Date: 12 Sep 1995 17:32:20 GMT
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@vanagon.com>
From:
Subject: VW of A Suing ME over The VW Homepage
Volkswagen of America is suing myself and the university I'm at over the use of
the pictures of volkswagens I have and the technical information provided by
Jan Vanderbrande that I have listed on my page. They claim that only an
"Authorized" venue can use materials relating to Volkswagens, namely only VW of
America. Even though most of my pictures were from Volkswagen AG who encourage
the downloading of their materials by enthusiasts.
The reason behind this you ask. Why would VW of A complain about a venue that
celebrates their cars and engineering? A site that garners over 100,000 hits
per day giving free positive advertising of their products? It's because VW of
A is trying to set up their own homepage service and wants to charge for its
usage. Imagine even a dollar per download times 100,000 per day.... big $$$$!
They even went on to imply that pictures of your own car and any of its badges
pertaining to VW are the property of VW of America and can only be disributed
by them (at a charge of course). Is it right for VW of America to dictate what
you can do with your car that YOU paid money for and for them to say that only
they can distibute pictures and articles on YOUR car, unless they SELL you
PERMISSION to do so? I don't think so. And does VW of America forget the fact
that they haveno jurisdiction in a matter involving a CANADIAN University with
a homepage b a CANADIAN. Do they forget about Volkswagen of Canada. And what
about SouthBend VW and their web page? Will VW of America shut down that too.
By shutting down me and all other VW pages, thet think they can monopolize the
market. Except that their big brother Volkswagen AG is only a keystroke away.
Are they going to shut down VW AG too.
Is this just the start of companies trying to shut down little guys so that
they can charge for the privailage to view their products.
I'll be posting a copy of the brief if The University of Manitoba doesn't bow
to te ridiculous demands of VW of America to keep it "Confidential". Also I
guess Poular Mechanics will be getting sued also because the other pictures are
from them.
Email me with your comments and support (umskilni@cc.umanitoba.ca)and post this
across the world. Also someone has seen this and uploaded acopy of my page to
an anomymis server at:
http://130.179.9.237/volks/vwhome.html
I would appreciate anyone else to copy the page and place it on a secure site
so tat VW of America's try at world wide censorship is unsuccessful.
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