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Template:Did you know nominations/CompuServe Inc. v. Cyber Promotions, Inc.

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The following discussion is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Allen3 talk 14:58, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

CompuServe Inc. v. Cyber Promotions, Inc. edit

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Created/expanded by Klueska (talk). Nominated by Ghoople (talk) at 19:29, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

  • The size and age of the article is fine. However, the article is a bit short on references. There are only two references for the entire article. Generally for Did you know, there should be at least one source per paragraph. Do you think you could add a few more? If you need any assistance I would be happy to help. Alpha_Quadrant (talk) 01:58, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

I've gone through and cited each paragraph to the original court case. I'd prefer if there were alternative sources, but for this case (as with many other law topics) linking directly to the case directly seems to be the preferable method. Ghoople (talk) 01:49, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

I've alerted klueska to this and am going to let him handle it. Ghoople (talk) 01:49, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

Hey guys. As the duplication detector was able to uncover, I did in fact use the netlitigation article as one of my sources when writing this article. I did not purposefully just pull text from it without proper citation, however, and have gone back through and tried to fix up references to it properly. There was at least one instance, that I know of, where I copied text directly and have now added quotation marks around it along with a citation. Alot of the other text flagged by the duplication detector is text used directly also in the court opinion, and is standard legal jargon ,which would be awkward to phrase any other way. Where appropriate then, I've tried to add citations to both references. Not including this article as reference to begin with was an oversite on my part and I never should have moved the page over from my sandbox before double checking I had put all of my references in. Let me know if more should be done to fix things up. I am not purposefully trying to violate any copyrights or steal someone else's work. Klueska (talk) 17:25, 5 March 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for your honesty, but please explain why you think the Netlitigation article copied directly from the court opinion. If that site is plagiarizing from the court opinion, it isn't suitable as a reliable source.
There are still issues with this article before it can be put on the main page as a DYK.
  1. Hook is unsourced.
  2. Close-paraphrasing remains:
    "Cyber Promotions also claimed a right to send spam under the free speech clause of the First Amendment" — copied wholesale
    "agreed to allow Cyber Promotions to send verifiably requested emails" — copied wholesale
    "CompuServe had effectively given Cyber Promotions consent to use its system since CompuServe’s email service allows subscribers to receive messages from outside the CompuServe internal network" vs. "CompuServe had effectively given Cyber Promotions consent to use its system by the fact that CompuServe’s e-mail service allows subscribers to receive messages from persons outside the CompuServe network"
  3. Ghoople "cited each paragraph to the original court case", I presume, without checking if the information cited was actually in the court opinion. Correct me if I'm wrong.
  4. Need more third-party sources. The article heavily relies upon the court opinion, a primary source. The article should be based upon more academic sources, like this article by Steven E. Bennett, which is mentioned only in passing in the article. Google Books and Google Scholar are good places to look.
Goodvac (talk) 00:13, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

To point #3 - I did check and verified that the paragraphs are generally drawn from the court case. I didn't do a thorough reading, but based on our previous discussions in class that seemed accurate. Ghoople (talk) 03:09, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

Okay, that's fine. I've stricken that sentence. Goodvac (talk) 08:56, 6 March 2012 (UTC)
I'll have a revised version with more sources and the paraphrasing fixed by the end of the day. I'll post back here once I've made my changes. 98.248.228.201 (talk) 15:49, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

I've tried to address all of the issues you've raised above. Let me know if more needs to be done. Klueska (talk) 06:25, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for the improvements. However, some more issues:
  1. The hook is still not sourced sufficiently. The sentence in the article is sourced to the court opinion, but there's no way the opinion would describe itself as among the first cases to apply US tort law to spamming.
  2. "In this case, it's clear that Cyber Promotions could have sent its advertisements to CompuServe’s subscribers through a number of different mediums" is the judge's opinion, but is not attributed to him.
  3. "The revival of the trespass to chattels doctrine in the context of cyberspace has had unexpected and far reaching consequences" is a quote thrown haphazardly into the article without integration. Either reword it (feel free to directly quote the key point—"unexpected and far reaching") or introduce the quote properly.
  4. "While both technological and regulatory solutions can be imposed to fight the spam problem, it is unclear which one's will turn out to prevail in the long run" — how is this relevant to the case?
  5. Needs copyediting for grammar and style throughout. I might take this on.
Goodvac (talk) 23:35, 7 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the feedback again. I'll start to address these in the morning. Klueska (talk) 07:52, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

