I hope everyone can forgive a late response on this:
At 12:41 PM 6/21/97 -0700, Sam Brooks wrote:
>Rather than get embroiled in a "my dad can whup your dad" kinda argument,
>may I suggest that list members hustle their browsers over to the website
>of the HTML Writers Guild at http://www.hwg.org
>in particular go to http://www.hwg.org/lists/rules.htm#5
>In a nutshell, price discussions are verboten on their mailing lists.
>Surely, some corporate attorney put a bug in someone's ear about
>the possibility of "price fixing" litigation. I do believe that
>the term for such activity is known as risk management.
Actually, in the case of the Guild, it was informal contact between
the original HWG listowner, and a US Government representative,
who advised us that we want to say clear of anything that could be
construed by a zealous prosecutor out to "tame the net" as price
fixing.
In particular, you can't have people from an industry get together
in private and go "what should we charge for <X>?" A mailing list
run by an organization of web designers may be "non-public", so
we have to worry about that.
The Majordomo-Users list may, or may not, be considered "non-
public". I for one wouldn't want to take the chance of being
sued, though.
>This is a big group, something like 50,000 members. Mucho resources.
>Why do you think they are frightened?
Well, actually, our resources aren't huge -- and this rule was
instituted when we had far fewer members. But I think it's a
prudent rule, at least for the Guild.
--
Kynn Bartlett <kynn@hwg.org> | New Plus Member Services:
Vice President, The HTML Writers Guild | RFP Program, Plus-Mailing Lists,
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