I run a digital product site, and we have always allowed our customers to re-download their purchases for free, as many times as they wish. Stuff the bandwidth costs, it seems so anti-consumer to make them pay extra for access to something they've already bought. And it's not like the file isn't always sitting on our servers anyway. Seems like just another way to gouge money from people.
I just never understand putting artificial limitations on these things, like stock image companies who make a download link valid for 1 hour. Why do that? Or only allowing you 3 download attempts before the link locks out. It doesn't stop piracy, it just makes genuine customers pissed off.
Regarding a minimum, I've always argued that if I'm on an 'up to' 20 meg package, and the next package down is an 'up to' 10 meg, then I should always be getting speeds above 10 meg, otherwise, why pay the extra in the first place?
Unfortunately, that logic doesn't really work with your typical ISP.
"why didn't PayPal just tell them that in the first place?"
Have you ever dealt with Paypal customer services? They are incapable of answering ANY question directly - they have a set template of answers they give to any question and seem to go out of their way to not answer your specific question. And no matter how many times you say 'I did not ask that question, I asked this...', they still don't address your specific query.
I agree, the entire situation is serious, and clearly something suspicious happened with GCB LTD, most likely to enable someone to hide their identity.
But too many people are talking about stuff that is quite frankly irrelevant. An incorrect SIC code is meaningless - the company was set up years ago, which is when the SIC code was most likely set up as relevant at the time. To my knowledge, there is no legal requirement to update SIC code.
Again, what is this 'Business Charter' you refer to, with this 90 days limit? That just sounds made up. Companies have to adhere to the 'Companies Act'.
I'm in no way trying to defend any of this, I'm well and truly appalled by the entire ASC Law/Media CAT scummy fiasco from start to finish, but people on forums seem to be just making stuff up now, and then too many people assume its fact.
You say their director is barred from trading? I assume you mean the director has been barred from being a director of any company - can you provide a URL where this has been discussed? If this is true, then that IS something Companies House will want to know about ASAP.
"This is a direct violation of the Business Charter, that all businesses MUST sign up to within 90 calendar days of starting for the correct area of business. "
'Nature of business' in the companies house info simply refers to the _primary_ business activity of the company - the company is free to pursue other business interests (including extortion), without declaring it in their Annual Return each year. SIC codes are typically used for statistical purposes only.
It is not a requirement to complete the SIC code for all activities you engage in. Nor is it a requirement to complete it when setting up a company, this form entry is frequently left blank when forming a company.
What is this Business Charter you refer to?
I also believe that there is no SIC code for 'extortion' or 'speculative invoicing'...
Clearly there are many issues with this company, however, focussing on an incorrect SIC code isn't really one of them. It's a bit like everyone getting all OTT about their address being that of their accountant, when in reality it is very common practice for an accountant to offer 'registered office' services for their clients, it indicates nothing dodgy whatsoever from the accountant's POV.
I've been following the slyck forum discussion about this, and unfortunately there's a lot of mis-information and ludicrous conspiracy theories being spouted. Thankfully, there's forum member Mullard47, who seems to be a very intelligent person with a healthy knowledge of IP law to keep it all together.
The main problem I have with all this case will collapse due to legal technicalities and sloppy practices, rather than addressing the current legal grey area of speculative invoicing, which is all about income generation and intimidation, and nothing about stopping copyright infringement.
T-mobile have now backtracked on this, and will now only limit new and upgrading customers, so people who signed up for 3gig plans will keep it for the duration of their contract.
Nice to see customer backlash have some impact on these things. However the arrogance of t-mobile throughout has been an eye-opener. One (more) company to avoid - the list grows ever longer.
They insist changes to the acceptable usage policy are not significant enough to be considered breach of contract. Whether or not a court would agree is another matter.
In these situations, you need to have a detailed history of your usage over the past few months; if you regularly use over 500MB then you can argue that in your case, the changes will affect you 'significantly' and you should be able to get out of the contract. Of course, one suspects such historical data is most likely not available to download :)
Regardless, it simply highlights so many reasons why you should never sign up to a 2 year contract with any mobile operator, as any of them can turn on you at a moments notice. They advertise high usage quotas, get you to sign up with them for 2 years, then pull the quotas, claiming most people don't go anywhere near them. Which IMO is beside the point - the high quota was used as a competitive advantage and would sway many people to sign up, even if the rest of the deal wasn't quite as good as the competition. Really should be investigated by the powers that be, but of course, won't be.
Anyway, just more reason to stick to PAYG or 30 day 'sim only' contracts, which these days are pretty decent and give you the power to switch providers without too much hassle.
