such a thing", the answer is always - "Well, No, of course not". "So, why forward the article?" ljj
news@ucsd.edu> (05/08/91)
In article <telecom11.329.8@eecs.nwu.edu> judice@sulaco.enet.dec.com (Louis J. Judice 04-May-1991 0845) writes: > The oddest thing about this is when you ask someone who flies into > your office "would you REALLY believe that IBM/Sears would REALLY do > such a thing", the answer is always - "Well, No, of course not". "So, > why forward the article?" The easy response to this is that corporate policy is not always what ends up being implemented. If the constomer representatives are so incredibly ignorant about Prodigy and Prodigy policies (as they were shortly before this hit the news), it's makes you wonder how far up the ladder this goes. In addition, we know all about those wacky programmers ( :) ), such as the one who got Microsoft in big trouble with his "Warning, pirated copy, wiping hard disk" message or whatever it was. On the surface, it would be really, really, stupid for Prodigy to engage in information theft, wouldn't it? Yep. So: Infoworld Magazine reports that Soap Opera Now, a weekly newsletter covering TV soaps, has sued Prodigy Services Company. Apparently, Prodigy started an online soap opera service last August and a number of stories from Soap Opera Now began appearing online verbatim. Michael Kape, editor of the 6500 subscriber weekly arranged for publication of a totally fictitious story with the consent of the story's subject. According to Kape, it appeared on the Prodigy service with virtually the same wording. The lawsuit seeks damages of $38 for each of Prodigy's 700,000 subscribers. Prodigy refused to comment on the story. Standard disclaimer applies, you legalistic hacks. | Ron Dippold