Legal help needed...

[MmmBoost]

hey everybody, dont know if we have any lawyers or legal professionals here, but i figured id ask.

I need to have an attorney (i think) submit a letter of cease and desist to a website owner and web host. i programmed a php back end for a website for a company. they originally offered me a certain amount of money for it, but when it was done, they didnt want to pay it. so they hired a third party to evaluate the situation, and he requested i submit the code to him to analyze that it was 100% mine and not copied from somewhere. well he ended up giving them the code (and i think uploading it to their server and got everything running) (yeah dumb me...)

anyways, i dont care about the money that they owe me, i just want my material (the whole fucking website) removed and not be able to be used.

anybody available to help me out? or any other programmers ever dealt with something like this?




thanks in advance for any help or suggestions

 

[JASONA70]

so basically they are hosting a web layout that you designed, and you are not getting paid for it? was there a legal binding contact that you signed or some sort of document stating that you are going to get paid for the work that you did? I'm pretty sure you can sue them for not paying you for the work that you did and on top of that stole your work.

 

[gaboonviper85]

can't you hack it and take it down yourself considering you made it?

I have no clue how websites work...

 

[tlo86]

so basically they are hosting a web layout that you designed, and you are not getting paid for it? was there a legal binding contact that you signed or some sort of document stating that you are going to get paid for the work that you did? I'm pretty sure you can sue them for not paying you for the work that you did and on top of that stole your work.

+1 i think this as well. if you werent paid for it, its not theirs they basically stole it from ya

 

[MmmBoost]

right and right and right...

the sucky thing is that its not just a layout... its approximately 10,000 lines of code of PHP that i wrote to automate a user database (think myspace) i spent over a month on the project, called in to both of my normal jobs several times, and ruined my personal life just because of all this. they were "paying" (going to pay?) me $40 an hour (which is way too generous of me) and i charged them only 70 something hours of work. i got paid for 20 hours total, and after that they stopped communication.

second thing, is that from what i can gather, my code and layout etc... is protected by US copyright law. i have already sent out a "fixed tangible form" of the program (printout of code) to be registered, even though it isnt necessary.

yes i could hack it, but i dont want to. i would like to just solve it all the easiest way possible with no trouble, jail time, bad record, etc...


thanks for listening guys... SM is always here for me /tear

 

[SupraMario]

Take them to court, plain and simple, they stole your hard work. It will hold up in court.