My letter to DreamHost FilesForever

[MPee3]

I sent the following e-mail to DreamHost/FilesForever through their "contact" page:
"
Dear Sirs,
Over the course of the last 2 years I have purchased 30 videos from your Files Forever service, for a total sum of $409.5. These payments have been made for the right to download and store the files on your servers "forever". As you have taken the service offline with apparently no intention of ever restoring it, you no longer provide the service for which I have paid for and therefore you are in violation of your own terms of service. If your service is not re-instated, I request that you refund in full all payments which I have made for storage of files "forever" and which are no longer stored by you, for the full sum of $409.5. Please be advised that failure to do so may result in legal action against you, up to and including a class-action suit which would require you to refund all payments made by all customers to which you promised this service "forever" and which you no longer supply. Best regards.
"

Note that I'm not asking for any refund from Bound2Burst - quite on the contrary, I fully support Dave and Bound2Burst and will continue purchasing from him in the future. However, from a legal standpoint, I never actually bought anything from Dave - I, and everyone else, purchased a service from Dreamhost FilesForever, and that service was not just the one-time download right of files but also permanent storage and hosting of said files with unlimited download time. That service, for which we all paid for, is now discontinued without notice, and therefore I think that we are all well within our rights to demand a complete refund of our money. Dave is also well within his rights to sue them for damages to his business, should he choose to do so. Anyway, that is what I sent to them, and I encourage each and every person who ever bought from them to do the same.

[bubbatub78]

Very well written letter, Mpee3. I would be willing to join a class action suit if only for the principle of the thing. Their namesake, at this point, is a joke. I guess "FilesForAsLongAsTheServerDoesn'tHaveIssuesOtherwiseAllBetsAreOff" just didn't have the same ring to it.

[cantholdit]

Excellent - I'll write something similar as soon as I compile my total. I'd also be willing to join a suit.

[cbprod]

I think this is excellent also, and I'm all for the class action suit.

[Bound2Burst]

For clarification, customers paid "me" for the content they purchased, but from that payment Dreamhost always withheld what they call a storage fee amounting to $1 for every 400 MB of disc space occupied by the purchased files. This is the part where the breach of contract has occurred since the storage fees were levied to guarantee that you would have access to those files indefinitely via Files Forever.

As a point of interest, this storage fee would have still be deducted from me even if I had given away files for free (in other words, I would have paid to give something away), so the fee was always levied no matter what.

[MPee3]

I don't think that's quite true Dave. Technically speaking, I never purchased anything from you. I don't know who you are, I don't have any real information regarding your business, and you don't appear on my credit card statements. I made payments to DreamHost, for the right to download and store files which they obtained from you.

Don't get me wrong, I don't really expect to get any refund from DreamHost, and I'm definitely not asking you for any refund whatsoever. I'm just trying to piss them off a little bit, to give them a little something to think about, as a small retribution for all the trouble they caused you. If everyone that ever purchased from them will write similar things to them, it might give them some cause for alarm.

[Watcher]

I think there is a lesson here for all of us, which is! Make sure you have the files you purchase backed-up !

When you put down good money for all the great files that Dave produces, you really need to make sure you can store them securely yourself. All my files are stored on drives external to my computer, and also on a 1 terabyte laptop drive placed in my safety deposit box in my bank! That way, in the event of a horrendous earthquake or a direct nuclear hit, my files will be saved. And, if either of those eventualities is realised, I probably won't be around anyway, and even if I am, I will have other things on my mind !!

If you don't have a safety deposit box, store the back-up disk in a location at the opposite end of your house/apartment from the computer. That way one or other is more likely to survive a domestic disaster such as a fire or burgulary

[WSFanfare]

I logged into my Files Forever account and all the files that I purchased are there, at least the list of all the files. So I want to believe there is some hope the server will be restored.

[Sphincter_movement+]

Hi Dave
Yes the same as WSFanfare, I to have just have logged into my Files Forever account

SM

[LovingDesperation]

Hi Guys,
I tried to log into my Files Forever account and I got a page that said Filed Forever is currently unavailable.

[Bound2Burst]

Your FF account is still there along with all the links that pointed to the movies you have bought. Unfortunately, the links currently point at nothing.

I don't know if they are leaving FF on user accounts to avoid making a clear statement that the service is finished, or if they do actually plan to restore it. My personal feeling... don't hold your breath. Something is definitely wrong here.

