Cloanto do not own the copyrights to Workbench nor do they have the power to issue/sell/give away/gift/ or out of the goodness of their hearts allow anyone to obtain distribution rights to Workbench...
How do you know?
And why would you expect them to be kind and contact you ("they have had neither the decency or guts to approach me themselves" in post #89), when you created this big public mess without even asking first? I would not have acted any different. Someone who asks deserves an answer, but in my opinion all you deserve is to be ignored. For these cases it should be enough to have quick and standard procedures apply, whatever they are (ISP takedown notice...)
Possibly they meant nothing bad to you personally, but it's a sad reality in a software company these days that you have to send dozens if not hundreds of DMCA takedown notices every week. Companies like YouTube built their entire multibillion-dollar business model around this. Download sites have an economic incentive (advertising and subscriptions) to host all types of content, even from dubious sources. It is up to the small guys like Cloanto to do all the work in the form of DMCA filings. Cloanto probably just pasted some links that somebody else reported into some automated tool. And if they hadn't done this, it would have been them who was in breach of some obligation.
You seem to have chosen this annoying approach instead of a more friendly and personal one. But apparently it was all your choice?!
It was also your choice to put some files for download instead of offering a floppy-based approach that would help all users (as per your thread subject!!). Now the only answer we are going to get from this is that online piracy is not good, but we already knew that! What benefit does the Amiga community get from this? We need real Amiga-formatted disks, not downloads.
One good side of this that I see here is that your NamesCo ISP is investing some of their own legal resources to actually verify if you have a right to distribute these copyrighted files. Speculating a little bit, that might be the reason why Cloanto hasn't asked for the 3.0 and 3.1 files to be taken down from MediaFire (yet): they only tested the waters with MediaFire, but they want your UK web site to continue to be "infringing", so the situation can be answered in full, rather than covered up.
Which leads me to an even bigger question: what if "Franko" was actually Cloanto itself? :roflmao:
