Church Didn't Pay Me for No-Contract Web Design Work: Moved It and Fed It Into Frontpage

June 18, 2004 1:21 PM

Client vs. web designer problem [need I even say it?].

I recently built a site for a local church (fairly simple, 15-20 pages, XHTML and CSS valid, the only slickness being a custom PHP events calendar with a pretty interface). I did this without a contract but with the assurance that I would be recieve my usual hourly rate in addition to ongoing hosting fees. I tursusted them, you know, being a church and all.

Lo and behold, I wake up the other day to find my pretty little site has been moved. Not only has it been moved (depriving me of the agreed upon hosting fees) but it has been converted to Front Page tag soup. No longer remotely valid (the guy has three body tags on each page) it still looks nearly identical to the original. The only exception being the CSS rollovers he couldn't figure out and replaced with a Front Page 'theme' and the deletion of the calendar.

I demanded the removal of my content and layout (the original stylesheets are still linked) along with a few photos I took. It is my contention that the rights remain with me as I was never paid and was not an employee. It is their contention that by virtue of owning the domain they own everything related to it. Outside of small claims court, do I have any recourse? Would it be terribly wrong to point the domain (yeah, they never changed the registrar password) towards another site, say Landover Baptist or Planned Parenthood, until this was resolved? Should I write it off as a learning expierience?

posted by cedar to religion & philosophy (33 comments total)

Were you paid for the site as agreed?
posted by samh23 at 1:26 PM on June 18, 2004

No. Not a cent.

I trusted them (I know, I know) and agreed to wait until it was completed before payment was due. It was moved before I even submitted an invoice.
posted by cedar at 1:33 PM on June 18, 2004

1. Remove the pages you created off the server. They are your intellectual property until you are paid for them. Tell them they can have text files of the content if they wish.

2. Go above their head. Every pastor answers to someone so tell their superior that they have lied and failed to pay you for work you did in good faith.

3. Get a contract. Use it. Trust me, I learned the hard way. :)
posted by will at 1:43 PM on June 18, 2004

Never, ever trust the Church, any Church.
If you really want revenge, post the domain password here.
posted by signal at 1:48 PM on June 18, 2004

Don't deliver until final payment. If that's not possible you can usually get away with saying you need a staging area on their final hosting environment. This means you have FTP access to pull the thing back down. It's not perfect by any means, but most people won't be saavy enough to drop your user account right before they decide to screw you.
posted by yerfatma at 1:49 PM on June 18, 2004

It's not something that I can pull down. As I mentioned in the original post, as incoherent as it was, I found out I had a problem after the site was moved.

I'm not explaining myself well. Here is something I wrote a few days ago that might make more sense... self link. Be aware that they may have encountered a DNS problem since I posted that and some of the links may not work.

Karma... it's a funny thing.
posted by cedar at 1:59 PM on June 18, 2004

What is their defense? I mean, are they admitting that they're screwing you?
posted by jpoulos at 1:59 PM on June 18, 2004

A verbal contract is still a contract. Talk with a lawyer of course, as you don't want to say anything that will fuck you later. Church's usually have a community of volunteers (read pro bono lawyers) that will use every recourse to fuck you. So is it worth it to you?

Do not repoint the domain as it could be seen as defamation/slander/act against god.

If I were you the first thing I would do is begin documenting everything. Look up all laws regarding verbal contractual agreements along with industry laws specific to you. Once you know the law you're dealing with call them up, specify what the're violating and the law. Then tell them that you expect payment in full by XXX date or you'll bring the big dogs in. Hopefull you've already contacted a laywer and what you're really doing is trying to settle this out of court.

Yes lawyers are expensive but so is getting screwed. Hopefully, again, you know a lawyer who deals with such things. In my experience churchs are terribly managed by either old biddies or idealogues who think that they can do whatever they want because of the fact they are a church.

My personal experience is that once I spend ~1 hour finding the codes and laws that apply to what I'm doing and tell them how they violated it, whatever I'm dealing with usually goes away. People abhor getting lawyers involved unless they are so huge they can afford it (or so churchy they can get it for free). I wish you luck. As I have said in earlier posts, this is why I got out of web design.

