Fall, 2001:

Welcome back, PEP! To those of you who may have followed its recent fortunes and misfortunes, we are happy to report that the funeral of The Piano Education Page, so vigorously sought after by Adventus Corporation, was prematurely celebrated.

To those who have no idea what we're talking about, here's the story:

The Piano Education Page was founded in 1995 by Dr. John Zeigler, whose hard work and steadfast dedication has steadily earned it numerous accolades and awards. This writer has served during that time as Editor at Large and Contributing Editor of PEP, and founded Muzine, at Dr. Zeigler's urging, as something of a spinoff; our main objective here is to provide something extra for the musical amateur, not only in piano but in other forms of music making as well.

One of PEP's ongoing features is the presentation of music learning materials, much of which is sent unsolicited by publishers and manufacturers. One such program, reviewed last October in both its 1.0 and later 2.5 versions, was Piano Suite, a computer software package put out by Adventus Corporation. Both of our reviews said many positive things about the various features of this
program, but we also spoke candidly of many technical difficulties which were encountered in installing and running it, and gave honest opinions about its pros and cons as we saw them. In particular, we did our best--as we do with all reviews--to present a fair and unbiased overview of the program from the vantage point of the piano students and teachers who were being asked to purchase it.

"Unfortunately, one of the manufacturers, Adventus Corporation, took serious issue with our reviews of its Piano Suite software. We extended to Adventus numerous opportunities to examine our reviews and to point out any factual inaccuracies in them before we published the reviews. Adventus availed itself of those opportunities multiple times, but persisted in its complaints. Adventus threatened to sue our former server operator over the reviews. Since then, we have changed server operators."

Candid reviews of products, movies, TV shows, concerts and the like--short of factual misrepresentation--have been a perfectly legal and accepted icon of our cultural rights since Ben Franklin's time. Think of the frank opinions published by Consumer Reports, or expressed on the PBS radio show Car Talk. Yet it's an unfortunate fact that the threat of a lawsuit is a routine tactic by powerful corporations under criticism. It often has little to do with the merits of the case, but everything to do with the cost of lawyers: the corporation can afford to have its battery of lawyers find obscure technicalities and employ endless delaying tactics in order to drag out procedings to the point where the resources of their opponents are exhausted and they are forced to cave in.

As of now, however, The Piano Education Page will continue to be the valuable and widely acclaimed educational resource it has been for the last six years.

Welcome back, PEP!