Claus-Dieter Zink takes measures against Lowlands Cup team

A valuable lesson. Learn from it..!

I wouldn't call you a thief, nor any other kind of
criminal. I'd just say you were a bit daft, beleiving
that an attempt to contact CDZ gave you the right to
assume it would be OK.

It would have only been OK with his writen permission
and I'm sure CDZ has good reasons for not replying,
however a simple 'no' would have saved a whole bunch
of grief.

Good luck.

Al

At 11:36 30 December 2005, Ronald Termaat wrote:
Some clarification.

Yes, we are wrong because we used a picture without
checking the
source/copyright. We just found it with Google and
it was not coming
from the site of CDZ. Up till now we did not even found
the picture
back on his website.

But the moment we found out that it was possibly a
picture of CDZ we
tried to contact him and ask for permission and support.
No reply.
A mail discussion started with somebody who claimed
to talk in the name
of CDZ (even wrote: CDZ is standing right next to me
at the moment) who
wrote (after some unpleasant mails), it is ok. During
this conversation
we again tried to contact CDZ (email and phone) but
no response.
Because the Lowlandscup is for fun and promotion of
gliding and
strictly non profit we had no reason to believe that
it would hurt CDZ,
or his business and that of course he would not have
any objection in
using the picture. Boy, we were wrong!
We received a letter from his lawyer demanding to pay
an amount of 1400
Euros for copyright infringement. Again we tried to
reach Mr. Zink
(email, phone and 3 different faxnumbers) trying to
settle this in a
mature way. The only response we received from him,
via the lawyer, was
that we committed a crime and he doesn't want to deal
with thieves.

The only option available to us was seek assistance
in the
glidingcommunity. We are spending a lot of time making
the Lowlandscup
work, and we get no money for it at all. We do not
have the funds to
pay for the claim of CDZ.

The picture we used is already removed and replaced
by a picture
offered by the German C-kader (German Juniors team).

I'm flying for more than 25 years, have participated
in everything from
Juniors up till Worldchampionships. It was always a
pleasure to meet
new people from all over the world, and we have made
many new friends.
All these people shared the joy of soaring.
The words from the website of CDZ: 'Mit Freundlichem
Fliegergruss'
(with friendly soaring greetings) seems to me not very
well chosen. We
tried to correct our mistake, mr Zink only contacted
his lawyer and
never contacted us.

Sorry Mr. Zink, this is not how we handle with issues
in the
glidercommunity!
And I also rather not be called a thief anymore...

Ronald Termaat
XT