• In the past two days I have gotten emails asking about being requested to provide credit card info in order to register and also to make a post in the classifieds forums. PLEASE NOTE: In no instance will this site ask you for this sort of information. The only time any request for payment is made is if you choose to opt-in for a higher membership level, and that is done SOLELY through PayPal. Anything else is coming from a source other than this site. My guess is that this is coming through Google Adsense, but when I can get someone to send me a screen shot of this sort of request, I will know more.
  • Responding to email notices you receive.
    **************************************************
    In short, DON'T! Email notices are to ONLY alert you of a reply to your private message or your ad on this site. Replying to the email just wastes your time as it goes NOWHERE, and probably pisses off the person you thought you replied to when they think you just ignored them. So instead of complaining to me about your messages not being replied to from this site via email, please READ that email notice that plainly states what you need to do in order to reply to who you are trying to converse with.

Rainwater: New Scam

"Before an infringement suit may be filed in court, registration is necessary for works of U. S. origin."

Also from the Copyright Office FAQ.

Which begs the question: If a work is protected under copyright law from creation (it is, under the Berne Convention), and if you cannot file an infringement suit if the work isn't registered...what form does the protection take?

I've asked someone who should know, (A copyright lawyer.) and I'll post whatever I find out here.
 
Rich, I would love to see what old stuff you have on this subject. I for one completely missed out on the calico corn thing. I had of course seen it (I do believe it took best of show at an IRBA show several years ago). Can you direct me to where you talk about this animal and its beginnings? I will be interested in hearing what the Barkers have to say about the whole issue of the photographs also. I honestly doubt that Dave and Tracy want thier names affiliated with Rainwater. Take care
 
Rich, thanks for the direction. That is very interesting indeed. I assume no one is working with them now? I have to wonder how many of these somewhat worthless animals Tim sold to people with $ signs in thier eyes. Take care
 
Ken,

Every now and then you still see some of these "calico corns" for sale. I saw a couple of them at the Tinley Park show in IL last fall.

They do look really cool as hatchlings, and if they are not all blistered up as adults, I'm sure they're stunning. However, they are just trouble, and no respectable breeder would propigate the defect in the population. That's why Tim Rainwater is/was involved with them, of course.
 
OK, here's a copyright laywer's response on mailing materials to oneself. Kind of clarifies the (flood of) info available from the Copyright Office.

Sorry this is off topic and long. I think it's an interesting aspect of the conversation, though. (Besides, we all know that a) Rainwater is up to no good and b) he's not trying to target people who are involved in herping and know his history.)


I've debunked "poor man's copyright" a number of times before. It is worthless, and has been of no value since passage of the 1909 Copyright Act (that's right, almost a century).

The provenance of the theory appears to be some books on patent-law-for-unsophisticated (i.e. sucker)-inventors written in the 1940s and 1950s. These books were later mined for their advice by unsophisticated writers on copyright. Ironically, the "poor man's copyright" has nothing to do with intellectual property law in the first place; it is/was an attempt to deal with authentication of evidence under the rules common early in the 20th century. The combination of changes in the Patent Act (which explicitly made laboratory notebooks admissible as evidence for proving prior conception and reduction to practice) and the evidence reforms begun in the 1960s culminating the the Federal Rules of Evidence in the early 1970s completely cut the "poor man's copyright" to pieces.

As the law stands now, one has this situation:

(1) Registration is registration. There is no substitute for registration if one wishes to sue.

(2) However, one can assert a copyright without suing. The copyright exists the moment that the work is placed into a "fixed form," which can include a word-processing file. Any reasonable system of business records can be used to authenticate the date of fixation; the burden is on the challenging party to do more than say "she didn't really write it then." This is one reason that authors should keep copies of their submission logs forever, as a submission log (particularly if it includes rejection notes) is pretty powerful additional authentication.
Click to expand...

The second paragraph above mentions writing, but the main point is that business records are evidence enough. The question was asked on a writers' site.
 
