"He has his facts completely wrong," Shenanda Janse van Rensburg, public relations manager for Lotto organising company Uthingo, said yesterday of LowVoltage, the administrator of the 2600.co.za Web site that criticised the organiser of the National Lottery.
Janse van Rensburg says the site, which refers to the "National Robbery" and uses the phrase "Tata ma f***-all", has unfairly directed criticism at the organiser of the lottery and has infringed the company`s registered trademarks, without a real understanding of how the money distribution process works.
Uthingo has issued LowVoltage with a letter demanding the removal of the offending pages within seven days.
LowVoltage responded yesterday saying he had no intention of removing the pages and he viewed this as an attack on freedom of speech. "They can`t attack our speech, so they attack the manner in which we express it.... The next best option for them is to try attack through trademark issues."
He claims the pages are "fair comment" and do not violate the company`s trademark.
However, Janse van Rensburg disagrees: "To us this is an infringement ... what he is doing is diluting our brand. He`s very obviously infringing our intellectual property.... I don`t know how many people visit his site but he is discouraging them from playing in the National Lottery."
Janse van Rensburg`s biggest concern is that the site misrepresents the Uthingo company and LowVoltage "has his facts wrong". She says, for example, the charge that Uthingo is not distributing the funds adequately has no basis. "Uthingo does not distribute the funds itself. We are just the operator."
Asked whether the company had tried to contact LowVoltage before issuing a legal letter, Janse van Rensburg said he had been difficult to track down and Uthingo had not been able to contact him.
As to whether the issue was indeed a trademark case, she says: "There are many routes that our legal team could have taken, and trademark infringement is just one of them. To us it is an infringement ... because it offends our company."
However, LowVoltage says the action by Uthingo is misguided and belated. He says the Lotto pages on the site were added well over a year ago. "When the Lotto boycott pages were added ... I personally sent e-mails and faxes to Uthingo and the Lottery Board asking for comment and received none. They have every right to put up pages on their site to prove our allegations wrong.
"We have every right to not buy lottery tickets and to discourage others from doing so by using facts and figures provided by Uthingo," he says.
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