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 COLUMN
No free speech @Home for critic who posts service documents to newsgroup SOMETIMES IT SEEMS the only legalese that defenders of intellectual property on the Internet haven't read is the Bill of Rights.
Participants in an @Home-run newsgroup that focused on @Home service topics were the ones up in arms. One of their participants, an AT&T@Home customer named Wesley, had his account shut down by @Home within hours of posting some @Home and/or cable company documents to the newsgroup. The documents included technical support procedures and refund policies, leaving many @Home customers feeling Wesley was guilty only of giving them ammunition to deal with the service outages they've experienced. "What Wesley posted was useful information to us because the techs always assume that the problem is on our end," wrote one @Home customer who participates in the service newsgroup. "The documents that Wesley posted proved this mind-set. The refund procedures and policies were relevant because we all had different results when asking for credit when e-mail went down. The documents clearly explained under what conditions customers could be given credit when an outage affected them." Although it seemed harsh to have one's Internet account closed over a newsgroup posting, it was no surprise @Home would be hypersensitive -- the company has suffered from leaked documents before. Last year's notorious "upload rate cap" came to the attention of most customers, and the press, only after a document from @Home to the cable companies was posted on the Internet. What caught my attention, however, was that Wesley posted some of the documents he'd obtained from an unknown source on several free Web hosting services, only to suddenly have those pages taken down. It was time to talk to Wesley. Wesley thinks he did nothing wrong in posting the material he had obtained. "I didn't post anything that's a trade secret," he says. "The main complaint people have [in the newsgroup] is the lack of communication from @Home to customers and between @Home and [the cable providers]; and that's what I was addressing. If it wasn't pertinent or if it was something that I thought could cause damage to @Home with its competitors, I didn't use it." Wesley originally posted some of his documents at the Webjump.com free hosting service, but they disappeared after a week. He then posted them at Lycos' Angelfire.com service, but again the page was soon taken down. Finally, he posted a set of documents in the @Home service newsgroup, and a few hours later his @Home Internet account was terminated. Wesley says he received no warning or requests to remove any of the material before his account was closed. The only explanation he says he received was from an @Home tech who said he was guilty of making "off-topic posts" -- an accusation that was clearly off base in a newsgroup about @Home service issues. He's still trying to find out whether AT&T, the company he actually pays for service, knows why and how he was terminated. Excite@Home officials say Wesley violated state and federal laws, infringing on their intellectual property by publishing stolen documents. "These are our confidential and copyrighted documents shared with our cable partners and not intended for the public," says John Sullivan, associate general counsel for Excite@Home. "What Wesley did was an infringement of intellectual property and trade secret rights." In Sullivan's view, many of the documents Wesley posted have no bearing on the issues users were discussing. And although Wesley says he received no notice of why his pages were closed down, Sullivan says Webjump.com and Angelfire.com both sent him infringement notifications as prescribed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act after Sullivan informed them of the infringement. "The way it was done was exactly how the statute foresaw we should all act, except for Wesley." Is Wesley a criminal? Or just using the Internet to tell the world what it needs to know? Professional journalists know we walk an indistinct and wavy line dealing with leaked documents that might be considered proprietary information. Did Wesley cross that line? Who knows. But as a journalist, I am concerned about what it means for free speech and a free press on the Internet when information individuals feel they are disseminating in the public good can disappear without warning or appeal. Got a complaint about how a vendor is treating you? Contact InfoWorld's reader advocate, Ed Foster , at gripe@infoworld.com.  RELATED SUBJECTS  Business NewsPortalsTelephonyDiscuss this article in our online forums MORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
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