... Well, it was an _HP_ mailing list. ;) Gil

Gil Carrick wrote: True. Still, it's cold comfort at best. Doc

... It would depend on the terms of the sale. Also, the bidders I remember from the article looked like legit users, not mailing list sellers. Gil

I know of one case where someone purchased a copy of AutoCAD at a US federal bankrupcy auction with paperwork stating that the sale was free and clear of any previous encumbrance. The slimeball started sell semi-legit Autocads and AutoDesk went after him, with little success! He has a letter from a federal judge saying he owned the software free of all encumbrance and could do what ever he wanted with it. Rumor was they ended up purchasing it for a undiscovered sum. There was a period of a year or two when Autodesk sent Buyers to BK auctions around the country with restraining orders to stop these sort of sales. Shortly after that the guidelines for buying and selling commercial software has been changed. Today encumbered doe not apply to distribution or copyright of commercial software unless it it the copyright holder being liquidated. Some ideas .... And by You, I am referring to every one affected or concerned by this, the more noise the better. Find out who the bidders are and contact their PR departments. Tell them you are aware that they are in the bidding for this database and if they use it to contact you or anyone of a number of contacts in that list, you along with other interested parties will be starting a very public campaign denouncing their third party use of personal information. You may want to spend a few bucks and register a throwaway domain name to scare them with. Host/loose it at a friendly or anonymous ISP and it will be weeks and thousands of dollars in legal legwork for them to find it and shut it down. (contact me if you need a suggestion) Contact the federal judge and express your concerns. Be very nice about it. Point out that it has been reported that he may be concedering the unrestricted sale of personal information to a third party and you want to know how people can opt-out and haver their information removed prior to the sale. You would also like to be notified who the purchaser is so you can prepare a restraining order preventing the use of your and other interested parties contact information. If it happens anyway : If you live in a no-spam state, file a small claims action for each and every contact the purchaser attempts. How many people does it take to have their lawyers running all over the country defending their rights to spam. I have not looked at the bidders list, but someone mentioned it looked like legit companies showing interest. start contacting their CEOs or PR department in protest. Then find whoever ran a user group 5Ml in debt and let then rot in a cell for a while. Just my 2 cents .... later Bob On Thu, 27 Oct 2005 23:35:43 -0700, Chuck Guzis wrote:

On Wed, 02 Nov 2005 17:50:22 -0800 "Stan Sieler" <sieler at allegro.com> wrote: Sounds like HP paid $65K to keep anybody else from getting a list of their own ex-customers. Which seems like a reasonable thing to do, really. And it's chump-change for HP. -- http://sasteven.multics.org/MacSE30/MacSE30.html

Stan Sieler wrote: I have to wonder if that isn't pure proactive damage control on the part of HP. Even if they burn that list (figuratively speaking), $65,000 is dirt cheap compared to the cost of a single nuisance suit blaming HP for letting someone's contact info out. Even with HP this far back up the chain, something like that could easily happen. Doc