Elan Vital has served a second DMCA notice. This time they managed to at least send a list of items that are actually on our website for which they claim copyright infringement. The reason for the password is that our host has given us access to the website until the legal dispute is settled. We are hoping to be able to have public access reinstated to a version of our website without the disputed materials as an interim solution.We hope that the first DMCA notice from EV, which made claims to items that have nothing to do with our website, was an honest mistake and not a way of intentionally dragging out the procedure to keep our website offline as long as possible. There are legal precedents for entities which have abused the DMCA procedure as a way of silencing critics. In such cases the entities wre forced to pay large sums in damages. Here is a quote from the judge presiding over the Diebold case for which they had to pay in excess of $100,000 for their abuse of the DMCA:
The fact that Diebold never actually brought suit against any alleged infringer suggests strongly that Diebold sought to use the DMCA’s safe harbor provisions—which were designed to protect ISPs, not copyright holders—as a sword to suppress publication of embarrassing content rather than as a shield to protect its intellectual property.
For more information please see:
http://prem-rawat-critique.org/dmca_case_law.htm
There are other references at the bottom of the article.
Andries, while I can't speak for all of the contributors to www.prem-rawat-maharaji.info, I don't think there will be much interest on the part of the authors themselves in getting involved in a Wiki war. If someone else would like to do that, that would be great though. The energy and time in creating the website itself was already daunting and I think we all feel that we have done our part with that.
