Here's a new post by one of the moderators, now that they actually have the letter in their hand ( It was originally sent to their host)
If you don't want to read through it - I've highlighted the important parts - bottom line is - they should be back up soon!!!!
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Hello again, folks.
We have read and re-read and re-read the letter over and over
again and again. To put it mildly, it's full of bull****. All what they
say could be torn apart if we had a lawyer (any German lawyer out
there???) and if the letter had been sent to us. (The letter is
addressed to the hosting service).
I'll try to translate some things, for your entertainment:
Internet-Homepage with unauthorized music recordings (rotfl)
...
It has come to our attention that one with the internet connected PC
is offering unauthorized music downloads under the URL
http://www.easytree.org/torrents-details.phpid=30630
(for sure, at least Ted will see immediately that the URL would not work)
The offer contains recordings to which our client has the complete
duplication and distribution rights. As an example, we like to point
out the recordings of the following artist:
artist/ title/ rightsowner
Nirvana/ Smells like teen spirit/ Universal
These offerings violate the rights of our client. In this regard it is
legally irrelevant if the right violating offerings are
physically available on your server or are made available through a
hyperlink.
For your better understanding we'd like to emphasize the legal basics:
The rights to the music on a sound carrier are owned by authors, artists
and sound carriage manufacturers.
You do not obtain these rights when buying a CD (would have guessed
that?!). After having bought a CD you solely have the right to listen to
the music privately. Therefore, you are not allowed to do what you want
with a CD (damn! So I can't burn all CDs I have by Universal artists
now???). You are also not allowed to copy a CD and distribute the
duplicated items ("Vervielfältigungsstücke", I don't think this word
even exists in German) -- the right for a private copy does not go that
far -- you are also not allowed to copy the music of a CD without
permission "to the internet" and thereby offering it to the public. This
does not only apply to the case that the download is made available to
others, but also then, when the user can only listen to the music or
when to an informational offer music has been added to. A private use,
which would not need the aforementioned permission, is not the case with
public offers on the internet.
[Some of this is infact written like that in German, it is not the
translation!]
We have to request you until
April 7, 2005, 17:00:00
1. To block the right-violating offers made available under the a.f. URL
and its subsites and to delete them (the offers) from your servers or to
have them deleted.
2. In the case you are not responsible to inform us about the name and
address of the person responsible for the content of the right-violating
sites.
We assume you are not interested to make space available on your server
for illegal offerings. We would like to point out that our client has
ordered us to immediately take the necessary legal steps if you do not
obey to the requested blocking and don't provide the requested
information. Further claims are reserved.
---
If they would have sent the letter directly to us, we could have had a
good laugh about it.
Unfortunately, the hosting service hangs in between and now we have to
make it clear to the hosting service that the contents isn't worth the
paper it's written on. As long as we can't convince the hosting service,
we can't put EZT back online, as the hosting service would shut us down
in a heartbeat. erwe is going to write and call the hosting service
tomorrow and will try to straighten out things.
It depends on the hosting service's ToS, but I bet my a** the ToS say
they can not be held responsible for what their customers do with the
servers.
Some folks mentioned it on- and off-list -- why not simply switch the
hosting service? It's not that easy, as we're bound to the contracts for
one year for each of the six servers. The first contract runs out in
August, one in October, two in November, one in December and one in
January.
Also, going off-shore would bring along not only considerably higher
expenses for the traffic and the machines we'd need, it would also mean
*additional* expenses as long as the contracts with the current hosting
service run.
Stay tuned and rest assured we're working at it!
jupiter2101
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