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Thread: Look what Calibrated Success has been up to...

  1. #21
    Senior Tuner eficalibrator's Avatar
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    Mar 2006
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    John, if you like the shirt, you'll love the DVD and you'll lose your mind over the class.

    For those still looking, I posted a couple class dates to the (new) Calibrated Success Facebook Page. There will be a basic class here in Detroit Sept 20-21 and a general advanced one-day seminar at Dynocom in Ft. Worth TX on October 18.

  2. #22
    Tuner in Training
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    Someday I'll make it! (Based in north-eastern U.S.)

  3. #23
    Tuner in Training
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    Someday I'll make it! (Based in north-east U.S.)

  4. #24
    Senior Tuner eficalibrator's Avatar
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    For the last couple years, I’ve been constantly fielding the questions. “When’s your next class?” and “When will you release another video?” While we truly enjoy working live with students and clients, and videos are a big part of our training offering at Calibrated Success, we wish we hadn’t been so distracted. The sad truth is that it only takes a few bad apples to ruin the whole damn bunch.

    Trust me, the last thing I wanted to do is get tied up in a legal battle and eventual online rant about thieves. We tried to solve things quickly with some direct correspondence, but you know how liars and thieves work – we were dismissed until we were forced to play hardball. We originally planned to just keep this quiet, until a second gross offender was recently brought to our attention. We’ve always lived by the golden rule and made sure we treat people fairly in our business, but it turns out that a few people think it’s OK to make a living by stealing our hard work.

    Dave and I spent a LOT of long hours filming, and for every hour of filming, we spend another ten later editing the videos to get them ready for production. I fronted 100% of the costs, secured vehicles, dyno facilities, put a lot of thought into what material needed to be presented and how to do that in such a manner as to not have it sail over everyone’s head. In short, it was a HUGE effort with a relatively slow payback for each video. Even then, the profits from one video funded the filming of the next. This process worked for a while until the previously mentioned bad apples started to do their thing.

    The problem with making something cool is that people will inevitably copy you. While I don’t really have much to say about other “training institutions” parroting my lessons after my material is released and it proves to fix issues that seemed to previously stump them. What I must take exception to is people who will blatantly make exact copies of my content and then have the balls to go out and post ads selling bootlegs for a discount price just to finance their own car projects or lifestyles. Yes it happens. In many aspects, this kind of theft is no different than if they snuck into your shop in the middle of the night and stole parts right off the shelf or stole money from your son’s college fund. Who thinks it’s okay to just rob someone like that?

    Well, here’s where it gets interesting. My creative and informative works are protected by Federal Copyright Law. That little “C” with a circle around it stands for something real. I took the time to produce the videos and I also took the time to register the copyrights just in case someone tried to steal from me. For more information, look up 17 U.S.C. § 501(a), 17 U.S.C. § 106(1), and 17 U.S.C. § 106(3).

    Well it happened. It turns out that if you keep stealing long enough, you’ll eventually get caught with your hand in the cookie jar. Fortunately, there are enough honest people out there that these stealing low-lifes eventually get outed for their brazenly illegal behavior. We’re not talking about someone sharing a legitimate copy with a friend, a couple of guys going in together on one purchase, or selling their (one) used copy when they’re done with it to someone else who is looking for a legitimate deal on a legal used copy. There are guys who thought it would be a good ideal to make multiple copies and sell them for their own profit, without the originator of the material (Calibrated Success) getting a dime. Worse yet, it destroys the value of product we worked so hard on and many spent their hard earned money on to buy through authorized dealers. Everyone but the criminal in this case loses.

    So what are we to do when someone steals from us like this? Short of stopping by to say “hello”, our only legal recourse is to ask the court to do its thing and protect our works. The cool part here is that some of the good apples helped out and got us enough evidence to bring the thieves to justice, as evidenced by Federal Judge Victoria Robert’s December 15, 2014 opinion issued on our motion for summary judgement with violation #1:

    Quote Originally Posted by The Honorable Judge Victoria Roberts
    The Court GRANTS Calibrated’s Motion for Summary Judgment on Charters’ liability for copyright infringement.
    How serious is getting caught? The law provides for an infringement penalty as follows:
    Quote Originally Posted by 17 U.S.C. § 504(c)(2)
    allows for enhanced statutory damages for willful infringement. It says: In a case where the copyright owner sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that infringement was committed willfully, the court in its discretion may increase the award of statutory damages to a sum of not more than $150,000… …Infringement is willful when the infringer has knowledge that the his conduct constitutes copyright infringement.
    (BTW, the video itself contains a warning of such right in it, so good luck playing dumb with the judge!)

    So if you decide to steal from us, and sidetrack our business with legal action when we should be making more videos and hosting more classes, expect there to be consequences. Nobody likes a thief, and this is most certainly not a victimless crime. The nice part is that my lawyer is pretty good at this, so we’re familiar with the process now. So after we’re done with violation #1, we’re on to violation #2. Hopefully this will drive home the message that we’re serious about protecting our rights and business so we can just concentrate on new videos instead of whoever thinks they’d like to be violation #3.

    To those of you who have bought from our approved distributors, we can’t thank you enough. Your support lets us work on the next industry leading training videos. We really look forward to bringing you more of what you want with practical examples mixed with solid science that works just as well in your driveway as it does in the emissions laboratory.




    TL;DR – If you plan to steal, please let us know. We’ll be happy to see you in court, and you’ll probably lose.

  5. #25
    Advanced Tuner
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    Jun 2014
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    Glad to hear the good guys (you!) are winning! Your first DVD was good enough that I'm sold on the advanced one, too. Wish I had gotten the first one sooner so I could have gotten that t-shirt!