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Legal hassles...

It seems nowadays you can't run a website anymore without some lawyer somewhere sending you a "cease and desist" letter. Finally, I also got such a letter (here, in German).

In this letter, I'm requested to refrain from making certain statements on the page http://www.awadalla.at/content/zensur-mlm.html (German), and from linking to web pages with photographs of the requesting family (which happen to be on their own web site). Plus they ask me to pay 10 500,- EUR of compensation and 1 236,56 EUR of lawyer's fees.

The mistake they made, however, is that they think I'm somehow responsible for the content hosted under the domain name awadalla.at; I'm not, which is clearly visible from the whois entry for that domain: I'm the technical, admin and zone contact, but the owner is El Awadalla.

So I had to answer (German, once again) them accordingly.

Background

The background of this story, summarized for the non-German-speakers out there: El Awadalla is a writer who publishes books on Cults, the Esoteric "movement", and related issues; one of those related issues are MLMs ("Multi-Level Marketing", more often than not just thinly veiled pyramid schemes). In her latest book, she reproduced a leaflet by some MLM which displayed a happy family presenting nice children and expensive cars; That family got the book's publisher to sign a cease and desist statement, and to black out the facsimile in the books in stock. Now they found out that there's a web page about this issue, and that web page has links to the MLM's own website featuring the leaflet, and to the family's own website, both featuring pictures of the family.

Now they try to make legal threats related to that web page, because it alledgedly implies they've got contacts with Scientoloty, and seeing themselves hurt in their personal rights by the story about the book's censoring and the links to their photographs on that page. Interestingly enough, they regard those photos, published on a leaflet and on their webpage, as private.

My personal (I Am Not A Lawyer) opinion is that their quest has little merit -- in the letter their lawyers sent me they only made vague statements about the illegality of the content on www.awadalla.at, but failed to cite relevant laws; it also seems they still haven't gone to court about this.


christian mock, last modified: Tue Apr 8 12:38:20 2003, impressum