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DRR's Formal Notice of Shutdown - One Big Concern

Below you will find formal notice about DRR's suitor - Newscom - recinding it's interest. Of particular interest is the following:

"The creditor will have all information erased from the storage devices and then sell the equipment at auction."

The concern is that someone will simply do a simple erase, and anyone with recovery tools can recover ALL of our images. ALL OF THEM. Stories abound about people's private information getting found on a company's old servers (Government probe launched after details of one million bank customers found on computer sold on eBay, 8/28/08, among others). Here, we have images which will be recovered and then someone will decide they have this huge library of images to do with as they please.

Someone needs to get information on just how they plan to do the erasing.

Formal notice after the jump:


November 10, 2008
To Digital Railroad Members and Customers;

As reported on October 31st, Digital Railroad (DRR) had received a letter of intent (LOI) to purchase specific assets of DRR, namely its hardware and application software used to store and retrieve images. This LOI was rescinded on November 5th.

On November 6th, a second company became interested in purchasing some of the assets of DRR, but late on Friday, November 7th this company also ended its negotiations.

Without a commitment for the purchase of its assets, DRR’s senior secured creditor will move to take physical possession of the hardware on which the intellectual property of DRR and the copyrighted images of its customers and partners reside. The creditor will have all information erased from the storage devices and then sell the equipment at auction.

Digital Railroad had hoped that it could preserve the images on the storage devices so that the owners of these images could recover them. Unfortunately, this was not achievable. We apologize for the difficulties that this has created but without additional resources we have no other recourse.

With regard to images in Marketplace that have been downloaded and/or used, and for which the publisher has not already made payment, we will work, with the assistance of photographer associations to have the publishers pay the photographers directly.

Please check the Diablo Management website www.diablomanagement.com for regularly updates regarding Digital Railroad. The DRR link is at the bottom of the DMG Home page.

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