From: Chris Anderson <
[email protected]>
Date: Sat, May 12, 2012 at 12:11 PM
Subject: Re:
To: RICHARD STUBBS <
[email protected]>
Dear Mr. Stubbs,
I received your email this morning regarding the Fauna Classifieds Board of Inquiry thread I created about the copyright infringement of my photographs by your company during their use on your commercial website without credit or permission (
http://www.faunaclassifieds.com/forums/showthread.php?t=193707). The Fauna Classifieds Board of Inquiry is not a blog where posts are made and then removed. It is a permanent record of dealings with buyers and sellers in the reptile industry and once posts are made, they are there for good for others to make informed decisions about whether or not to conduct business with said buyers and sellers. I have no control over the Fauna Classifieds website beyond the ability to add content to it and thus have no ability to remove content, even if I wanted to.
In your email this morning you insinuate that in the above mentioned thread that I have slandered you, presumably by calling you "a Thief" and "a liar" based on your email. I've reviewed the thread and the only mention of theft ever made was pointing out that your Terms of Use indicate a clear understanding of the Copyright Laws violated by stealing my photographs and that your website was using my stollen property to facilitate your own sales. Given that "to steal" is defined as "to take (the property of another or others) without permission or right; to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment", and your website appropriated my photographs without right, acknowledgement or permission, this statement is clearly not slander. As far as mention of you being a liar, you falsely claimed in your Terms of Use to own the rights to my photographs and you repeatedly informed me over the course of 6 months that my photographs would be removed in various specified periods of time, yet you, your company or its employees NEVER took care of it at all, let alone in the specified periods of time. In fact, the photographs were only removed when I issued Digital Millennium Copyright Act compliant Take Down Request to your host company and they then removed the photographs from your website. Given that a "lie" is defined as "an inaccurate of false statement" and "to lie" is defined as "to express what is false; convey a false impression", stating that you lied to me repeatedly is clearly not slander either.
You also suggest in your email that in the above mentioned thread that I am "accusing [you] of doing something to your site". After reviewing the thread, I never accused or insinuated any such thing. The fact that your site was triggering malicious software warnings was brought up by others and I in fact stated that I was not sure if that was a coincidence or not but that I was giving you the benefit of the doubt that it was not anything you had done but rather that you were the victim of a third party attack.
As the owner of the
http://global-reptiles.com/ website and the associated company, you are ultimately responsible for all of its content. While you may have hired someone to do the website for you, when you were informed of the issue, it was your responsibility to have it taken care of, something you never did despite repeatedly telling me it would be. I quite frankly do not care who you hired to do your website, what country they were from, etc., your website and company, for which you are ultimately responsible, infringed my copyright and you then strung me along for 6 months telling me you would fix the issue and never did. Over the course of 6 months there is no legitimate excuse as to why you could not take care of this issue.
Ultimately your failure to address and correct the copyright infringement issue over the course of 6 months despite repeated assurances that you would is the reason this thread exists at all. It is going to be on the Fauna Classifieds Board of Inquiry until such time as Fauna Classifieds decides to remove it. As the amount of time this thread is inactive increases, it falls back among older and older threads on the Board of Inquiry and on pages further and further back, locatable only by specific searches. Every time you email me about it, however, I am going to post a copy of your email to me and my response to it in order to continue to maintain the complete record of my interaction with you on this topic. Doing so brings the thread right back to the front page of the Board of Inquiry for everyone to once again see. So, the level of exposure this thread continues to get is still in your hands and while you may be upset by how your failure to rectify and deal with this issue makes you and your company look, continuing to harass me about it is not going to change what you did and did not do.
As for the suggestion that asking anyone in the industry about you would result in good feedback, when I did I was pointed to the United States v. Richard A. Stubbs, 11 F.3d 632, 633 (6th Cir. 1993). I have not been able to confirm for myself that this was you, however, I don't know of many Richard A Stubbs involved in importing reptiles and have not been able to confirm that it was not. If it is you, I don't think I would call being convicted of illegally importing endangered crocodile species in violation of CITES and the ESA, thus also violating the Lacey Act, "good feedback".
Regards,
Chris
I never would have read this thread had it not been brought to the forefront. 