Compuserve

Cyber Promotions Inc., the Philadelphia marketing firm that sued America Online for limiting its ability to deliver "junk" electronic mail, now finds itself in a legal battle with CompuServe as well. A federal judge in Columbus, Ohio, where CompuServe is headquartered, has set a hearing Dec. 5 to consider that online service's request for an injunction against Cyber Promotions. This is while a federal judge in Philadelphia is weighing arguments on whether there is a constitutional issue of free speech involved in Cyber Promotion's lawsuit, which contends that AOL, of Dulles, Va., is trying to drive it out of business.

For the second time, a federal court has ruled against a Philadelphia "junk" e-mailer that has drawn the wrath of America's two largest online services. This time, a federal judge in Ohio declared that bulk mail sent by Cyber Promotions Inc. to CompuServe subscribers amounts to computer trespassing. CompuServe, of Columbus, Ohio, filed suit against Cyber Promotions last year, saying that its host computers were bogged down with junk e-mail, and that subscribers were complaining bitterly about having to sift through their electronic mailboxes while the meter was running on their CompuServe accounts.

In what one analyst described as a "strategic retrenchment," CompuServe, the granddaddy of the commercial online services, has decided it will not compete with America Online and other services that are slashing rates to draw subscribers. The company also said it would kill its family-oriented WOW! service effective Jan. 31. The service was started in March, but had attracted only about 100,000 subscribers. "We are walking away from the bloodbath in the mass-consumer market in which hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent" in marketing efforts to gain subscribers, Scott Kauffman, CompuServe's vice president of interactive services, said yesterday in explaining the new strategy.

America Online, the Internet behemoth, will gobble up the 2.6 million subscribers of the struggling No. 2 online service, CompuServe, in a complex deal that redefines what it means to be big in cyberspace. In the transaction announced yesterday, America Online and WorldCom Inc., a telecommunications company based in Jackson, Miss., said they would split CompuServe's consumer and commercial businesses once WorldCom buys CompuServe for $1.2 billion. H&R Block, which owns 80 percent of CompuServe, has been in search of a buyer for the money-losing service for the last year.

It started as an investigation into child pornography by a local prosecutor in Germany, but it quickly escalated into a test case that could profoundly affect the international development of commercial online services and the Internet. At issue is whether CompuServe, the online service, and other Internet access outfits can be defined as media outlets that are subject to censorship laws, or as mere messengers, like phone companies, that are not responsible for what is carried over their lines.

Unisys Corp. thought it was just protecting an old patent, but the Blue Bell company now finds itself the target of "flame wars" in cyberspace similar to the heat Intel Corp. recently took over its flawed Pentium chip. Bulletin boards on the Internet and a user's forum on CompuServe have been barraged with hundreds of insults aimed at Unisys for attempts to protect its intellectual property. At issue is the patent on what was originally thought to be technology that was in the public domain and could be used without charge: a software algorithm used to view digital pictures and other on-line graphics.

A federal judge in Philadelphia yesterday said the Justice Department violated a court order - and its own promise - when a complaint about allegedly indecent sexual material on the CompuServe online service was referred to the FBI. U.S. District Judge Stewart Dalzell, one of three judges presiding over a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the new Communications Decency Act, or CDA, ordered the government not to make any such referrals while...

The Viewtron videotex service, which offers bank-by-computer and information-retrieval services for home-computer owners, will cease operations within a few weeks, its owners announced yesterday. Knight-Ridder Newspapers Inc., which owns Philadelphia Newspapers Inc., the publisher of The Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, said it was terminating Viewtron because it would cost too much to maintain it until it became profitable. The Viewtron announcement followed by just three days the demise of Gateway, a similar home videotex service operated in Southern California by Times-Mirror Co., publisher of the Los Angeles Times.

A SNOWBALL FIGHT NEVER TASTED THIS SWEET Organizers of what promised to be the world's largest snowball fight yesterday didn't let a little lack of snow deter them. They simply found another soft white concoction: marshmallows. So instead of aiming for a snowball record, organizers of the event in the Chicago suburb of Skokie hoped to earn a Guinness Book mention as the world's largest marshmallow fight. Thousands of children, and a smattering of adults, tossed or chewed on 130,000 marshmallows poured from 2,500 bags.

It's 3 a.m., nine days before Christmas, and - thank goodness - Bloomingdale's is open. For that matter, so are Waldenbooks, Pepperidge Farm and the gift shop of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. If you have a home computer, a modem and a credit card, the shopping mall is as close as your desktop. No parking hassles. No crowds. No lines at the cashier. Nothing but your holiday-battered judgment standing between you and, say, a $2,489 African safari from Air France.

