FC: Reuters reports info on Swedish firm's public website, gets sued

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

[This is insanely silly. Intentia (the plaintiff) did not take the proper, 
trivial technical precautions and instead put the info up on the web at a 
predictable URL. Embarrassed at its lack of technical clue, it seeks to 
invoke the law instead -- in a move that would set a terrible precedent. 
--Declan]

---

LAWSUIT ALLEGES SNOOPING ON PUBLIC WEB PAGES
A small technology company in Sweden has filed a lawsuit alleging that
Reuters violated the law when it obtained and published information
from an earnings report on the Web. The data were on a Web page
accessible by anyone who entered the correct URL. The Web page, though,
was not linked from elsewhere on the company's site, according to the
company. A spokesman from the company said the lawsuit could have
important implications about what is considered public versus private
information. If the court rules that the information Reuters obtained
was public, he said, then potentially everything on a company's Web
server could be considered public.
Associated Press, 28 October 2002

News coverage:

http://www.zdnet.com.au/newstech/security/story/0,2000024985,20269450,00.htm

http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/money/story/0,4386,151717,00.html
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1035389344290 




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