The Electra Forums

... has gone. For good. The Site Admin for reasons known only to himself has razed the site to the ground - there is nothing left, and even trolling the cache sites elicited nothing, so there you go!!

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"... and on the eighth day, God created New Zealanders.

Because even the Australians need heroes."

Have you been in contact with the Admin? I was watching a "Dimension IV" auction last week, and the seller was using a bunch of links from the Westone site, about four days into it, all the linked images at the bottom of the auction had been hacked to show some very objectionable pornography. The hacking was done to the Westone site, not the auction, so maybe this incident had something to do with the site going down? Maybe not... Mike.

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Electra Guitar Videos ===> http://www.youtube.com/user/mjm33mjm?feature=watch

Did I mention I hate Hackers. When someone goes to all the time and work to make so much great information available to all it burns me up to see some idiot do this and cause him to have to wipr out the site to get rid of the garbage. Where did honor and integrity in people go? I would hope he had a backup of the site and can just reload and update the site again. Lots of great information there.

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Always give thanks for everyday, It may be your last so Rock On Semper Fi!!

If you know the URL, try this website

http://www.archive.org/web/web.php

DARN IT!!!! I need some locking nut parts. I have been dragging my feet on placing the order waiting to see if I needed anything more. I figured the site would be around for a long time to come.

That's a shame because he binned all of the Spares that he had left as well....



Ahhh!! Well, that won't have helped his state of mind, I'm sure!! Still, he could have passed the baton on, as it were, if he didn't want to do it anymore, eh!!

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"... and on the eighth day, God created New Zealanders.

Because even the Australians need heroes."

I just checked a few minutes ago and it appears the site was pulled today because people were copying his "work." If this is his reason than all I can say is it seems like a remarkably petty reason to take the site down. Here's what admin posted on the Westone site:

"9th April 2011

All spares orders have been posted. This site is now closed.

This was my personal site about Matsumoku Westone guitars. The site was never public domain. For several personal reasons (and also to a large degree thanks to the amount of copying of my work on this - which I am told is still ongoing) the pages that I wrote (The individual model pages, wiring diagrams etc) will not be made public here and will not be made available for any other site.

Pictures etc submitted by others will also not be made freely available as they were given to me for use on this site, it would be impossible to get the consent of all contributors to wider distribution.

The documentation that was researched for the site (Adverts, reviews, catalogues and pricelists) and the html for those pages will be made freely available from this site. It is currently being edited to remove all references to this site, any of my comments and replace absolute links with relative ones so it can be uploaded to any site. There are a lot of pages involved, I expect this to take about a week.

Watch this space."

This is the URL: http://www.westone.info/

What is Public Domain? Well, if you go to Wikipedia you'll find a complicated 18 paragraph article infused with legal jargon that left me more confused than enlightened. Here is probably the most concise excerpt, which hopefully will not upset anyone if I copy and paste it here!!

Public Domain refers to works, ideas, and information which are intangible to private ownership and/or which are available for use by members of the public.

I guess this begs the question, if the Author did not want to freely distribute his information, why was it posted on the Internet?

I would love to hear Thorny chime in on this one, as he is in a similar situation. I do know that some Hosting providers will charge more if the site is getting more traffic, so maybe this does boil down to economics. I can see both sides of the story on this one, but if you gather useful information and no one ever sees it, what good has come of your efforts? Just saying, Mike.

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Electra Guitar Videos ===> http://www.youtube.com/user/mjm33mjm?feature=watch

Posting something on the web does not put it "In the public domain." It does make control difficult though. The owner of the site that uses photos and other material with permission has no legal duty to protect them from miss-use as long as they don't promote it. Sounds like the guy is having a hissy fit.

He has to be pretty naive and unrealistic--as well as misinformed. How many people think the internet works on the honor system--lol? He gets my vote for crybaby of the year.

It can be pretty discouraging to have the results of long hours of work simply copied and passed off as belonging to someone else. There may be some original content that he feels has been improperly co-opted.

That being said, if one post something on the internet, you have to be extremely naive to think it will remain under your control. The general level of respect for intellectual property is fairly dismal these days-- but that should be a surprise to no one.

Interesting, too, that the site's admin says "The documentation that was researched for the site (Adverts, reviews, catalogues and pricelists) and the html for those pages will be made freely available from this site." If I'm not mistaken, the advertisements, reviews (copied from publications?), and catalogs are without a doubt the property of some other entity. And he has no qualms about making it available to everyone else, eh?

Looks like the site may have been turned over to someone else now.

The site is indeed live again under new management http://www.westone.info/
Glad to see the information is again available to all.

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Always give thanks for everyday, It may be your last so Rock On Semper Fi!!

Good news because I just picked up a Concord...

Yeah, 'tis!! Good to have it back and nice that you've got a Concord!! You gonna show us??

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"... and on the eighth day, God created New Zealanders.

Because even the Australians need heroes."

As soon as I have a free moment. Really nice guitar...