Darin, Rainwater was not always like the way he is now. When I first met him, he was a spunky go-getter that had great potential in this hobby. I won't go into how we became partners here, or how and why we broke up, but let's just say that we were incompatable as partners. He had his style of doing things, and I did not like it, and I'm sure he felt the same way. The one thing I can say is the Tim is a poor businessman, period. He can't seem to manage his money, or customers either. I will relate the first time I found out what he was really all about. I had split with him, and basically sold out my share of our wholesale business to him (I already had Exotic Pets, long and established). However, despite our agreement, he never bothered to take my name off as a partner. About 6 months goes by, and I get a call from Columbia. On the phone is an angry fellow who is demanding that I pay him money that is owed him. It seems that Tim bought around $8,000 worth of baby iguanas from the guy, and the check bounced. He found my name on the business license, and called me, since Tim refused to take his calls. I told him that I had no interest in the business anymore, but would call Tim and see if I could work things out for him. Although Tim really hated my guts at this time, I had no ill feelings towards Tim. Bad partners happen, it's part of doing business. I try to never mix my personal feelings with business. So I call Tim, and ask him what's going on. He tells me that half the iguanas were DOA, and that's why he had not paid the guy (does not explain the bounced check of course). So I call the guy back, and tell him that half the iguanas were dead, and Tim did not feel he should have to pay for dead animals (makes sense to me). I told the guy that we would not give him more then $3,000 for the remaining iguanas, and that if he wanted his money he would have to take it in monthly installments over a 10 month period. I knew that Tim was hurting financialy, so I though this would really help. Much to my suprise, the guy says ok. I call Tim back, and told him about the favor I did for him. He said, and I quote "Why did you do that, I never had any intention of ever paying him back, and I have no plans to do it now" unquote. This is when I met the real Rainwater. Enough that he embezzeled from our own company when we were partners, but this was just down right theft. There are of course many, many other items I can relate to you. He is just a bad guy, period. I don't trust him, and would never take his word for anything, ever. Take care
 
Thanks, Ken. I appreciate the insight, especially coming from your unique position. I am relatively new to the hobby/industry (about five years, now, not counting the time spent catching snakes and lizards as a kid), and I have never even heard of the pre-scamming Rainwater. On the one hand, it's nice to know that he is not inherently evil, and had good intentions at one time. On the other hand, it's really a shame to know that he's fallen so far.
 
Darin, I have to agree with you. It is a shame. This is just an example of what happens when you want something so bad, can't wait to get it, and take all the shortcuts you can to become "the man". Hopefully all of you younger guys can learn from Tims example. Take care
 
I really don't think that this scam will do much damage, as Tim's name is getting known in a not so positive light. Seamus, thank you for starting this thread!
This is a great example of someone who is in it for the love of money and not the animals.
The best weapon against this is widespread knowledge of this scam. Contact as many people as you can. I will let everyone I am able to talk to know about this.

Remember, how many people do we know that can just drop 100 grand like that? Or get loans for these ridiculous amounts for that matter? To me..Tim shot himself in the foot by making this facade too obvious.

Take care!
Billy Fraser
 
Tim's name is getting/has been known in a negative light by people likely to read this thread. However, virtually none of them are intended targets, nor is it likely we know any.
He's looking for people with large sums to invest and probably know little if anything about the herp buisness.
On the plus side, people who are in this position didn't get their money by being stupid or taking part in shady or unknown buisness ventures. They are very likely to check him out thoroughly before becoming involved.

On the other hand, scams even more rediculous have proved successful in the past. Take the "Nigerian scam" for instance. It has apparently worked to a degree to still be floating around this long. Many other scams are run all the time, real estate, taking advantage of the elderly. If you contact 10,000 potential targets it's a pretty safe bet a handful of them will fall for it no matter how absurd.
I'm sure he's not so foolish as to think he will actually get 10 mil out of this, but what if only one person kicks in a hundred grand, or a small handful offers 10 or 15. He's still taking in a nice little profit off this facade. The sad part is he'll probably take a few people if he's not stopped completely.

