This is a tricky one and has come up a couple of times in the last few years. It might have been brought on by that Friday feeling or the impending court case where my Fiance? is taking her ex-husband to court for money that is seriously overdue - either way my thoughts turned to courts, suing and lawyers.
Thief
So who is stealing what? Well, we found out, by accident, that one of our clients seems to have decided to stop using our services. Rather than phoning up or emailing and telling us what they are doing they lift a copy of the web-site using a (bad) replication tool (such as this ) and then sneak away into the night. The obviously go to some effort to copy the site but don’t understand what they are doing so although they create a copy of the site it quite often won’t work as the “clever stuff” such as form handlers and database functions do not function.
Anyway, back to the point. In the last couple of cases - and I am only talking about 1 per year out of the 300+ clients we have - we have designed and built the site for the client and they both use proprietary technology owned by us to operate. So what makes these clients think they can steal our intellectual property?
It’s on the web, it must be free!
This is the line we here all the time. Because it is in the public domain and because we can copy it it must be royalty and copyright free. But it’s not. How many years did Sony et al chase down Napster, E-mule and the other P2P sites to stop them distributing music for free? it is illegal to copy anything that has copyright owned by another party and when someone (anyone) builds a web-site some portions of the intellectual Property is owned by the originator. This is exactly the same as photography and music - there is an original creator and they own the elements they created.
Time to go legal
Well, this is an option - not in the msot recent case as it is too small and insignificant to worry about and in reality we have seriously outgrown the client and he was always going to fall behind in the Internet stakes. However in a bigger case over the Summer of 2005 we had a reasonable sized client who simply lifted and stole our design, property, layouts and all of the front-end code work. The cheek of it!
Naturally first stop was our lawyers (very good and highly recommended) and they said (in a nutshell) “yup, they are in violation - we can get in front of a judge tomorrow and slap an injunction on them to stop using the web-site for commercial gain”. What this really mean’t was that they had to stop using the site immediately. Then a date would be set for 2 weeks hence when a judge would decide if the injunction was to be upheld.
So why didn’t we do this? Well - we cannot sue for loss of income from the site as we cannot supply the services the company did (double glazing in this case) so had no financial benefit in actually owning the site! On the otherhand, if the company attacking the injunction wins then they are entitled to sue us for the loss of business over that 2 week period. Here’s the rub, the site probably generated ?500,000 of orders per month so that exposed us to a quarter of a million pounds of liability with the prospect of getting nothing in return. Madness.
Suffice to say we did not sue and the company in question (think Cannon & Ball Adverts) is still using our site over a year later. Lessons learn’t for us and most new sites actually need a big tranch of back-end code to make them work so the good ole days of site lifting are (nearly) over for us.
Irony
The final irony - the client that moved away recently is actually an old drinking buddy of mine and I helped him out to get him started on the Internet years ago. He never really made anything of it and didn’t invest the time and effort to develop what was, in my humble opinion, a very good opportunity. Suffice to say they, as a client, were way too small for us really so we were just supporting them as a favour and really should have gone elsewhere but I didn’t have the heart to say that to Jimmy and just kept him on the support contract. If he had asked to leave or said he was thinking about it then I would have helped him and even signed over the IP rights for the bits he needed. Just goes to show. Ask and ye shall (occassionally) recieve in business.
Some notes: as it’s Friday I have been doing my weekly cleanup of my inbox and I’m proud to say it’s now down to 24 items which is as good as it gets for me. I am expecting the usual dump of spam on Monday (not working this weekend, yeehaa!) so I thought I would try for the next week or so and unsubscribe to any spam I get. I’ll keep ya posted!