In response to each of your above comments:
  1. I've moved the citation at the end of the first sentence to just after the words "one of the first", this is what I was trying to reference with this source anyway. Even if you don't have access to download the full article, clicking on the link to this source you can how this source is appropriate from the last sentence on the preview page.
  2. I've reworded parts of the paragraph this pertains to, and cited it appropriately. It's never been clear to me if/when I need to put a reference to the same source in a paragraph more than once, so I thought I'd just be better safe than sorry here. Feel free to fix this up if it's overkill.
  3. I've wrote my own sentence that integrates this quote as you suggested. This whole section could use some expansion still though (hopefully from someone more qualified than myself).
  4. I've just removed this line and its reference.
  5. I'll do a pass over the whole thing soon. Feel free to do the same.
Klueska (talk) 23:03, 8 March 2012 (UTC)

I've completed some spot checks, and here are some issues:

  1. The entire first paragraph of "Background", sourced to [1], fails verification. For example, where does it say CompuServe was an email service provider?
  2. "in the business of sending unsolicited email advertisements (spam) on behalf of themselves and their clients to hundreds of thousands of internet users, many of whom were CompuServe subscribers" is misquoted. Please maintain the capitalization of "Internet" from the text and bracket "spam".
  3. "False return addresses, relaying, and multihoming were among the questionable practices used by Cyber Promotions to bypass these filters"—how does the court opinion support that multihoming was used?
  4. What citation supports "In their defense, Cyber Promotion argued that CompuServe implicitly granted Cyber Promotions permission to send email through their serves since CompuServe’s email service allowed subscribers to receive email from outside their internal network (i.e. from any user on the Internet)."?
  5. What citation supports "The fact that Cyber Promotions actively tried to circumvent these filters only exacerbated the issue."?
  6. Please clean up the quotes in the following:

    The final consent order was served by the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on May 9, 1997, permanently enjoining Cyber Promotions from "causing, authorizing, participating in, or assisting others "to send unsolicited email to CompuServe e-mail addresses, or to employ any "false or misleading reference" to CompuServe "in the header of or in connection with any electronic message [5]."

Goodvac (talk) 22:40, 9 March 2012 (UTC)
I have copyedited the article. Once you rectify the above issues, I think it'll be ready to go. Goodvac (talk) 20:01, 10 March 2012 (UTC)
Regarding the issues above:

  1. I've moved this reference up one sentence (as it does give a good history of compuserve as it relates to AOL and its ISP capabilities), and added a new reference for the last sentence that talks about compuserve as an email provider (and when this happened).
  2. You've already stricken this out
  3. I grabbed this sentence directly from here(and gave credit to it in my comments). Digging further I found that this sentence was actually pulled directly from here(without giving credit), and that it refers to a different court case than the one discussed here. As a result, I've simply removed this line from the article.
  4. I've changed the wording for this to better match what was exactly stated in the court opinion, and added a citation for this.
  5. There is already a citation to this, and it refers to comments made near the end of section 1023 in the court opinion. In general, trying to circumvent "self-help" mechanisms (such as Compuserve's filters) weigh into a decision of whether a tort of trespass to chattels has occurred or not. Given that Compuserve obviously had put filters in place, the "exacerbation" of this issue comes from Judge Graham's comment that "defendants' persistent affirmative efforts to evade plaintiff's security measures have circumvented any protection those self-help measures might have provided."
  6. Fixed.

Klueska (talk) 23:02, 12 March 2012 (UTC)

Excellent, I am satisfied with how far this article has come. Thank you for your diligence in addressing my concerns! Goodvac (talk) 05:42, 14 March 2012 (UTC)


Great. Does this mean that it has now passed the DYK nomination and will appear on the front page soon? Klueska (talk) 18:12, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Yep. Good work! Goodvac (talk) 00:29, 15 March 2012 (UTC)
Just so this doesn't get overlooked - good to go. Moswento (talk | contribs) 10:13, 15 March 2012 (UTC)
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