Who owns "Robert X. Cringely"?

The obvious follow up, though, is: Who is Al Cringely? Stewart denies it...



Rohit



PS. I am missing the last 10 minutes from my videotape. Anyone else record it?



------------------------------------------------------------------------------



InfoWorld and Mr. Stephens

Sue Over Fictitious Supernerd



By DON CLARK

Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL



Robert X. Cringely and the Public Broadcasting Service told viewers a lot

about the history of the personal-computer industry Wednesday night. They left

out one interesting fact, though.



Robert X. Cringely doesn't exist.



The host of the three-hour documentary, "Triumph of the Nerds," is really

Mark C. Stephens, one of several authors of a popular gossip column in

InfoWorld magazine written under the Cringely pseudonym. Mr. Stephens, 43

years old, penned the column between 1987 and last December, when InfoWorld

cut him loose. But in a case with enough twists to give anybody an identity

crisis, the magazine and its parent, International Data Group Inc., sued Mr.

Stephens in March for trademark infringement to block his continued use of the

Cringely name.



So far, they haven't had much luck. In April, San Francisco Federal Judge

Robert Keeton denied IDG's request to bar Mr. Stephens from using the Cringely

name while the case is in court. The judge also granted Mr. Stephens's

request to have the case moved from Boston, headquarters of IDG, to San

Francisco, where Mr. Stephens filed his own suit. It charges IDG with

copyright infringement for using his Cringely work outside InfoWorld without

authorization. He claims IDG owes him as much as $735,000 and vows not to

settle without at least joint rights to use of the name.



That he even has a chance illustrates some murky nooks in

intellectual-property law, as well as apparent slip-ups by IDG, a closely held

company with $1.4 billion in sales but no lawyers on its payroll. Above all,

the tale is testimony to the opportunistic traits of Mr. Stephens, who came to

realize that the Cringely persona was more valuable than his own, to the

point that some people wonder where Cringely ends and Stephens begins.



"I chose to promote Bob rather than Mark," Mr. Stephens says. "It made sense

to keep my eggs in the most profitable basket."



Cringely, the Series?



In the magazine columns, Mr. Stephens, the third Cringely author, transformed

the character from a Sam Spade knockoff into an oversexed magazine editor who

trades racy repartee with Pammy, a fictional flame. Mr. Stephens has used

Cringely as a platform for a lucrative career outside InfoWorld as an author

and pundit. "Triumph of the Nerds," the PBS show, was based on "Accidental

Empires," a successful 1991 book Mr. Stephens wrote under the Cringely name.

He is working on another Cringely book and a possible TV series, and commands

up to $5,000 for Cringely speeches.



But few outside of InfoWorld know of the ruse. In "Nerds," Mr. Stephens, in

Cringely mode, tooled around Silicon Valley in his red Thunderbird

convertible, interviewing dozens of tech luminaries such as Bill Gates, Paul

Allen and Steve Jobs. Most of them didn't know Cringely is just a pen name.



"It was months before I learned that he wasn't named Bob," says Stephen

Segaller, who co-produced the show for Oregon Public Broadcasting. Blindsided

by the IDG lawsuit, OPB executives told Judge Keeton that reshooting the show

to expunge the Cringely name would expose them to claims from distributors and

broadcasters who had put up money for the show. "The timing was

excruciating," Mr. Segaller says.



Cringely has been an affliction to computer companies since 1986. The popular

column is rife with leaks about products, defects and consumer gripes. But in

the hands of Mr. Stephens, the line between author and alter ego blurred. Old

girlfriends of Mr. Stephens, for example, appeared in the column as

Cringely's old girlfriends-and continued to appear after his ouster. Mr.

Stephens introduces himself as "Bob Cringely," has a credit card in Cringely's

name and sometimes ponders real-life options by wondering what Cringely would

do.



Mr. Stephens's real life, meanwhile, at times reads almost like a novel. He

says he began writing obituaries for an Ohio newspaper at the age of 14 and

freelanced from Lebanon and other hot spots in his 20s. He claims a doctorate

in communications from Stanford University; it says its records show only a

master's degree. An accomplished stunt pilot, Mr. Stephens once blew his

savings on a propeller company.



Lucky Nerds



"Accidental Empires," which helped make Cringely a high-priced pundit, argues

that the industry was shaped by lucky nerds out to impress their friends.

That thesis grates on executives like Mr. Gates, chief of Microsoft Corp., who

also disputes an anecdote in the book that describes the billionaire as

scrounging in his pockets for coupons at a checkout counter. Mr. Stephens

stands by Cringely's account.



InfoWorld initially thought Mr. Stephens's outside activities were good

publicity. The magazine signed a 1989 contract that allowed him to write the

book, while reserving its rights to the Cringely name. But relations soured

between the writer and Stewart Alsop, an industry analyst and InfoWorld

executive vice president. In December 1994, Mr. Alsop fired Mr. Stephens, but

asked him to keep freelancing for $1,500 per Cringely column.



InfoWorld, however, neglected to get Mr. Stephens's approval to use his

articles outside of the magazine. After negotiations over a license to his

copyrights stalled, InfoWorld in December 1995 dumped Mr. Stephens altogether

and demanded that he stop using the Cringely name. Mr. Stephens refused,

demanding that IDG pay him $250,000 for violating his copyrights by publishing

his Cringely articles on the Internet's World Wide Web and elsewhere. That

was when InfoWorld and IDG sued him for trademark infringement.



"The issue is the confusion," explains Patrick McGovern, IDG's chief

executive officer. "We have a terrific column coming out as Cringely, and Mark

Stephens has nothing to do with that at all."



Character Issue



Courts usually side with trademark holders in such disputes. Actor Clayton

Moore, the Lone Ranger in the old television series, was blocked from

appearing in his Lone Ranger mask for five years by a company that was

promoting a movie using a different actor. But in the Cringely case, Mr.

Stephens makes the novel claim that his years of molding the Cringely

character entitle him to joint trademark rights. (The column is still running

under the Cringely name, under at least two different writers since Mr.

Stephens left.)



Judge Keeton mused in an April opinion that Cringely had indeed become a

jointly created fiction, raising "fundamental" legal questions that might

trouble even a legal Solomon. "The Robert X. Cringely of this litigation," he

said, "is indivisible."



Claude Stern, Mr. Stephens's lawyer, says IDG abandoned the Cringely

trademark by not adequately supervising Mr. Stephens's use of it. Veronica

Devitt, a San Francisco trademark expert, thinks such a defense won't work but

agrees that IDG erred in failing to get a copyright license from him. Says

Mr. Alsop: "We will not disagree with our opposition that we are human and

we've made mistakes."



To some, the case mainly points out the way the telephone and electronic mail

make it easy to sustain a fictional identity, in a way that perhaps can fool

even its creator. "It's a tale of Narcissus for the digital age," says Paul

Saffo, an analyst at the Institute for the Future, a think tank in Menlo Park,

Calif.



Insists Mr. Stephens: "I am Bob."

