Following the publication of his book, “The Art of War — Five years in F1”, TJ13 reported author Adam Parr faced legal action from Global Motorsport Media’s editor in chief – Andrew Maitland – for copyright infringements. Parr was alleged to have published word for word an article produced by Maitland entitled, “Wolff should step up at Williams: Ecclestone”.
Having been promoted to CEO of Williams F1, at a fans’ forum Parr had criticised Bernie Ecclestone’s understanding of modern media and claimed F1 was losing hundreds of millions a year because of this.
Ecclestone, Parr and the ‘night of the long knifes’
TJ13’s Craig Alderson caught up with Andrew Maitland recently and here is an excerpt from their conversation.
CA: How did the Adam Parr dispute end up, anyway Andrew?
AM: It was such a paltry amount of money that we were bickering about, but it was just the principle of it – if you use something, you pay for it. If you make a mistake, you acknowledge it and put it right. Yeah, he just settled. As far as I can recall, pretty much as soon as the story about him being sued got out there he just picked up the phone. Funny that. Maybe I need to start doing that more often?
CA: More often? Has someone else been naughty?
AM: Well, nothing as exciting as publishing stories in a book without asking. But yeah, someone does owe me a considerable amount of money.
CA: Can I ask who?
AM: Oksana Kossatchenko.
CA: Oh, Vitaly Petrov’s manager?
AM: I’m not 100% sure what she does these days. She certainly runs a Russian motor sport website, I know that much because I’ve been supplying her with news for a couple of years.
CA: So what else does she do these days?
AM: Like I said, I’m not really sure. I know she was involved on the commercial side with Caterham for a while. She has some sort of marketing agency and I think it’s involved with the new race in Baku. I don’t really know. I just know she never paid for the last seven or eight months when she was using GMM for her website.
CA: What’s the website?
AM: I don’t know if it’s common knowledge so I don’t really want to say. I don’t know if it’s fair to drag a great name in motor sport publishing through the mud just because she bought a license to use that name in Russia and then treated a supplier like shit. It’s pretty much the biggest publishing name in motor racing, put it that way.
CA: You sound pretty annoyed about it.
AM: Apart from the fact that she owes me thousands of euros, it’s the way she decided to handle it. Endless emails of apologies and excuses for why the payments were late – I’m talking reams of emails, it’s all in writing. The whole time, I said I fully understood what it’s like to be in business, thanks for keeping me up to date, blah, blah, blah. Then she just completely stopped communicating. For weeks and weeks and weeks. While happily using the service. Absolutely refusing to talk to me. Just outrageous behaviour when you’re in business. So I engaged some people in Russia to talk to her about it and she just point-blank denied that she owes me a dime. Just ignoring letters of demand, denying that she even used the service at all – even though she paid for it each month for a year! It feels like she’s double-daring me to sue her. So, OK — I’ll have to sue her.
I guess coming forward with this story might spare him some money. Maybe now he doesn’t need to sue.
Russians in general don’t give a shit. And when you as a foreigner try to sue one of them in Russia, you better have some connections and know who you have to pay the bribes to. Else there will suddenly be evidence that everything has been paid somehow, without you having received anything.
But I don’t know under which country’s law their contract has been signed.
I have often been told that the most efficient way to use the law is to threaten with the law. In a lawsuit generally all parties lose money. That is of course, the sum up for grabs is very large.