One point I have wondered about was the use of the pictures. I realize that for instance I had some of those pictures on my website without credit to the owner that the most they could really do is make me take them down. As has been mentioned earlier lawsuits usually require registration of the material.
This case is several degrees worse than just posting uncredited pics on a website though. They were published on hard copy with the intent of generating a significant amount of revenue to say the least. I wonder if that might lend weight to potential legal recourse.
My thinking of this is akin to piracy issues. If someone copies a CD it's not worth the trouble to go after them, but if someone has an operation turning out thousands of them for profit the situation is completely different.
 
Rich, thanks for posting the old BOI, that was an interesting read for sure. Of course Rainwater filed bankruptcy several years ago, so most of the people he swindled are out the money owed them forever, and I guess that would include animals owed as well. As far as future investors goes, a credit check will most likely reveil the bad credit rating, and perhaps detere people from investing in this deal. Of course, it can always be claimed that he is not the owner, and has no way to get ahold of the funds, but as I said before, I doubt that there are any owners besides Tim himself.

Clay, you are of course correct. I wonder what the reaction will be when the first "hets" roll off the line to be sold to the public? Will anyone buy them? Can they be trusted to be anything more then the "het" geckos he sold to many people years ago? Of course, Tim has never produced a ball python, perhaps he never will. I guess he could wait until next spring when the new batch of imports arrive, and use them as his hatchlings. He's done it before, in just that manner. It would take at least a few years before it was shown that they were not het for anything. Plenty of money to collect between now and then I guess. Tim is a great flim flam man. I bet someone will give him some money.
 
Just reading through this and the following from Dave Barker caught my eye:

Thanks for your heads-up message. We've been on vacation and didn't know
about this brochure. We do know the people involved and are surprised
that they would do this. So, as you might imagine, we will be looking
into this.

Thanks,

Dave
Click to expand...

Does Dave know people involved in this, or just Tim Rainwater? And if it's just Rainwater, why would he be surprised?
 
you all need to cool it on tim rainwater.
You are hurting mario stinso's feelings when you post about tim.

that is mario's hero

mario looks up to him and probably hopes to be like him in the future.


not the parts in bold were only bolded by me.

I also know of a top breeder that seems to be a bad guy in the community. But I ask why? Supposedly he walked off with many peoples moneys. But who’s to prove this. Sounds like just an awful rumor to me. I’m just curious, but did this whole Rainwater situation involve fauna my any way or any members from their? I’m not trying to speculate anything with that. But I do know I don’t know anything more then rumor about it, and for some reason, it wouldn’t surprise me. I just have a hard time understanding how someone so big could make such an unreasonable error in judgment.
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First off, I am having trouble coming up with a name of anyone whom I think would really care about what Mario thinks about this situation. A better example os someone talking about something that he has absolutely no knowledge of would be hard to come by. What do you suppose Mario's involvement in all this was back in 1995?

But I think this pretty plainly shows that Tim Rainwater will always have followers, even if it is as a pack of underdogs running together trying to avoid the dogcatcher.

Did Tim actually get any investors to pay for his expedition to South America to attempt to find the largest anaconda on record? Darn, I wish I had kept that text. It was a REAL hoot. It may be laying around here somewhere. It was too good to throw away.
 
It should come as no surprise that Mario idolizes a common thief. After all, Mario himself is nothing more than a sad, pathetic little liar himself. Birds of a feather...

Anyways, thieves like Rainwater will always be around as long as there are greedy folks that can't see how ludicrous his proposals are, are groupies like Stinso who blindly worship them.
 
Anyways, thieves like Rainwater will always be around as long as there are greedy folks that can't see how ludicrous his proposals are, are groupies like Stinso who blindly worship them.
Click to expand...

Rather, it should read:
Anyways, thieves like Rainwater will always be around as long as there are greedy folks that can't see how ludicrous his proposals are, and groupies like Stinso who blindly worship them.
 
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