At the very least they violated your IP by not paying you for the work they did, even if they did make changes. The verbal contract of using you as a host is different and may be harder to prove. If they think that since they paid $15/yr for a domain they also get web design and hosting they are incredibly stupid or incredibly hopeful.
posted by geoff. at 2:00 PM on June 18, 2004

Chances are the only person "above" the pastor is a Board of Elders (or Directors, or some other title; they all do pretty much the same thing). This is who you need to address your concerns to, because they're the ones who control the money. (In most mainstream churches, at least; some smaller churchers may be different.) A church is a non-profit entity and most of them have lawyers who at least volunteer their services. The Board should understand that they've opened themselves up for being sued in small-claims court, provided that you can document everything up to this point At the very least you should be able to get payment out of them.
posted by arco at 2:01 PM on June 18, 2004

yerfatma and will, i assume cedar's problem is that the pages he created have been copied to another host (which is of course possible with every browser or wget). ftp access to the server gives you the ability to delete your files, but it won't stop the customer copying your work to another host.

i'm afraid you have no other possibility but to trust in your client's conscience and good will.

as for legal actions i cannot give you any advice for i am not into us law. i know it is uncomfortable (as a freelancer) to make a contract with someone you think of as a reliable person and i usually do not either.

make sure you keep the registrar password, no matter if you redirect the domain or not. this might give you some elbowroom.
posted by tcp at 2:08 PM on June 18, 2004

What exactly are their arguments? "Sucks to be you, see you in hell"?
posted by signal at 2:16 PM on June 18, 2004

on preview, what geoff and arco said. planned parenthood? hehe.
posted by tcp at 2:17 PM on June 18, 2004

http://bethelbapchurch.org/ actually leads to http://plannedparenthood.org/, which I find amusing.
posted by signal at 2:20 PM on June 18, 2004

... i'm afraid you have no other possibility but to trust in your client's conscience and good will.

Aww, crap. I just knew somebody was going to say this. That was my first bet... it didn't go well.

And yes, tcp, you have it exactly. It has been moved and I'm powerless. Well, kinda powerless. Right now I'm thinking that people who do not understand DNS would be best off not screwing people who do. But that is neither here nor there.

Arco: The pastor of the church refuses to take my calls. My contact was with somebody else (I'm not exactly clear on her place in the church heirarchy) and I find myself believeing the pastor knows little (and wants to know even less) about this fiasco. That was my first recourse. My second was the new host. The new host who also happens to be the guy who ripped my site and calls himself a minister.
posted by cedar at 2:22 PM on June 18, 2004

My sympathies, cedar. I know how it is dealing with churches when it comes to web design, though I admit I've never been screwed over in the rights-to-a-design area. Though it's of no help to you at this point, I think this highlights the importance of having a written contract on who maintains the rights to a design through the course of a project, before and after payment.

37Signals ran into this wall recently, where a client insisted on maintaining rights to the design work even before payment was made. They refused to be pushed around and dropped the client, admirably sacrificing a fat paycheck for their principles of a designer's rights.

Hope this church sees the light on that. (Plannedparenthood.org redirect? Heh heh heh.)
posted by brownpau at 2:24 PM on June 18, 2004

Wait, so did you redirect the site? Or did they?
posted by loquax at 2:28 PM on June 18, 2004

loquax: I work with several people, I keep much of my information in a common database. This creates a pool of information, reasonably secure, that is available to all of us.

