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What Happened to the German Link

A tale of mindless fear of the Internet and the kind of damage it can do. Here's the note I received from Tom Zoerner, the maintainer of what used to be the most complete Melrose Place site on earth. Seems to me that rather than close his site down, SEG* should have offered to set him up with a great server, a fast connection to the Internet, and pay him a salary for all the great publicity.... But no, I guess not.

* SEG = Spelling Entertainment Group Inc., 5700 Wilshire Blvd., Suite 575, Los Angeles, CA 90036-3659, USA, Phone (213) 634-5214


From: Tom Zoerner <Tom.Zoerner@informatik.uni-erlangen.de>
To: dbrick@hera.speakeasy.org (Douglas Brick)
Subject: Re: German Link
Date: Sat, 19 Aug 1995 07:07:10 +0200 (MET DST)

Hi.

I've written a little statement for the newsgroups that explains the situation. I'll append a copy to this letter. If you have any more questions feel free to ask back.

bye
tom


Since February 1994 I was maintaining my "Spellingland" archives without any trouble and steadily increasing access rates, lately 80.000 hits a week (>4000 people). Early in 1994 I had short email contacts with Larry Mollin, supervising producer for 90210, and Mr. Kennedy from FOX and didn't get any negative feedback.

But on June 14th we received a letter from some Mr. Bosworth from SEG. It wasn't addressed to me, but to the "president" of our department, informing him that a student was using the university's computers to "load and retrieve unauthorized information about Spelling's productions". He was also stating that Spelling is owner of all rights in names and logos, which are protected by the laws of trademark and copyright, and my use of them may be a violation of such laws.

He demanded to cease using their logos and names, else they'd "pursue all available remedies to protect their rights and valuable property".

From the number of times the word "unauthorized" was used (when I read the letter first, I thought he was complaining about the site in general; in the first paragraph he doesn't mention the logos at all) and the overall tone of this letter you could tell that he aimed further than the removal of his 4 logos. IMHO the aim was shocking my supervisors, bringing them to have me remove the whole site - and of course this worked - almost at once.

My boss took this first letter quite relaxed, so I decided I could risk a second of Spelling's attacks and just took the complaint literally: I removed all of the logos, replaced the names with shortcuts or some other sort of identification (like "9*210" for BH90210), removed a few more stuff that might infringe someone's copyright (frameclips, sounds, articles) and went online again.

However it took only a couple of days until we received the second letter. Mr. Bosworth told us how "surprised" he was, that I intended to "resume use of Spelling materials." He was basically repeating his demands - totally ignoring the modifications at my site. There were no further explanations what exactly he was referring to, why he wanted me to remove it or which legal basis his complaints had. Of course I asked back about this, but haven't got a response (in 3 weeks).

To understand the reaction of my boss, you have to consider that I was using the university's Web server. We can't possibly go to court and fight for keeping material about some TV shows -- this is not what our equipment is intended for. (But it's silently tolerated only as long as it doesn't disturb or offend anyone.)

So I got direct order to remove all of my material about SEG's shows from our server, even dispite the fact that I wasn't doing anything illegal (and it wasn't. This is confirmed by a lawyer). It just was no longer reasonable at this site.

As to my material about Spelling's TV shows, of course it won't be gone. Many people have written me and assured, that they'll take over categories of the archive. If there will be a total replacement at another (non-educational) site isn't completely sure yet, however probable.


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Last modified: Mon Sep 4 14:04:16 1995