Those of you wishing to contact me can do so at nolongerascout@fament.com
And a copy of the letter I faxed on October 18, 2001 to both the attorney and Linda LeShanna at GSUSA is below this letter.
Dear Mr. Garrity:
I am writing to you in response to the letter sent by your firm to me at my business address. First of all, I want to tell you what an inspiration that posting this letter on my website has been for me. I wanted to tell you that since I have taken down all the leader information and links and have posted the three page mail I received from you on October 4, I have received many, many e-mails of encouragement. It sure made all of the work that I did (free of charge, I might add) worthwhile for me.
Secondly, I want you to remove the name of Family Entertainment Network, LLC from all future mailings addressed to me at this address. Family Entertainment Network, LLC has neither legal or personal jurisdiction over this domain in any way, shape or form other than they are the ISP that hosts this domain (also free of charge, I might add). This address was used to prevent me from having to list my home address and/or phone number in a public place to prevent the tons of "junk mail" that is received yearly from domain owners and operators.
I would also like to take this opportunity to address the tone and nature of the letter received by your firm. Obviously, neither you or any one at your firm never even bothered to look at the site GIRLSCOUT.NET. Yes, you are probably correct that GSUSA owns the rights to such a name, but why, all of a sudden, do they choose to take this course of action? This has NOT "just recently come to their attention" as I have forwarded e-mail to GSUSA from a @girlscout.net e-mail address for as long as the domain has been active (over THREE years). I believe one of the e-mails that was received by me sums it up best…."..So much for being a 'Sister to every Girl Scout'. And to believe this is financed by a bunch of little girls selling Girl Scout cookies". Even though I have been a (prior) Girl Scout volunteer long enough to know that the National Office receives no revenue from Cookie Sales, most of the volunteers don't and certainly the general public doesn't know that either. From absolutely no correspondence about my ownership of this domain name, which began August 29, 1998, to a letter of this tone and nature makes no sense.
In your letter you claim to have ownership of several different domain names, including but not limited to GIRLSCOUT.INFO. I looked up this claim on the internet (using geektools.com and the whois.afilias.info server and discovered that GSUSA does NOT, in fact, own this domain. It really is too bad that you think you can threaten and harass people into giving you what you want by falsifying information.
What was in place on GIRLSCOUT.NET until the receipt of your letter (which, by the way, scanned and posted quite nicely) was a website that had information for Girl Scout leaders, such as songs, ceremonies, links to other useful sites (including but not limited to GSUSA). There were NOT ANY advertisements of any kind, there were not even any links to any craft sites that had materials for sale; this was an attempt on my part to avoid the fact that I might look like I was endorsing a business or otherwise leading consumers to purchase things from someone. There were no other commercial doings on my site what-so-ever. It really is too bad that before you took the tone that you did in your letter that you didn't even bother to look at the site to see what was REALLY up there.
In closing, I would like to point out in your letter what exactly you are demanding. I refer to page three, the last sentence of the paragraph continued from the previous page. In this it states "…to effectuate the transfer of ownership of the registration for the domain name GIRLSCOUT.ORG to GSUSA." I would love to do so, however, I don't own (never have, never will) the domain name GIRLSCOUT.ORG. The only domain that I personally own is GIRLSCOUT.NET. I suppose that is the domain name you meant to refer to in this paragraph, so please find attached the Domain Bank Registrant Transfer Request Form 3.0. I will be mailing a copy of same to your office by October 19, 2001 as per your second threatening letter that I received via fax. (Which, I assume by the information in this letter, you really DIDN'T look at my site prior to writing the first one).
It really is too bad that GSUSA doesn't bother to "practice what they preach" as far as copyright infringement and such. I refer to a tape made by the Ozark Area Girl Scout Council several years ago at Resident Camp at Camp Mintahama. On this tape was a song by the name of "On The Loose" which was written by a lady by the name of Judith Keller. They recorded, produced and sold, at a profit, this tape in their local council store, never bothering to get permission from the holder of the copyright. This was even reported by several local volunteers to GSUSA but nothing was ever done about it. The tapes were carried in the local store until they were gone (over 100 of them were produced). Judy contacted me with permission to post that song on my site, and I am sure she will give permission even if my site goes up with no reference to GSUSA directly. I am completely disgusted and appalled that this type of thing is not policed internally but that you have no qualms about threatening the "little people". Yes, I know, this doesn't begin to come close to a big law firm such as yourself knowing all of the ins and outs of the legal system, but I do know that what the council did was wrong, and I do know that GSUSA knew about it, and did nothing. Too bad the volunteers couldn't afford an attorney.
In a final parting note, I am also enclosing a letter received by one of the leaders that went so far as to actually send me a regular letter (as opposed to an e-mail) that expresses her disappointment in what you are doing. She also went so far as to contact GSUSA in my behalf. I would really urge you to re-think the attitude with which you deal with the public-at-large as you could just have a publicity nightmare on your hands. (Not a threat, merely an observation)
Beverly Gustafsson
Former GS Volunteer
Please note that nowhere in the first letter received from the law firm does it ask me to contact them other than to present them with the paperwork they want to change the domain registration.
At this point I didn't even bother to respond to the claim that I didn't "respond to their letter as requested". Hopefully, someone at GSUSA will have some sense to realize what they are doing in bullying people like myself. It really is too bad, but cie la vie...........