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Old 07-11-2012, 06:04 AM  
AdultKing
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Join Date: Jun 2003
Location: Outback Australia
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Ok this is going to be a long post, so please bear with me.

One of the difficulties of dealing with large organizations like Visa and Mastercard, or Industry Groups or even Paypal initially was that this was "just one person on a bit of a mission". Being taken seriously as "one person" is hard, especially in some of the financial and industry representation areas.

Over the past few days alot of thought has been put into how to change the perceptions of organizations we deal with and how we can make them take this whole thing a little more seriously. A number of possible options were examined and there was a lot of legal and accounting advice sought in that process.

Another issue, for me anyway, was that of donations. As most of you were aware I just didn't even want to accept them at first, I intended to just do it all myself. Over time people persuaded me otherwise and it seems that was a good thing as this whole effort has started to cost a little bit of money.

There is also the issue of what happens if I were to go under a bus tomorrow, if that were to happen then the whole thing would grind to a halt and nobody would know what was going on.

So with all this in mind and with the best possible advice being considered these are the things that have been done and are in the process of being done.

1. Today an Australian Company Limited by Shares was established as a legal entity to be a container for the whole effort. It's name is Copy Control Pty. Limited. It is established under Australian Corporations law and will live on as an entity in it's own right even if I had to stop working on this for any reason. The corporation also has as a recorded minuted decision of it's first meeting, to re-invest any profit each year back into the corporation, so it will act like a non profit in that all excess funds go into further expansion of operations and not into anyone's pocket.

2. It is not legal for an Australian Company Limited by Shares to raise funds such as dontations without a charitable fundraising permit. It is also unlikely that our operations would be considered charitable. Therefore to everyone who has contributed and anyone who wishes to contribute in future, you will have the option of receiving a paid invoice for "Copyright Protection Services" to the amount contributed. If you don't want in invoice that's fine, but if you do let me know and we will send you one by mail or if you prefer as a PDF in email.

3. As everyone knows we are finalizing our collaboration system. We have chosen Podio as the system we are going to use. The main reason it was chosen is that we already have experience with it. The secondary reason was that if you can use Facebook you can use Podio. With Podio we can assign people different roles and different levels of access.

It is even possible to provide people observer or guest access to see overall operations without revealing higher level confidential information. So for example a guest might be able to see our targets and compare them to our milestones. A guest might be able to tip us off about a site to target and will be able to search for targets we have already dealt with.

The Podio system will be rolled out in stages. Initially we will have only a handful of volunteers use it. However in the long term I see it becoming a centralised clearing house where people can report piracy in file lockers to begin with, then see a result. In other words we will have a system that provides a level of transparency and where people can see actual results as they happen.

4. People have suggest I cannot keep this up forever, this is true to an extent. This stopped being a solo effort a little while ago, however now we have clearly defined strategies in place we can spread the load beyond just my staff. As things progress I will be able to spend more time on oversight than actual slaying. I will be able to concentrate on the relationships with billing companies, credit card companies, ISP's , Network Providers and so on.

5. As of writing I own Stop File Lockers, Cold Copy and the other support sites, the web hosting and all the databases and so forth. However from midnight tonight all of that is officially and legally transferred to Copy Control Pty. Limited. No longer will I personally own or be liable for any of it.

6. If someone wants to sue us for whats on a site then they can only sue the legal entity. I will not be legally liable for any of it. The most that anyone launching a law suit can expect to receive is what assets the company holds, which is virtually nothing but contributions and a few domain names, databases, software and some office supplies.

7. As many people have been generous and have contributed in many ways I have decided to match all contributions dollar for dollar out of my own pocket to a cap of $50,000.

8. The company on it's website will publish financial reports and milestone reports on a quarterly basis for anyone to scrutinize. Additionally contributors will have access to guest access on Podio to watch how their contributions are spent and what progress is being made on targets.

9. We are working hard to streamline our reporting to Paypal and become more efficient at doing so. The collaboration system based on Podio will help us do that.

10. We will not need to focus on illegal pornography to keep Paypal's attention, nor that of Visa and Mastercard and the other processors. The issue of piracy is enough so from today onward we will simply report any suspicion of illegal pornography to the appropriate authorities and not deal with it in our blog posts or reports any longer. We are not qualified to do make any kind of judgement about what's a misleading liink name and what's dangerous material. We never open links so we can never know what's really behind them anyway. The authorities are best placed to deal with these issues.

11. We will , as some of you know, be launching a toll free hotline in the UK, USA and Australia/New Zealand for people to report sites to us. All we will ask for from callers is the name of the site and the type of material they found. No caller will be asked for URL's or details beyond those two simple things. Callers may speak to a live operator or leave a recorded message with their reports. We have delayed the introduction of the hotline until incorporation and will set about a launch date for some time next week.

12. If anyone has any questions, comments, criticisms or concerns I'd be glad to hear them.

Thanks for putting up with such a long post but I thought it was important to clearly state what was being done and why.

Last edited by AdultKing; 07-11-2012 at 06:17 AM..
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