28 September 2000

Mr. Brown:

Our company hosts a mirror site for your primary web site www.vidiot.com,
as a non-commercial service to the non-profit satellite television
"hobbyist" community.  We have for over twenty-one years now strongly
supported this dish enthusiast community (from the original days of Bob
Coop and totally unscrambled C-band feeds :-)  Our exchanges
non-copyrighted information and material strictly for home television
viewers' personal viewing pleasure, in a variety of ways.  One of the more
personally rewarding means of support by us over the last seven years has
been the provision of free Internet connectivity services.  

The home satellite television enthusiast community provides a valuable
non-commercial service which strengthens the commercial fortunes of the
various motion picture and television production companies and increases
their viewership.  We shall always support the non-profit satellite
television community in its legitimate activities, and will continue our
practice of donating connectivity services on a non-profit basis wherever
we are able.

It has, however, been recently brought to our company's attention that
copyrighted material may be present on the mirror site mirror.vidiot.com
without prior written authorization of the original copyright holders,
which if true would place our commercial web hosting business division in
legal jeopardy of civil litigation from such copyright holders.  Part of
the Clinton Administration's Digital Millennium Copyright Act provides for
an exemption from liability of an Internet Service Provider under certain
circumstances should a subscriber post copyrighted material on that ISP's
servers without knowledge of the ISP and without prior written approval of
the copyright holder.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act does not continue to protect the ISP
after the ISP is made aware of the presence of unauthorized copyrighted
material, meaning material whose presence is known to be copyrighted and
for which there is no written authorization on file in the business offices
of our company. Should we continue to host such material after learning of
its presence, we could become liable for quite severe civil penalties and
lose our business assets to a civil judgement (or worse if we continue to
violate court orders).

So that we can comply fully with all legislation including the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act, and continue to provide non-profit free Internet
connectivity services to the "lists that we love" and the satellite
television community of which we are a proud part, we must ask that you
first examine the material you currently have on the web site
mirror.vidiot.com for the presence of copyrighted materials.  If there is
any copyrighted material present for which you cannot provide written
authorization from copyright holders, and it is not your own copyrighted
material wherein you control the original copyright itself, then we humbly
ask that you remove it as soon as humanly possible and place it on a server
not hosted within our ISP's infrastructure.  All other material of course
can remain, since the remainder will not expose our company to consequent
civil liability or damages, and we can continue to stay in business and
thus continue to provide hosting of satellite television related
information for private non-commercial use of all home enthusiasts.

To allow you to examine the material and delete or move that which cannot
remain, we will temporarily "turn back on" the site with sufficient
simultaneous sessions enabled (5) to allow you to examine the site content
for prompt candidate removal without simultaneously risking unauthorized
access by others to copyrighted material which is in the process of being
reviewed and removed by you.  When you have replied to us via email or fax
that all material which may expose us to liability has been removed, we
will restore the site to its full number of 100 simultaneous sessions.
While most ISPs would simply "cut the connection" for good, we do not
believe that such a Pyrrhist approach is necessary or appropriate to your
sincere non-profit endeavour.   We believe also that through this approach
you will more easily be able to expeditiously remove any material which may
otherwise expose us to liability.

Thank you, Mike, for all that you have done to promote this hobbyist
activity of which we are a proud part, and we look forward to continuing to
host sites such as yours for many years to come.  Please accept my personal
apologies for our being required to fully conform to the rules of the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  If our servers were located outside the
United States then this Act might not apply to us or any subject content.
It is rumored that there are many "data havens", or server complexes
outside the United States who regularly host material without regard to its
copyright status.  For strictly educational and research purposes, of
course, you may wish to investigate these types of sites and how they work.

For our part, we may ourselves go investigate this offshore community for
the sole academic reason of comparing the position of such server operators
on US Copyright issues to our own, but not of course to ever attempt to
evade full compliance with all U.S. laws covering the issue for our own
servers currently located within the U.S.

Sincerely,

[name and address withheld]