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A few weeks back, RING!OnLine Superstations contacted Kaye Absalom, the maintainer of the now-inactive Bossman's Ring Around Michigan, claiming that the use of that name violated copyright and/or trademark law and demanded that the page be removed. The full story can be found at Kaye's Ring Caper page.Update!Today I received a letter from RING!OnLine's lawyer(s) demanding that I cease using the name "Webring" or else they will sue. The name of the company appears to be Retail Interactive Network Group (or R.I.N.G.), but they use the name RING!Online on their Internet site.
What little knowledge of copyright and trademark laws that I have tells me that their demands are unfounded and that they would not be able to win any lawsuit. However, my legal knowledge is very limited.
Does anyone out there with any legal experience have any advice for me? At this point in time we certainly cannot afford a lawyer, nor do I have the time to do any research myself. If you have any information and/or advice, please contact me at sage@mind.net.
Thanks to everyone for their support! I have receive a flood of e-mail about this--far too much for me to respond to anyone personally (sorry!). (I'm also behind on the regular Webring mail--this has been a very busy week for me.) I am currently in the process of contacting legal counsel to determine what options are left for me. Unfortunately, the folks at RING!Online seem quite persistent.A number of you have asked for an e-mail address to contact them and make yourselves heard. RING!Online can be reached at ringmstr@ring.com. If you do choose to send them mail, I suggest that you keep it civil, however, as it reflects on the Webring community as a whole.
This week the number of hits to the Webring CGI increased by 27%, for a grand total of over 220,000 accesses! Wow!Unfortunately, this tremendous popularity does create a few problems for us. The Webring has been running off of a virtual web server at mind.net, which has graciously allows us to consume their bandwidth and disk space at no cost. The Webring's size, however, is approaching a point where they can no longer afford to provide us with that luxury. I have managed to secure a free internet connection elsewhere, but I do not have enough money to buy a new server (college is expensive!).
Help! I am desperately seeking sponsors looking for a good return on their advertising dollar, and/or donations to help pay for the new system! Until now the Webring has been a totally free service to the net community, and I would really like to keep it that way, but if I don't receive some support from the users of the system and/or sponsors, I will no longer be able to afford to keep it going.
If you're interested in helping out, don't hesitate to drop me a line at sage@mind.net.
This Monday (the 23rd), the hard drive on the Webring server filled up, causing a number of ring and queue databases to be erased. Although I am making daily backups of the entire system (minus access logs), those backups were accidentally erased by the powers that be. We were able to dig up some older backups on tape, however, dated the 12th, and those rings that were affected (and unchanged since Monday) were restored.I have since taken steps to insure that the daily backups will always be available to prevent this from happening in the future.
What exactly happened, for those who are interested:
A few instances of sloppy programming and file management on my part with the web reporting system for mind.net and the Webring backup strategy caused the hard disk on the virtual web server running the webring to fill up. This didn't affect in any the way the use of the Webring to move from one site to another. However, whenever ring data files were modified (when someone edited their site, added someone to the ring, or added themselves to the queue) the Webring has to rewrite the file. Since the disk was full, the operating system wouldn't let it, leaving the files of size 0 bytes in its wake. As a result only those rings that had queue or ring additions were affected. When I was able to get ahold of backup copies of the Webring files, I restored the ring and queue databases for any ring that has a file of size zero and a backup file of size greater than 0. If someone added themselves to the ring or queue AFTER the files were deleted and disk space was freed up again but BEFORE I restored backups, the restoration wouldn't have taken place (because the ring/queue files were no longer of size 0). If this is the case, let me know, and I'll fix it manually.
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