Website Design & Legal Recourse Help

[Krishna Avora]

Clipped. Received some excellent advice and support via PM. Feeling much better and more confident. Thank you to everyone who offered advice and helped me get a foot in the right direction to protecting my works. :) Except for Cato Badger. Something about ambulances? :smileyvery-happy:

Kind of lame you can't nuke your own topics. Anyone like Doritos?

[Prokofy Neva]

This is the sort of complex case you really do need a lawyer for. Getting a lot of uneducated and unprofessional advice from a wildly different set of random people from all over the world is not really going to help you. Lawyers are expensive. They cost $400 a hour in New York where I live. You can find some websites by Googling that help you define your rights better and help you file the DMCA, but you have to be prepared to dig in and do it right, and use your real life name and address. In the SL situation, not everyone wants that.

It's not really a matter for SL, even if related, it's not on their servers.

[Void Singer]

This is almost entirely up to the terms under which the site was designed and hosted....

In the terms of a third party hosting service, the basic starting point is that sites content and design would still belong the sites designer.

In the terms of an organization hosting the site, which relates to that organizations activities, the basic starting point is that the design and content belong to the hosting organization.

Other scenarios exist, but you can boil the starting position down to "for whose benefit was the site designed" to get a basic answer as to who is likely to have the rights to it.

Contractual terms that modify or even reverse the basic starting point can exist, and are often part of the later arrangement.

 

Review any contractual terms you have agreed to, and any communications stating intent or requirements, and then if it still looks like you might have rights over it, contact a REAL lawyer and dump that information on their lap =)

[Krishna Avora]

Thanks, Void. That was in the ballpark I was going for.

What's used is a third party hosting service. It's paid for each month by the other individual. The site itself is by no means part or for an organization or company. It's a personally run website that I designed and have managed and operated. I'm both the systems administrator as well as the website designer. Yet the other individual feels its their website when they legally own the domain and pay for the server space each month. I disagree. I feel the website itself is mine, as I made it.

It's a community website and I made it both for myself and the community, so it was to the benefit of the respective community.

This is basically where I'm standing right now. Someone yelling at me it's THEIRS and wanting to do with it as they please, and me disagreeing because I've spent years of hard work managing, designing, tweaking, and working on it. I'm the grunt worker in the steam room, but it's to the benefit of the community participants and I've designed it to be a pleasant userfriendly interface for them. I guess I'm viewing it sort of like, my science project is in my friends house, therefore my friend considers it their science project. It makes no sense.

I just want to figure out if I even have a dog to bark in saying "I made it, it's legally mine." They can keep their domain name and server for all I care. :smileyvery-happy:

[Argus Collingwood]

 

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Krishna Avora wrote:

Thanks, Void. That was in the ballpark I was going for.

What's used is a third party hosting service. It's paid for each month by the other individual. The site itself is by no means part or for an organization or company. It's a personally run website that I designed and have managed and operated. I'm both the systems administrator as well as the website designer. Yet the other individual feels its their website when they legally own the domain and pay for the server space each month. I disagree. I feel the website itself is mine, as I made it.

It's a community website and I made it both for myself and the community, so it was to the benefit of the respective community.

This is basically where I'm standing right now. Someone yelling at me it's THEIRS and wanting to do with it as they please, and me disagreeing because I've spent years of hard work managing, designing, tweaking, and working on it. I'm the grunt worker in the steam room, but it's to the benefit of the community participants and I've designed it to be a pleasant userfriendly interface for them. I guess I'm viewing it sort of like, my science project is in my friends house, therefore my friend considers it their science project. It makes no sense.

I just want to figure out if I even have a dog to bark in saying "I made it, it's legally mine." They can keep their domain name and server for all I care. :smileyvery-happy:

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I feel your pain. It is your baby and since so much hard-work and creativity went into it, you feel a real ownership. As a person who has been a full-service host/design/maintain web person, I understand all the sides here. Was the other person involved right from the start? Did you find yourself saying I can do this part and the other person saying I can fund it? Do you have an email trail or any written agreements? Just because the other person only funded the project you must realize that without the money angle covered monthly, you would not have been able to do the site at all.  You should really consult some sort of legal person. Things like this are similar to marriages going bad. Best thing is, you can always do it again and fund it yourself:smileywink:

 

[Cato Badger]

You are in the same position as a voluntary ambulance driver who keeps the vehicle clean and tidy and drives it around helping patients get from one place to another. You don't own the ambulance and you have no rights to it at all.