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Is
Amway pressuring Randy Haugen to |
I got a letter the other day from an attorney in Texas of all places with an attachment  from Randy
Haugen demanding that I remove his critical letter about Amway and Quixtar from the fall of 2007 from my
website. First of all I thought Haugen was a resident of Utah so it came to
me as a surprise that a Texas attorney is being used. I asked a few old timers
about this attorney and one thought that Brett Flagg was an attorney used by Amway in the
Sidney Schwarz case. I do not have any hard facts however, its just
rumor. It seems strange that after after 1.5 years after leaving Amway / Quixtar Randy Haugen now wants to take back his statements and impose a "copyright" threat on anyone who dare publish his story and criticisms of Amway. Other sites have also gotten the DMCA threat straight from their provider, while I was graced with a letter from Randy himself. I wrote two E-mails to Mr. Haugen but he seemed little concerned to write me back. I mean, what can be his motivation if Amway is not behind it? Ron Simmons has also been attempting to purge the internet of his stories of his problems with Amway. I can only assume Amway is holding something above their heads in order for them to remove their comment from the internet. It could be Amway has set Haugen up with a task he might not be able to complete. Just assume Amway is holding something over his head and says, we will only give you this if the "letter" comes down. Now Amway knows from the Sidney Schwarz website, the Blakey report and other cases that the harder they try to censor the internet and have things removed the more places it gets mirrored and posted. I suspect this will unfortunately happen to Mr. Haugen as well, and the company knows it too. That is why they asked him to do the impossible task. If he can't get the stuff off the Internet then Amway doesn't have to give Haugen what he wants. Just for fun I wrote back to Mr. Haugen's attorney asking them if I was to remove Mr.
Haugen's repeating of the P&G
Satan rumor I asked Haugen's attorney if he would send me the copyright registration but he said there was none. Surely any good attorney knows you cannot file a copyright suit without a registration. They can of course register it after the fact but then they can only collect for actual damages, that is the revenue from lost sales of the works since they could be obtained for free on the Internet. Mr. Haugen would never have a case for copyright infringement since he never sold the works in the first place. Given how many sites had his letter, I think he wanted it to be republished as much as possible. I know their strategy and it would be to send DMCA notices to the website hosts. They have no backbone and no knowledge of copyright law and will pull a site in a heart beat for a bogus claim like this. If you have a host with a backbone then there is no way they could win a copyright suit. But as I know too well, these people never intend to win, they intend to spend you to death so that you give up, even though you could win and they actually have no case. So everybody can read the Haugen letter until my time is up on April 30th. |
since that was obviously also a copyrighted work of Mr.
Haugen. Mr. Flagg did not respond to my question so I guess there is no
infringement issue with those statements and I can leave them up!