Rip Ezt - Long Live dimeadozen.org

[boombox]

Just got this off the front of EZT\'s site - content says it all really.

Hello gals and guys,
 
We\'re very sorry having to tell you that we had to shut down EZT forever just a couple of minutes ago.
 
We got a call from our provider, they had received a few letters from a couple of lawyers. They requested EZT to be shut down immediately, otherwise we and the hosting service would be sued.
 
As you may imagine, we do not have the funds to fight a battle we most probably can\'t win anyway.
 
We would like to thank everyone here for their contributions to EZT, one way or the other, for sharing the music, sharing an ideal, for all your mails, rants, praises...
 
To say it with Joan Armatrading:
 
We had fun, fun, fun, fun
fun, fun, fun, fun
we had fun -- while it lasted...
--"Tall in the Saddle"--
 
You all take good care!
 
The EZT team

[davepeck]

that\'s a shame, although i never really liked the setup there..

at least STG is back we have the trader\'s den...

[obsession600]

:sadban:  Sad news. I almost had all of the shows from the Sex Pistols american tour thanks to that site.

[kindm's]

not surprising when you openly dist. copyrighted content people get pissed.

I mean there is so much legally free music on the net. It just another example of people wanting something for nothing

[boombox]

not surprising when you openly dist. copyrighted content people get pissed.

I mean there is so much legally free music on the net. It just another example of people wanting something for nothing

Not sure about how much was copyrighted - AFAIK torrents were always pulled if there was some doubt. The odd ones were bound to escape the net, but of the hundreds of shows I got there, I tyhink only one or two were of dubious origin and are on my list as not for trade. More likely it was one of the bands who didn\'t want their stuff torrented. Many bands did this the civilised way and emailed the mods asking to be placed on the "Not allowed bands" list. Obviously some groups, or their record companies, could not be bothered to be civilised. Maybe they were pissed at having former torrents being sold on ebay.

Hope thetradersden keeps going OK - never really got much from them as EZT had so much.

[obsession600]

Can we expect thetradersden to get flooded with refugees from EZT?

[boombox]

Can we expect thetradersden to get flooded with refugees from EZT?

Without a doubt - front page there says the server is too busy at the moment - come back later!!

[boombox]

Just got this via the David Bromberg trading group:

From: EZT Mod jupiter2101
Date: Thu Apr 7, 2005  5:46 pm
Subject: The Fax from the lawyers    eztmods

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 bullshit. 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

So there we have it - all edits are jupiter\'s, not mine.

[boombox]

:banana:  :banana:  :banana:  :banana:  :banana: Oh well, lot of fuss about nothing - EZT\'s back at http://www.dimeadozen.org/index.php.

At least that should help out the tradersden - couldn\'t get in there all day due to heavy traffic.