Claus-Dieter Zink takes measures against Lowlands Cup team

Knacklappen schrieb:

I explained the situation in detail to him - in German - and he
actually agreed that probably this conflict could have been avoided if
Vertigos first mails would have been in German. Since he does not speak
English, he throws away all non-German mails as spam. =:-o

If this is true, you should forward this message to the LLC guys. That
puts CDZ's whole case into the dustbin.

Despite this, there's things that make him look bad:

Why did he have to employ a lawyer before trying to communicate, even
though the two parties don't share a common language, there's enough
Germans with fluent English that could have helped out. (maybe the
initial "unauthorized spokesperson" was such a helping hand? Wonder why
he's unauthorized now, then)

The claim that now he has to pay the legal cost and thus he doesn't
want to settle the case in a good-will scenario is, let's say, slightly
blue eyed. Giving the above quote that he probably threw away the first
e-mails that tried to get his ok to use the picture based on the fact
that he was unable to read the predominant language in international
business, I assume that a court would find that throwing away business
messages because you don't understand them is not good practice, which
will not help his case. The LLC guys have, thus, behaved correctly in
asking permission as soon as they found out that it was copyrighted
material. They should have removed it while there was no positive
feedback, however.
I firmly believe that, if this case goes to court, it will come out as
a draw with two unhappy parties and two happy lawyers.
We Germans have been known for feeding haystacks of money to the
lawyers over such stupid things as fences between neighbouring yards,
trees on those fences, cars parked in "wrong" locations etc. etc. etc.
It seems that CDZ is continuing this "good" practice by not even
considering a peaceful settlement of this case, which might be easy to
get. If he had to hire the lawyer because of his own lack of
proficiency in English, that's his problem and thus the cost he'll
have to pay. He could have gotten translator services for less money.

Finally, the claim the lawyer makes on LLC being a GbR (Gesellschaft
des bürgerlichen Rechts) is pretty dubious. While a GbR can be
constituted without a written contract to pursue basically any joint
interest, I doubt that it will hold in this case. The finer point
behind it is this: if those guys really were a GbR, they would all
jointly be liable with their private wealth (with the word wealth
probably being too big a word in this case) and thus they could go
after those that are here in Germany who themselves, as far as I
understand, were not involved in copying the picture, just because they
were members of the same legal body. Boy this smells bad. It's a trick
to avoid having to go to court in Belgium.

Oh, and finally one thing you need to know about Lawyer fees in
Germany:
There's something called the BRAGO (federal regulation for legal
attorneys fees). This lists, in detail, what a lawyer is allowed to
charge for a certain service. It does this, for most things, in
relation to the case value. If you're fighting over 200EUR, the
attorney will make much less money than when you're fighting over
10000. That's the reason why every lawyer has a vested interest in
inflating the case value to something "sensible" for his own purse.

I wish you all the best for your case!
Reno

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Disclaimer: IANAL, all above is laymen's knowledge

pj