Badly smelling news from PhotoPoint

Sergiusz Mitin

Sergiusz Mitin

Joined
Nov 25, 1999
Messages
1,499
If you remember well some time ago www.photopoint.com turned to paid image hosting. When a lot of people have paid them they stopped their online activity. Personally for me this caused a lot, lot of redundant work reediting Internet publications. I didn’t deal with this up to day, a lot of Forum publications are already archived and unavailable for edition.
In another words – PhotoPoint have wasted a decent deal of my work, I guess a lot of people could have to them similar pretensions as well.

Today a have got from them “cool” proposition: to buy from them CD with my own photos for $24.95 plus shipping and handling $9.95.
All I have found useful to answer them is to do not be silly and insolent.

Would any normal fellow be going to send them money after all they did?
 
If anyone is dumb enough to send these bozos cash, I need to sell them some swamp land. So email me after you place your order :D.
 
Wow, I can't believe the gall of this company. They get people to pay for a service that then shuts down causing untold headaches. Then they want to sell you your picture files? I would tell them to go to hell.
 
Sounds borderline criminal to me. Anybody thought of contacting the apropriate law enforcement agency, like the FBI.:confused:
 
It could be worse, it could be they would sell your stuff to ANYONE that wants to buy it. Forcing you to buy your own stuff to protect yourself.
 
Originally posted by Sergiusz Mitin

Would any normal fellow be going to send them money after all they did?
Click to expand...

Damn right, Serg! I had a lot of photos get "eaten" by their demise. I am <b>NOT</b> paying those idiots another cent even if it is to recover all those images I have never backed up. Their demise was what I call PPP - piss poor planning - on their part :mad:
 
It is probably just some entrepreneur who paid a couple of bucks for their data base. These guys have nothing to do with the original company. Having said that, their is a real issue to be discussed involving the rights to this data.

Just sit tight and wait for the lawsuits. Next up, an online retailer will go bust and sell his credit card files to another would-be "entrepreneur". :rolleyes:

n2s
 
I believe that if you'll examine the terms of service which you agreed to when you signed up with PhotoPoint, that they really didn't guarantee to give you any service at all. They certainly didn't agree to become a serogate hard drive for your computer. And you also agreed that you did not expect them to safe-keep your files.

I also suspect that the $25 is about break-even for them if you consider their material and labor cost to make that CD up for you. They are under no legal obligation to do this.

You should be thankful that they are and are doing so at a rather reasonable price. If you had 25 pictures hosted with them, then you're paying $1 each, about the cost of a reprint if it was a film picture.

My father was a wise man. He often said, "the only thing more dangerous than a stupid person is a stupid person who doesn't know that he's stupid." My younger brother is a wise man. He often says, "If you think you're getting something for nothing, then you're a dummy and you don't even know it."

Bottom line as I see it: you got what you paid (or didn't even pay) for. You have no complaint.

If you initially valued those files as much as you seem to now, you wouldn't have trusted them to a situation where there was no guarantee in the first place.

Let's face it: someone flashed the words "FREE" or "CHEAP" in front of your face and you were so blinded by the thought of getting something for nothing (or very little) that you didn't consider what that something was. Because of that carelessness on your part, you've lost your files. And now you are trying to find some way to blame someone else for your mistakes.

Me? While you hosted your pictures on the cheap at PhotoPoint, I paid money to host my website at a reliable hosting service where there is a guarantee of service. While you all just casually uploaded your pictures to PhotoPoint assuming that they'd always be there, I bought a Zip Drive and a CD burner and Zip disks and blank CDs and spent time backing up mine on multiple copies on multiple different media. And, today, I've got all my picture files.

You get what you pay for.

Sorry to be quite so brutally blunt, but that's how I see it.
 
I couldn't agree more with Chuck. My guess is that they are only doing that because so many people had not saved their files. In effect, it's a service they provide. They might make a small margin on it, but my take on this proposal is that they had to close shop for $$$ reasons, and they want to give you an opportunity to get your stuff back - without screwing up the stock holder who them *did* pay some of their own money... Also, how much do you value your time, and how long is it going to take you to duplicate that work? What is the smart solution?

JD
 
:rolleyes:

Chuck, I do not see your position in this case.
Bottom line as I see it: you got what you paid (or didn't even pay) for. You have no complaint.
Click to expand...

The problem is I paid for a year of service. That service was terminated without any notification long before the year was up.

Did I loose anything? No pictures, I am a programmer and I back up things important to me by second nature sometimes in more than one place, but I did loose a portion of that year of service I paid for.

Please tell me how I do not have a complaint, I paid for a year of service.
Gus
 
So what you two are saying is that if I offer a service for a period of time at a price and then decide that I screwed up that it is OK for me to not provide that service for the time I agreed to.



Uh... Remind me never to make a deal with you two. :D
 
Again, I suspect that if you will go back and read the terms of service that you agreed to when you signed up, I think you'll probably find that you agreed that they could terminate the service early. If that's not true, then you have a valid legal case against them and you should persue that.

My guess, however, is that many of you clicked on that "I agree" button without even reading what you were agreeing to.
 
As I understand it, Photopoint went bankrupt. When a company goes bankrupt, sometimes creditors are left holding bad debt. Nobody likes that, but that is the pracitcal reality. If Photopoint did actually go bankrupt, then I'm afraid that those who paid for a full year are just left holding bad debt. If $11 is the biggest bad debt you're ever left holding, you should be happy. (BTW, if you itemize, you may be able to deduct that bad debt from your income tax.)

A couple of years ago, I bought a subscription to a new magazine that I was very excited about. After just a few issues, they went bankrupt. I have not yet received another issue nor have I received any refund. And I don't expect to see either in the future. I don't like having lost about $35, but that's life.

