You may already be a winner...

A Quebec man has been awarded $100,000 in damages because he didn't understand the fine print on a direct mail subscription offer from the U.S. edition of Time magazine and thought he'd won $1.2 million. According to a story in the Globe and Mail, Madam Justice Carol Cohen of Quebec Superior Court said in a ruling Mondaythat the direct-mail campaign was misleading and may have violated the spirit of the Quebec French Language Charter.

"There can be no doubt here that the unsolicited publicity sent to Mr. Richard indeed had the capacity to mislead if viewed through the eyes of the average, inexperienced French-speaking consumer in Quebec," she said.

Jean-Marc Richard received the direct mail package with a big headline that said: "Our sweepstakes results are now final: Mr. Jean-Marc Richard has won a cash prize of $833,337.00!" (At that time, this amount in U.S. dollars was worth about C$1.2 million.)

Mr. Richard did not notice a sentence in small print that preceded the big headline: "If you have and return the Grand Prize winning entry in time and correctly answer a skill-testing question, we will officially announce that...."

Mr. Richard sent back the letter, signing up for a two-year subscription. When the money didnt' materialize,he called New York and was told he hadn't won and that the name on the letter (Elizabeth Matthews) was a fiction.

"It is patently obvious to any reader that the mailing from Time was not only false and incomplete, it was specifically designed to be misleading ... especially to a reader who is not reading in his or her mother tongue," Judge Cohen said.

She said reading the Time letter was "the literary equivalent of trying to drive safely on a winding road after having been blinded by the headlights of an oncoming truck."

Though he regularly speaks English at work, Mr. Richard, a francophone now in his late 40s, showed the document to an anglophone superior at his office, who congratulated him on winning.

Mr. Richard testified that he felt "embarrassed and stupid" when he had to explain to his girlfriend and relatives that he'd been wrong when he told them he had won a big prize.

Time Inc. says it will appeal the ruling.