
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, August 12, 1995                   TAG: 9508140055
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                 LENGTH: Short

INTERNET ACCESS TO BE CANCELED

A non-profit group's experiment that offered free Internet access to valuable corporate records will stop Oct. 1, officials said Friday.

The Internet Multicasting Service of Washington, D.C., said it's unclear if the government will step in to fund the popular project that distributes corporate filings to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Patent and Trademark Office.

Grant money supporting the project from the National Science Foundation is about to run out.

But Rep. Dan Frisa, a New York Republican in charge of reviewing the SEC, said he generally supports the idea of distributing SEC corporate filings over the Internet, but hasn't figured out how to pay for such a service.

Since January 1994, IMS said it sent out 3.1 million SEC filings to individuals, Wall Street firms and college students. That's an average of 16,700 documents a day.

Carl Malamud, president of IMS, said an additional 1.59 million patent documents were distributed during the same period. The group researches new technologies for the Internet.

Grant money supporting the project from the National Science Foundation is about to run out. Malamud also received support from private companies such as commercial printers R.R. Donnelley & Sons Inc. of Chicago and New York University, but he wants the government to take it over.

Malamud contends the newly passed Paperwork Reduction Act, a part of the GOP's ``Contract with America,'' compels the SEC and Patent and Trademark Office to launch a similar distribution project on the Internet.

by CNB