He doesn't appear to be making anything up; he posted a bad review based on the fact that they failed to repair his product, and by all accounts actually made it worse. He then asked for a new unit, and they refused. If those are the facts, then how can he be sued for defamation?
As for his rights under Greek law, I suspect it may be related to his insistence that they actually caused more damage to the unit while attempting to repair it. If they've further damaged the computer, perhaps Greek Law decrees that they should replace it entirely.
this is pretty much what you expect from most big tech companies these days. When it's all going well, everyone is happy and the money flows. When something goes wrong, you enter 'autobot' world, where no one is willing to give you a straight answer and you spend your days receiving boiler plate responses to questions you didn't ask.
So all you want to do is talk to someone. With Google, there's no chance. But even the companies with a phone number still manage to fail miserably. Take paypal - their phone staff must be trainee politicians as they never give a straight answer, anything other than low level account enquiries are given the response 'I'll have to look into that, and will send you an email when I am ready'. Then you re-enter autobot email world, where quite often they even forget to replace the 'insert boilerplate text here' tags.
Even when I've tried to report customer fraud, I get given such a run around by the autobot system, that I give up. Basically, these companies are now so big, they think they can do pretty much as they please, and unfortunately they seem to be correct.
This is why you should withdraw funds your paypal account daily, only leave a small float to cover chargebacks and expenses etc. And this is why Dylan Winter should have moved over to monthly bank transfer payments rather than taking his commissions in cheque form. That way if they pull your account, the most you can ever lose is a few weeks commissions, and bank transfers cannot be recalled like cheques.
the people who were caught out for downloading the files were the ones who downloaded the files. No question about it, and you really dont know what your talking about if you think otherwise..
Except these people are not being accused of 'downloading'. They are being accused of 'making the files available', i.e. sharing them.
Because as with all these speculative invoicing systems, they rely on coercing people into unnecessarily parting with useful information that can be used against them.
Any response, written or verbal is logged in a database and picked apart for possible weaknesses. Cases get built and the most probable 'slam dunks' get identified.
'Slam dunks', of course, are the people who are most likely to pay up without requiring actual court action against them
I run a digital product site, and we have always allowed our customers to re-download their purchases for free, as many times as they wish. Stuff the bandwidth costs, it seems so anti-consumer to make them pay extra for access to something they've already bought. And it's not like the file isn't always sitting on our servers anyway. Seems like just another way to gouge money from people.
I just never understand putting artificial limitations on these things, like stock image companies who make a download link valid for 1 hour. Why do that? Or only allowing you 3 download attempts before the link locks out. It doesn't stop piracy, it just makes genuine customers pissed off.
Anyone have a link that is not region-restricted?
Re:
Regarding a minimum, I've always argued that if I'm on an 'up to' 20 meg package, and the next package down is an 'up to' 10 meg, then I should always be getting speeds above 10 meg, otherwise, why pay the extra in the first place?
Unfortunately, that logic doesn't really work with your typical ISP.
"why didn't PayPal just tell them that in the first place?"
Have you ever dealt with Paypal customer services? They are incapable of answering ANY question directly - they have a set template of answers they give to any question and seem to go out of their way to not answer your specific question. And no matter how many times you say 'I did not ask that question, I asked this...', they still don't address your specific query.
Re: Re: Re: Re:
I agree, the entire situation is serious, and clearly something suspicious happened with GCB LTD, most likely to enable someone to hide their identity.
But too many people are talking about stuff that is quite frankly irrelevant. An incorrect SIC code is meaningless - the company was set up years ago, which is when the SIC code was most likely set up as relevant at the time. To my knowledge, there is no legal requirement to update SIC code.
Again, what is this 'Business Charter' you refer to, with this 90 days limit? That just sounds made up. Companies have to adhere to the 'Companies Act'.
I'm in no way trying to defend any of this, I'm well and truly appalled by the entire ASC Law/Media CAT scummy fiasco from start to finish, but people on forums seem to be just making stuff up now, and then too many people assume its fact.
You say their director is barred from trading? I assume you mean the director has been barred from being a director of any company - can you provide a URL where this has been discussed? If this is true, then that IS something Companies House will want to know about ASAP.
Re: Re:
"This is a direct violation of the Business Charter, that all businesses MUST sign up to within 90 calendar days of starting for the correct area of business. "
'Nature of business' in the companies house info simply refers to the _primary_ business activity of the company - the company is free to pursue other business interests (including extortion), without declaring it in their Annual Return each year. SIC codes are typically used for statistical purposes only.