When Thomas Powers was 17 years old in 1984, things were different. Ronald Reagan was the president of the United States, the Soviet Union still existed, and The Terminator gave moviegoers a glimpse of Judgment Day. But life in general was dissimilar from today. "I spent my day driving around looking for a job and something to do," Powers, an Academy Park High graduate said. "If I wanted to find something out, I'd either have to go to the library or talk to somebody on the street," Powers said.

With our smartphones, on-demand video and Twitter feeds in 2012, it's hard to relate to the challenges that confronted the team that started Infonautics Inc. in 1992. No one was getting online back then, unless you were a devotee of CompuServe or Prodigy dial-up services. Information was not at our fingertips instantly. Infonautics cofounders Marvin Weinberger and Josh Kopelman aimed to change that with a subscription service called Homework Helper, a pre-Internet reference service that provided full-text access to articles from more than a thousand newspapers, newswires, magazines, books and TV and radio transcripts.

Tel-Save Holdings, Inc., the New Hope-based telephone company that pioneered an online billing system, said yesterday it has been in talks to be acquired by "a number of potential suitors. " In a flurry of announcements, Tel-Save said it had signed an exclusive multiyear deal to sell long-distance phone service to the more than 2 million members of CompuServe's online service. And it said it plans to start reselling local phone service in the second or third quarter of this year.

The Justice Department said yesterday that it was reviewing America Online's plan to acquire the 2.6 million customers of its closest competitor, CompuServe Corp. AOL has about nine million subscribers and is the nation's biggest online service. The federal review will focus on making sure the deal won't stifle competition or lead to higher prices for access to the Internet. Under the proposal announced Monday, CompuServe's parent, H&R Block Inc., will sell the subsidiary to WorldCom Inc. in a stock swap worth $1.2 billion.

America Online, the Internet behemoth, will gobble up the 2.6 million subscribers of the struggling No. 2 online service, CompuServe, in a complex deal that redefines what it means to be big in cyberspace. In the transaction announced yesterday, America Online and WorldCom Inc., a telecommunications company based in Jackson, Miss., said they would split CompuServe's consumer and commercial businesses once WorldCom buys CompuServe for $1.2 billion. H&R Block, which owns 80 percent of CompuServe, has been in search of a buyer for the money-losing service for the last year.

For the second time, a federal court has ruled against a Philadelphia "junk" e-mailer that has drawn the wrath of America's two largest online services. This time, a federal judge in Ohio declared that bulk mail sent by Cyber Promotions Inc. to CompuServe subscribers amounts to computer trespassing. CompuServe, of Columbus, Ohio, filed suit against Cyber Promotions last year, saying that its host computers were bogged down with junk e-mail, and that subscribers were complaining bitterly about having to sift through their electronic mailboxes while the meter was running on their CompuServe accounts.

Hey, America Online subscribers! CompuServe will have a message for you during the Super Bowl. The No. 2 online service is running a commercial titled "Busy Signal. " That would be what many people say they get, over and over, when trying to access America Online, even as the computer service continues to sign up new subscribers. "The most difficult thing was listening to the busy signal . . . and hearing an ad for AOL on the TV right next to the computer," Gary Arlen, an Internet industry analyst in Bethesda, Md., said in an interview.

In what one analyst described as a "strategic retrenchment," CompuServe, the granddaddy of the commercial online services, has decided it will not compete with America Online and other services that are slashing rates to draw subscribers. The company also said it would kill its family-oriented WOW! service effective Jan. 31. The service was started in March, but had attracted only about 100,000 subscribers. "We are walking away from the bloodbath in the mass-consumer market in which hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent" in marketing efforts to gain subscribers, Scott Kauffman, CompuServe's vice president of interactive services, said yesterday in explaining the new strategy.

Cyber Promotions Inc., the Philadelphia marketing firm that sued America Online for limiting its ability to deliver "junk" electronic mail, now finds itself in a legal battle with CompuServe as well. A federal judge in Columbus, Ohio, where CompuServe is headquartered, has set a hearing Dec. 5 to consider that online service's request for an injunction against Cyber Promotions. This is while a federal judge in Philadelphia is weighing arguments on whether there is a constitutional issue of free speech involved in Cyber Promotion's lawsuit, which contends that AOL, of Dulles, Va., is trying to drive it out of business.

America Online's recent decision to block some "junk" electronic mail from its system has ignited an important legal debate about the nature of companies that provide Internet access to individuals. Are such companies like newspapers, which have property rights and the ability to decide what information they carry? Or are they common carriers, like phone companies? Those questions - raised directly in a lawsuit brought against AOL by a temporarily thwarted bulk e-mail distributor, Cyber Productions Inc., of Dresher, Pa. - are more than academic.