Comment by balloot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by balloot | Hacker News Reader

I can't believe people are defending this. If a brick-and-mortar store has a pay dispute with a contractor, would that contractor have the right to put a giant padlock on the store doors and spray paint a message on the door saying that the store owner didn't pay? Obviously not. How is this any different?

The key thing to keep in mind is the designer may be wrong. I'm sure if you ask the store owner they have a totally different story, and it's likely not "We are SUPER EVIL and just stiff people who do good work". Maybe the contractor (onemine.com, if you're curious) tried to bill the store owner more than agreed upon, the store owner refused, and this is the result. Maybe the contractor left out some significant part of the site and the store owner wont pay until completion. Who knows?

The problem here is OneMine has taken all the power in the pay dispute by holding the client's intellectual property hostage until all demands are met. It's at the very least unprofessional, but it becomes defamation very quickly unless OneMine has an absolutely airtight case. There better be exactly zero unfinished products, missed deadlines, rate changes, etc. And it's safe to say with many contract projects this is not the case.

It's different because the stiffed party in your example does not own the store being locked and vandalized and cannot take those actions without breaking unrelated laws. That's not the case with IP for which the creator still has clear title and is (presumably) hosting on their own servers.

Seperatly, it's 2013. We are waaaay past the point where intelligent people think that laws pertaining to the ownership of tangible and intangible goods can, do, and should map directly to one another. The differences between these classes of property are not trivial, and neither are the laws and social norms that govern people's treatment of each. Making analogies that ignore these differences is just unhelpful, stupid, and irritating. It's a bit like saying to a judge "I don't see why you're issuing this fine. After all, what I did is perfectly legal in (insert name of foreign country here)."

None of this is to say that connections and parallels can't be drawn between the fields of tangible and intangible goods. It's just to say that doing so in a useful fashion demands acknowledgement of the wide gulfs that separate them, and clear identification of the specific points where they do overlap.

So you think onemine.com, and not NYC Fresh Market, has IP rights to nycfreshmarket.com and its website contents, simply because onemine.com was hired as a contract designer?

I would LOVE to see a legal precedent for this claim.

Given the petulant tone of your response, I'll leave it to you to do your own research on the basics of copyright law. But I will note that, under the law, the contents are owned by whoever created them. If the client failed to pay for the work, and did not secure a clear transfer of title, ownership of the IP remains with the author. This is Copyright Law 101.

The domain is a seperate matter. Presumably, this could happen because the designer was hosting the site. The owner of the domain is free to host it elsewhere, but would need to populate any sites they publish with content they actually own, and not work stolen from people they didn't pay.

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