It is not a requirement to complete the SIC code for all activities you engage in. Nor is it a requirement to complete it when setting up a company, this form entry is frequently left blank when forming a company.
What is this Business Charter you refer to?
I also believe that there is no SIC code for 'extortion' or 'speculative invoicing'...
Clearly there are many issues with this company, however, focussing on an incorrect SIC code isn't really one of them. It's a bit like everyone getting all OTT about their address being that of their accountant, when in reality it is very common practice for an accountant to offer 'registered office' services for their clients, it indicates nothing dodgy whatsoever from the accountant's POV.
I've been following the slyck forum discussion about this, and unfortunately there's a lot of mis-information and ludicrous conspiracy theories being spouted. Thankfully, there's forum member Mullard47, who seems to be a very intelligent person with a healthy knowledge of IP law to keep it all together.
The main problem I have with all this case will collapse due to legal technicalities and sloppy practices, rather than addressing the current legal grey area of speculative invoicing, which is all about income generation and intimidation, and nothing about stopping copyright infringement.
Surprise surprise
T-mobile have now backtracked on this, and will now only limit new and upgrading customers, so people who signed up for 3gig plans will keep it for the duration of their contract.
http://support.t-mobile.co.uk/help-and-support/index?page=home&cat=DATA_CHANGES
Nice to see customer backlash have some impact on these things. However the arrogance of t-mobile throughout has been an eye-opener. One (more) company to avoid - the list grows ever longer.
Re:
They insist changes to the acceptable usage policy are not significant enough to be considered breach of contract. Whether or not a court would agree is another matter.
In these situations, you need to have a detailed history of your usage over the past few months; if you regularly use over 500MB then you can argue that in your case, the changes will affect you 'significantly' and you should be able to get out of the contract. Of course, one suspects such historical data is most likely not available to download :)
Regardless, it simply highlights so many reasons why you should never sign up to a 2 year contract with any mobile operator, as any of them can turn on you at a moments notice. They advertise high usage quotas, get you to sign up with them for 2 years, then pull the quotas, claiming most people don't go anywhere near them. Which IMO is beside the point - the high quota was used as a competitive advantage and would sway many people to sign up, even if the rest of the deal wasn't quite as good as the competition. Really should be investigated by the powers that be, but of course, won't be.
Anyway, just more reason to stick to PAYG or 30 day 'sim only' contracts, which these days are pretty decent and give you the power to switch providers without too much hassle.
Re: hrmmm
He doesn't appear to be making anything up; he posted a bad review based on the fact that they failed to repair his product, and by all accounts actually made it worse. He then asked for a new unit, and they refused. If those are the facts, then how can he be sued for defamation?
As for his rights under Greek law, I suspect it may be related to his insistence that they actually caused more damage to the unit while attempting to repair it. If they've further damaged the computer, perhaps Greek Law decrees that they should replace it entirely.
this is pretty much what you expect from most big tech companies these days. When it's all going well, everyone is happy and the money flows. When something goes wrong, you enter 'autobot' world, where no one is willing to give you a straight answer and you spend your days receiving boiler plate responses to questions you didn't ask.
So all you want to do is talk to someone. With Google, there's no chance. But even the companies with a phone number still manage to fail miserably. Take paypal - their phone staff must be trainee politicians as they never give a straight answer, anything other than low level account enquiries are given the response 'I'll have to look into that, and will send you an email when I am ready'. Then you re-enter autobot email world, where quite often they even forget to replace the 'insert boilerplate text here' tags.
Even when I've tried to report customer fraud, I get given such a run around by the autobot system, that I give up. Basically, these companies are now so big, they think they can do pretty much as they please, and unfortunately they seem to be correct.
This is why you should withdraw funds your paypal account daily, only leave a small float to cover chargebacks and expenses etc. And this is why Dylan Winter should have moved over to monthly bank transfer payments rather than taking his commissions in cheque form. That way if they pull your account, the most you can ever lose is a few weeks commissions, and bank transfers cannot be recalled like cheques.
Re: Re:
the people who were caught out for downloading the files were the ones who downloaded the files. No question about it, and you really dont know what your talking about if you think otherwise..
Except these people are not being accused of 'downloading'. They are being accused of 'making the files available', i.e. sharing them.
Re: Slam Dunk?
Because as with all these speculative invoicing systems, they rely on coercing people into unnecessarily parting with useful information that can be used against them.
Any response, written or verbal is logged in a database and picked apart for possible weaknesses. Cases get built and the most probable 'slam dunks' get identified.
'Slam dunks', of course, are the people who are most likely to pay up without requiring actual court action against them
the musictechpolicy site appears to be gone. Just a google 'not found' error page now.