I work for a small company. But our business is almost exclusively phone/internet based.
My company has an ongoing history of bad telco relations.
We had a problem with being slammed by some no-name long distance carrier. They took our lines, and then when we refused to pay them, they refused to relinquish control of our lines. At one point, they even cut off our long distance phone service for a week or so because of it.
We sued them - claiming that we lost good will from customers and lost sales because our phones weren't working and for a few months after that we got phone calls with questions like "I thought you guys were out of businesS". We ended up settling for a decent sum. Yay good guys.
We are currently embroiled in a non-slamming conflict with none other than AT&T. They are our local and long distance provider.
Their salesman came out to our office a long time ago and quoted us all sorts of prices and zones and assorted salesman crap. Then after a while we noticed our phone bills were higher than they should have been. We talked to their billing guys and they agreed that we were paying the wrong amount. At that point we were still paying the bills and we spent a couple of months with their billing department trying to straighten it all out. After a while, we said screw it and stopped paying the bills. We told them the whole time that we'd pay it as soon as they sent us a bill with the rates we were quoted.
That's still going on! Every once in a while we get a call from their collection people saying we owe them some $30,000. We always tell them the same story about paying it when they pull their head out of their ass. The collection guy goes away "to check on it" and we never hear from him again.
I can't wait to see how this turns out... phone companies suck. All of them.
It should be up to the lawyers to argue, and up to the judge to decide if a piece of email was intended as official or casual. A 6 month expiration doesn't make sense.
If an executive at a company says something atrocious at a meeting - when he's speaking as an official representative of the company. Handing down policy. That's one thing. Whereas a conversation with the same executive in front of urinals is quite another and not open to litigation.
Likewise, when Bill Gates emailed folks to cut off netscape's air supply, he was speaking in an official capacity. He was dictating a corporate policy which was relevant in court. I gather that this proposal would prevent those emails from being admissible - that sucks.
I realize there are problems with leaving it up to a judge to decide in what context a message was sent. Just as an astute judge should be able to decide that if I tell my webmaster that I'll kill him if the web page goes down again. Somebody has to decide these things... that's why they call them judges.
It's the context, not the medium that's important. A casual conversation or a casual email or a casual winpopup message (super ephemeral!) or a casual anything should be viewed as such.
A policy dictating winpopup message should be treated as the serious piece of lawsuit-bait that it is.
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My company has an ongoing history of bad telco relations.
We had a problem with being slammed by some no-name long distance carrier. They took our lines, and then when we refused to pay them, they refused to relinquish control of our lines. At one point, they even cut off our long distance phone service for a week or so because of it.
We sued them - claiming that we lost good will from customers and lost sales because our phones weren't working and for a few months after that we got phone calls with questions like "I thought you guys were out of businesS". We ended up settling for a decent sum. Yay good guys.
We are currently embroiled in a non-slamming conflict with none other than AT&T. They are our local and long distance provider.
Their salesman came out to our office a long time ago and quoted us all sorts of prices and zones and assorted salesman crap. Then after a while we noticed our phone bills were higher than they should have been. We talked to their billing guys and they agreed that we were paying the wrong amount. At that point we were still paying the bills and we spent a couple of months with their billing department trying to straighten it all out. After a while, we said screw it and stopped paying the bills. We told them the whole time that we'd pay it as soon as they sent us a bill with the rates we were quoted.
That's still going on! Every once in a while we get a call from their collection people saying we owe them some $30,000. We always tell them the same story about paying it when they pull their head out of their ass. The collection guy goes away "to check on it" and we never hear from him again.
I can't wait to see how this turns out... phone companies suck. All of them.
If an executive at a company says something atrocious at a meeting - when he's speaking as an official representative of the company. Handing down policy. That's one thing. Whereas a conversation with the same executive in front of urinals is quite another and not open to litigation.
Likewise, when Bill Gates emailed folks to cut off netscape's air supply, he was speaking in an official capacity. He was dictating a corporate policy which was relevant in court. I gather that this proposal would prevent those emails from being admissible - that sucks.
I realize there are problems with leaving it up to a judge to decide in what context a message was sent. Just as an astute judge should be able to decide that if I tell my webmaster that I'll kill him if the web page goes down again. Somebody has to decide these things... that's why they call them judges.
It's the context, not the medium that's important. A casual conversation or a casual email or a casual winpopup message (super ephemeral!) or a casual anything should be viewed as such.
A policy dictating winpopup message should be treated as the serious piece of lawsuit-bait that it is.
It's the meaning, not the medium!