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4th October, 2002 Most of the polyphonic ringtones offline

Unfortunately, after a number of discussions I have been involved in over the last couple of days, I have decided to take most of the polyphonic ringtones on my site offline.

The reason for this is simply because most of the ringtones I have been offering are under copyright to their composers and/or publishers, and I obviously do not have a way to pay them royalties for the downloads, particularly as I am not charging for them myself. Whilst I could start charging, it wouldn't be the service that I had decided to run, it wouldn't be what most of you reading this would want, and primarily it would stop this being a fun hobby and turn it into a business and that's not what I want to do. I can not afford to put myself in a position where I might be sued by a music company, though, it's just not worth the risk.

I am totally gutted about having to do this -- much more annoyed than you will be, I promise... I have dedicated countless hours to working on this section of my site over the last three months, arranging and reviewing the ringtones, updating the site and even writing my own software to handle the mailing list when the volume of subscriptions became more than I could handle manually. The only reason I bought my Nokia 3510 was because I wanted to run this service and now I have to stop.

I also want to thank all of the people that have contributed to the ringtone collection, especially Kevin Mortimer and Simon Dean. I really appreciate the hard work you all put in and am sorry that I'm no longer distributing your work.

I have left the "copyright-free" songs that I had been offering online (though if anyone believes that any of these are in fact still copyrighted, please let me know). These are only a small part of the collection however (eight that I am fairly sure about, of more than 50 that were previously available). As for the rest of the songs, I may consider offering the remaining tones to some of the other free download sites, but I'm not sure if even this still leaves me vulnerable to the music companies.

In the mean time, thank you for all the nice emails you've sent me, sorry I didn't get more of your requests made and sorry the ringtones aren't there any more. Please don't email me asking if/when they'll be back online or if I can email you a specific ringtone that I used to have, as I won't have time to reply to all the messages. I will keep the mailing list running, however, and will post any updates to that as well as to this page.

It was fun while it lasted. :(

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