> I agree completely. Obviously CMP felt that some limit had been exceeded
> and wanted to voice their opinion. Jim did, in my opinion, the courteous
> and honorable thing as well. However, their letter sounded threatening
> (legally) and now, since it was within the law, did Jim *really* do the right
> thing by going along with them? Wasn't he "forced" into doing the "right
> thing" by threat of legal action?
What distubed me most about the entire affair was the way in which I was
asked to change TLOFCRP. I've been asked in the past to consider
making changes to various things I've put on the WWW, always by a polite
and simple e-mail message by someone expressing their disagreement with
what I've said. In return I've almost always agreed with what they've
said and made the requested changes or politely replied why I felt the
material should remain unaltered.
In this case, though, instead of receiving a simple e-mail message from
someone at CMP--perhaps in the form of a little warning about how others
within their organization might interpret what I'd said--I was sent a
cease-and-desist style letter from their corporate council. Perhaps this
is the way their company works--if so, perhaps the lesson to take away
from this is that large companies, including all of their official
policies and buerocratic ways, are coming on-line and we need to act
accordingly.
As for whether or not I should have taken a stand against CMP, when I made
my decision I simply weighed what I could possibly have gained by tangling
with the multi-million dollar publisher--the right to continue to include a
single paragraph in an on-line publication which earns me no money--with
what I could have lost--time and money in having to hire an attorney, fly
out to NY (I assume this is where venue would be) and possibly lose some
sort of judgement and have to pay damages. While perhaps not the
spirited thing to do, it really didn't seem like their was any other choice.
-- =============================================================================== Jim Huguelet huguelet@sun.soci.niu.edu Northern Illinois University http://www.soci.niu.edu/~huguelet/Author of "THE List of Free Computer-Related Publications" <URL: http://www.soci.niu.edu/~huguelet/TLOFCRP/>