[cantholdit]

Here is the note I just sent to DreamHost:
Gentlemen: Over the period from Feb. 2012 to date, I have made numerous purchases of Bound2Burst videos from you, with the assurance that they would be stored on your server(s) "forever", thus making them permanently accessible for me to download. It's lately become apparent that "forever" has ended within the last few months, and that you have no intention of restoring the service for which I have paid a total in excess of $479.45. By your acceptance of my payment as consideration for your commitment of "forever" availability, you are in breach of our mutual contract. I shall expect a timely refund of this entire amount. Legal action will be given serious consideration (including class action) in the absence of either the refund or the restoration of the service for which I paid. Thank you for your immediate attention.

[cbprod]

I'd say let's take up a class action suit against them so we all get our money back ,from the smallest amounts to the biggest.

[Anon_E._Mus]

I think threats of a "class action" lawsuit against FilesForever, whoever that entity might be, are hollow threats, especially by parties who have received or should have received the merchandise they paid for. Any amounts that possibly could be recovered would be consumed by legal fees and lawyers' expenses. Those who threaten would be better advised to buy a few memory sticks and do their own backups, just to understand how "forever" really works.

[Loo-Loo]

I agree with anon_e_mus, the complaints are a waste of time and effort.

I have seen this attitude before with computer companies, they just ignore their customers who complain.

You would probably never find out who FF were anyway. They are probably registered through a maze of holding companies and the owners have little direct connection with the day to day workers, who are probably just doing as they were instructed in order to cut costs and/or increase revenue.

My only gripe with C4S is their very strange search facility. I think they had some problem with the word 'pee' a few years back, which meant that they did not use the word anywhere on their site. They do seem to have got over this phenomena to a certain extent (I presume that it was a legal thing in the area they are based). I find that 'female desperation' is a reasonable search string to use, although even that brings up some weird and wonderful categories sometimes. (Maybe people really do have an ear fetish, and what is this thing with balloons?)

I think that if FF did now re-emerge I would still pay the extra to use C4S, purely because of the way Dave has been treated by Dreamhost.

[Loo-Loo]

Sorry, I had not read Dave's post on C4S categories until after posting my comments above.

[Bound2Burst]

Not at all Loo-Loo. In fact, I need to create a page and link it to the home page of B2B explaining this to customers. As a store owner, I get filters which enable me to search on clip number, title, key words, etc., whereas customers only see the key word search which is somewhat less than helpful. I was trying to locate a bondage clip yesterday and I couldn't find it using any of those filters, so thinking it must be missing I uploaded it again. Only when i tried to launch it did the software tell me the clip was already there and gave me the clip number to locate it. C4S does need to improve their search engine.

In time, the issue of finding clips will become moot as far as B2B and BiB are concerned because there will be direct links from all movies/clips to their locations on C4S.

I am also introducing two pay buttons per movie, one which will point to the description on C4S and the other which will simply add the movie directly to the shopping cart on C4S. It's designed for a single purchase, but by using the back arrow and selecting other items, they too get added to the cart. Some customers may prefer that.

[cantholdit]

Here's the text of the reply I received today. I re-sent the request from the gmail address they have on file for me. We'll see what happens:

Hello,

On Tue, 26 Mar 2013, you wrote:

> Gentlemen: Over the period from Feb. 2012 to date, I have made numerous
> purchases of Bound2Burst videos from you, with the assurance that they would
> be stored on your server(s) "forever", thus making them permanently
> accessible for me to download. It's lately become apparent that "forever"
> has ended within the last few months, and that you have no intention of
> restoring the service for which I have paid a total in excess of $479.45. By
> your acceptance of my payment as consideration for your commitment of
> "forever" availability, you are in breach of our mutual contract. I shall
> expect a timely refund of this entire amount. Legal action will be given
> serious consideration (including class action) in the absence of either the
> refund or the restoration of the service for which I paid. Thank you for
> your immediate attention.

I'm sorry for the delay in getting back to you. We'll be happy to
refund your charges, but you'll need to send in the request from the
email address on file for your account. There isn't any information in
this message that points me to the account you made payments on. We look
forward to hearing back from you.

Thanks!
Dan W

[Loo-Loo]

Goodness me. A reply.

I owe them an apology (well almost) as I thought they would just ignore your email.

Does this mean that if we all send an identical email from the address that we used to register on FF, we will get money refunded?

Might be worth a try

[cantholdit]

[Alister_McFish]

... and I have a one-owner low-mileage bridge I would like to sell you.

[Bound2Burst]

[pcwp]

[Bound2Burst]

[cantholdit]

Just to set the record straight - in NO WAY is Dave responsible for this fiasco - he's been more than fair and has gone way beyond what anyone could expect in order to try to make up for the shoddy performance of Files "Forever". If FF should offer a refund that would in any way hurt Dave, I, for one, would refuse it. My purchased videos are backed up on MY PC, which I think is prudent for ANY PC owner. The idea here is, I think, to try to provide a bit of pain for the FF operation alone.