Legal question for the gfy lawyers regarding rogue designer/coder
 

i am waiting on my own lawyers response, thought I would throw this out there for you all while I wait.

a non-profit group has a website, they grab a designer doing work coding and designing their site, he is doing it for free in exchange for that non-profit

he gets mad and decides they don't deserve his work anymore, takes 6-8 months of work and pulls it from the site and replaces it with the site that was up 8 months ago before he started working on it

he claims he owns the copyright to that work and if they try and use it again he will sue them

does he have the right?

sticky icky... def wait for the real legal camp on this one.

it is definitely messy, I just like to hear if anyone else has encountered this issue

Legally I don't know since I'm not a lawyer but practically, that's some punk ass shit that he did right there....He should've just walked and done nothing more to support the project...

If I were the the company, I'd just use his code and wait for my court date

man, tell me about it

this is a total non-profit, there became some rifts in the community over how something was handled, he became a baby because some people that were not a part of the community threatened and accused him of cheating the system, he pulled the site overnight and all his work (which was a LOT, including accounting and ticketing style data), and replaced it with the old system, which is almost a year old

If no money changed hands or no contract was signed for the work he did showing it to be legally yours then theres nothing you can do. He owns his work he did.

You're just wasting your time and money on lawyers for something like this.

Copyright can only be waived by way of a formal written assignment or work for hire agreement.

By way of his agreement he gave them a non exclusive limited license, by way of him pulling the work he ended his license.

He owns it. Always get pics/videos/graphics/code/programming ect. rights waived/assigned in writing.

Game. Set. Match.

Do you have back ups?

Wow! What a dick move on the designers part.

But i'm sure something on the part of the "non-profit" lead up to him doing this.

I'd like to hear the rest of the story heh...

any paperwork on this? contracts?

yeah its easy enough to call the designer an ass but Ive dealt with my fair share of non-profits who are more arrogant and harder to work with than profit businesses.

dick move or not, if he didn't get paid for his work, or a release was signed then I cant see any reason why he cant take his work off the site.

Nice to see some real lawyers hang out on here :thumbsup

There is always three sides to the story. 6-8 months of work? Seems like he did a lot of work for free and probably wasn't treated too gratefully.

thanks for the response :thumbsup

we just found out he is bipolar and is having a manic episode

everything was fine until someone accused him of altering the ticketing system code to benefit his friends and himself, then he flew off the handle, pulled his work and split, claiming fraud and scamming from the board of directors

and oh yeah, the person that accused him has nothing to do with the non-profit except for attending functions

Why not pay the guy for his work? Just because it's a non-profit organization doesn't automatically allow them to get free work out of people.

I'm doing something for a local non-profit right now, and they're actually paying a premium and have no issues with it.

If they deem the guys work valuable enough to make use of it, he should be compensated.

Also, what does being Bi-Polar have anything to do with it?

what does the contract say?

sorry for the offtopic
 

hey man can you hit me up on icq?

Bookmarked your site Michael :thumbsup

Good luck getting the mess sorted out Jace.

Calling him out as bi-polar which has nothing to do with the biz relationship is NOT a good way to get the site design back.

Thanks - and we do have a work for hire/assignment of copyrights contract within the members area if you need one. :thumbsup

Cha-ching. You got da bling. This is spot on sire.