I thought this was interesting:
http://www.nationalpost.com/artslife/story.html?f=/stories/20000708/338343.html Here's an exerpt (deja vue):
Grose says that when he received the scathing e-mail he was baffled. "I didn't know what the hell Glen was talking about. When I found out what the joke was, I couldn't believe it."
But worse was to come. "I'm just getting my head around the e-mail and I look at the top and I see he's cc'd a bunch of other people." Those "other people" appear to be the entire contents of Foster's address book, a good representation of the Canadian comedy industry: members of the Yuk Yuk's chain, CTV executives, Just For Laughs poobahs, club owners, agents and other comics.
Grose, who has been a stand-up for eight years, insists he came up with the joke independently of Foster, and says he would have been happy to talk it over with Foster in private and settle things amicably. But the mass mailing to the comedy industry distressed him.
And more e-mails were to come.
"I get an e-mail later that day from a comic calling me a piece of s--t," says Grose. "Later he writes that he hopes I die, like my father did [recently]." The entire tight-knit comedy community was in gossip overdrive. No one can remember an alleged joke thief so publicly outed.
Grose fought back. He hired a lawyer and began pursuing a libel action. Foster hired his own lawyer and an agreement was struck. An e-mailed retraction worded by the Grose camp and mailed to the same recipients, by a given date, would abort litigation. The deadline has since passed and Grose is now launching a million-dollar libel suit, claiming that Foster's blanket e-mail has damaged his reputation.
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