StopECG

When Nick Cunningham launched his attack on http://www.stopecg.org/ I do not think he realised the anger that Novachannel AG’s activities have caused, now he is finding out and his only message to journalists who phone him up appears to be “No Comment”. There is a small part of me that wants to feel sorry for the man, however I wrote to him in October, making it very clear that he had a duty to himself and to his firm to investigate fully the allegations against his client before he continued to assist them. He could have walked away then, he did not.

CONTENTS
Pledge and other help
Press Coverage
Mirroring the site


PLEDGE AND OTHER HELP!
The pledge is half way in just 5 days, please consider pledging 100 pounds, we will only ask for the money if this actually ends up in court.
http://www.en-gb.pledgebank.com/Defend-StopECG
Even if you do not sign the pledge, please click the link above and leave a message of support

If you would rather donate your time or expertise check out our wish list on
http://www.stopecg.org/donate.htm
This includes everything from Tech help to media and translations.


PRESS COVERAGE
Without the Media I doubt we could have gotten the website back up, a big thanks to those papers that have supported us
The Register
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/08/08/antiscam_website_pressured_by_scammer/
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/01/25/mep_saves_scam_website/
Daily Mirror
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/mirrorinvestigates/#story1
(This page will move when archived, but you can find it in the future by visiting
http://www.mirror.co.uk/ and searching for “Meinolf Ludenbach”
Also see
http://www.mirror.co.uk/archive/archive/tm_objectid=16601112&method=full&siteid=94762-name_page.html

MIRRORING THE SITE
The men behind the legal threats thought that by attacking http://www.stopecg.org/ they could remove from public view the valuable advice we offer, they may try again. For that reason it is very reassuring to have Richard Corbett MEP amongst the people to republish the site elsewhere on the web.
http://www.corbett-euro.demon.co.uk/stopecg.htm

Reproducing a website in its entirety is known as ‘mirroring’ please consider grabbing the content of http://www.stopecg.org/ and reproducing it, or simply grabbing a page or two. You can post versions on your website or Blog, also consider posting text from the site to messageboards and relevant newsgroups on the Usenet. It helps if you include a link to the original page Please do not Spam

Jules

Last Saturday, 14th Jan, http://www.stopecg.org/ disappeared from the internet. It vanished because of some quite frankly remarkable claims made against it by a UK lawyer (Nick Cunningham of Wragge & Co LLP) acting for Novachannel AG.

Mr. Cunningham started his campaign in September 2005. He did not write to the site authors, but instead chose to threaten out service provider claiming that they bore responsibility for publishing the content of the site. We responded by renting our own server, making stopECG the publisher as well as author. However he continued to threaten our upstream provider.

He developed an argument that as the data from http://www.stopecg.org/ crossed their network they bore responsibility for our “unlawful material” being available to internet users. As such he threatened them with a lawsuit, even going as far as to mock up the documents he would file with the high court. Were this argument to hold fast in court it would have profound implications for Net Freedom; meaning that upstream providers could be forced to block sites that others disagreed with.

We admire the way Rapid Switch Ltd stood up to this bullying and accept their eventual decision to back out, however unlikely it is that they would end up in court and lose, this is not their battle, and herein lies the failing of British Law. It is becoming more common for people who wish to silence their critics to simply threaten service providers; it might be cowardly but is cheaper and avoids court action. UK Law needs to be updated in order to absolve web hosts of liability for words published by UK residents.

As I write this the DNS is propagating so that people will soon be able to see http://www.stopecg.org/ again, thanks for the offers to mirror and host the site, more on the mirror sites soon. If you wish to mirror the site, please simply copy the pages from the web and then host them yourself. Once it is up and running, email the URL and we will add a link.