What Photopoint has done is dishonorable and unethical, but I think you'll find that it's probably not illegal.

Again, I'm reminded of a person who leaves his prized knife out in the weather all the time and then complains when it rusts. And who does he blame for the rust? Himself for his own carelessness? No. It couldn't possibly be his own fautlt? No. He blames the weather. If he really did value that knife, he should have taken better care of it.
 
Photopoint is now owned by Pantellic software as of 07/2001. Pantellic software is far from Bankrupt. I use some of their products professionally. My payment was made to Pantellic in Auguest of 2001.

I have a copy of my agreement with them in front of me (being in software for 25 years I read fine print and keep copies). There is no mention of pulling the service at their will. There was when the use Photopoint did not involve a cost before Patellic purchased them. If that was still the case now I would be in total agreement with you.

I paid for a year of service and I should get what I paid for or the company should be out of business.

What Photopoint has done is dishonorable and unethical, but I think you'll find that it's probably not illegal
Click to expand...

That part I agree with and that is my whole point. At first I thought you were defending their actions and when I read your first post I still see some defence of their actions as well as belittlement of folks who entered a contract with Pantellic. I find Pantellic actions to personally be dishonorable and unethical also.
 
Chuck,

You are missing the point. What ever their financial status may have been it was known well in advance of their campaign to seek user fees. They intentionally and knowingly defrauded their customers, and then pulled the plug without giving anyone prior notice. That is precisely the kind of behavior which will soon cause our government to step in and regulate the industry.

Perhaps that is why the business has dropped 90% over the last two years. Internet services are an unregulated, unsecure, and unreliable mess.

n2s
 
I amy be all wet on Pantellic solvency. More later when I find out for sure.
 
Oh man, there's alot of things I feel like saying here right now at this particular time. But I'll start with this. Chuck, no disrespect intended here old buddy but what's with the blinders? Every situation in life isn't cut and dried like it must be within the confines of your view of the world. Reguardless what the 'fine frigging print' says, if you pay for a service then you should recieve that service. Period. If you don't recieve the service you paid for you should recieve a pro-rated refund. Photopoint played the numbers game and lost. They pulled a fast one on people much like PayPal. Promise the moon and the stars, take the money, then ignore their customers to the point of criminal neglect.

Then they have the gall to ask people who paid for their service and didn't get a full measure for what they paid to ante up for a CD of the very images they paid to have hosted. And $9.95 for shipping? Get real! Parcel post is $1.45. And $25 for a CD that cost them a quarter? For your own frigging pictures??? That you paid to have hosted? That's blackmail or extortion or maybe they need to make up a new word to describe that thing that they pulled. Hell, I have my pics backed up on my hard drive and on a CD. I always save a copy because I edit the pics to make them fly on the web smaller and faster. Photopoint did people dirty. They whined and sent out emails to all of their users asking for money so they could stay in business. They sent out surveys to see if a paid service would fly. I watched all of that with great interest because I had several hundred pics sitting on their site. And I paid the fee they asked for when they asked me to pay it because I was happy with their service and I thought it would most likely help them to get over the bump in the road that caused them to ask me for money. And they dropped the ball Chuck. Plain and simple. They screwed lots of honest hard working folks out of real money and just left us all hanging. That's wrong any way you look at it.
 
As I have repeatedly said, what PhotoPoint did was wrong. It was morally wrong. It was ethically wrong. But... I doubt that you have any legal case.


I don't know anything specific about this case, but I can tell you that if there were any lawyers worth their Brooks Brothers Suits in the room, then Pantellic did not acquire PhotoPoint.

If you go to an estate sale and buy some of the dearly departed's knives, do you also, with that purchase, also become responsible for the deceased's unpaid debts? No. Of course not.

What probabaly happened in this case probably went something like this:

1) Photopoint legally changed its name to something like "The PhotoPoint Receivership Corporation." However, this was just a name change. They still owned all of the assets they previously had including the database, the PhotoPoint name and URL. And, they still owned all of the old debts including the months of service that some of you contracted for. But, what they've done legally free up the PhotoPoint name.

2) PhotoPoint Receivership Corp. had an estate sale of sorts and Pantellic bought a whole shopping cart full of the old Photopoint assets including the database, the URL and the name. But, the debts stayed with PhotoPoint Receivership Corp.

It is PhotoPoint Receivership that legally owes you for the undelivered months of service, not Pantellic.

But,

3) PhotoPoint Receivership Corp went bankrupt and took those debts down with it.

What happened to the money that Pantellic paid for that cart full of assets? It went to PhotoPoint's preferred creditors... probably at a rate of pennies on the dollar of debt.

So, while you wringe your hands over eleven dollars, there's some venture capitalist out there explaining to his priciples that he lost eleven million of their dollars. And there are principles out there writting eleven million dollars off of their books.

Now, you may say, "I feel very sorry for them... maybe they won't be able to affort a new Learjet this year and will just have to make do with last year's."

But, maybe they just won't be able to invest in the new company that would like to get started in your town and give you a good job.

And maybe one of those principles is a mutual fund that you have money invested in...

Hmmm....

You might ask, "It is reasonable for a company to be able to do this, to just up and declare bankruptcy and leave their creditors helplessly writting off debts? Isn't this legalized theft?"

Well, nobody forced those creditors, you included, to invest that money. Furthermore, it is only in an environment where failure is possible that success is also possible.



Again, let me say that I feel that many of PhotoPoint's actions were unethical. But I also think that those who are whining about loosing their files and now being asked to pay to receive them back can fault only themselves for putting themselves and their files in this situation.
 
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