I really wouldn't know what happened, specifically, but will admit that I'm not surprised.
posted by cedar at 2:37 PM on June 18, 2004

Ah, I see. No need to explain. Apologies.
posted by loquax at 2:38 PM on June 18, 2004

I think you should start attending their church, and next sunday offer to "witness." Tell the entire congregation about the bullshit.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 2:45 PM on June 18, 2004

Is the church local? Screw phone calls, go talk in person. And if he won't see you, ask for a list of their Church Elders and contact them.
posted by gramcracker at 2:47 PM on June 18, 2004

cedar: In Chile, we have a saying "Se cuenta el milagro pero no el santo", roughly: "You can talk about the miracle, not the saint".
posted by signal at 2:56 PM on June 18, 2004

You seem to basically be in an "extra-legal" situation--you don't have a contract, and I'd be surprised if getting a lawyer involved wouldn't put you in a hole, financially, even if you did recoup your expenses.

From what I know, you've got two routes:

1) If you're a congregant of the church, and want to keep your good standing, then all you can really do is appeal to the larger community somehow for fair treatment. Whether that's an informal appeal to influential parishioners or a formal appeal to a board, I don't know, but it's hard to get this sort of thing redressed and maintain good ties with the community.

2) If you're not a congregant, or are willing to sacrifice membership in the community for getting this straightened out, then your "non-lawyer" options are really on the broader PR front. I almost hate myself for saying this, but the sensationalistic "investigative" squad on your local news program would eat this up. I really don't want to encourage that kind of seamy journalism, but it's not going to live or die by whether or not you talk to them, and it would definitely be an effective route to getting things dealt with in your favor.
posted by LairBob at 3:44 PM on June 18, 2004

IANAL, but it seems to me a two-pronged approach might be helpful, if you do take it to court:

- If they say they agreed to pay you for the work, then they need to pay up.

- If they say they never agreed to pay you for the work, then it wasn't a work for hire; thus you retain the copyright, and they're in violation of your copyright on the work.

And then you've got the church in a damned-if-they-did, damned-if-they-didn't bind.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 3:50 PM on June 18, 2004

LairBob: "If you're a congregant of the church, and want to keep your good standing..."

Not even remotely a concern. As far as these folks go I may as well be the anti-Christ. They are evangelical nutjobs and I'm not even Christian.

"If you're not a congregant, or are willing to sacrifice membership in the community for getting this straightened out, then your "non-lawyer" options are really on the broader PR front. I almost hate myself for saying this, but the sensationalistic "investigative" squad on your local news program would eat this up."

I'm pretty much going this route. Sure, I'm looking for Google juice rather than a 'real' story, but I'd like to leave a trace of myself when it's all said and done. I've written off the money, I'll never see it. The Golden Rule only seems to apply if you agree with them and that commandment stuff is a little more flexible than I thought.

As far as membership in the 'community' goes, your talking to the wrong guy. They all hate me anyway. It's a small town in the woods and I don't have a backhoe in the yard or a Camaro on blocks (shit, I don't even own a mobile home).
posted by cedar at 3:59 PM on June 18, 2004

Well, then...go nuts!!

Like I said, I'm not a fan--in principle--of sensationalistic news, but you gotta figure that they spend so much time manufacturing stories out of whole cloth, that if you give them a legitimate hook to hang a report on, you're really elevating the level of discourse, right?

Well, whatever route you choose--good luck. I'm in the same business myself, and I know how hard it can be sometimes.
posted by LairBob at 4:31 PM on June 18, 2004

yerfatma and will, i assume cedar's problem is that the pages he created have been copied to another host

I know, but this seems unwinnable, so all you can take from it is a lesson. Which is not to say you should give up cedar, just be conscious of throwing good money after bad (in terms of hours spent).

On the other hand, any motherfucker that would turn XHTML+CSS markup into Frontpage code deserves to rot in H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks as far as my religion goes.
posted by yerfatma at 5:40 PM on June 18, 2004

yerfatma: " ... know, but this seems unwinnable, so all you can take from it is a lesson.

Thanks. Your entirely right. I figure that it's time to cut my losses and move on before investing any more time in this. That's not to say I can't/won't find a few minutes on a weekly basis to make their lives difficult.

If anyone gets anything out of this saga, let it be a reminder to always change those registrar passwords. Even if you think you don't need to, do it anyway.
posted by cedar at 7:10 PM on June 18, 2004

Send their ISP a DMCA takedown notice. The law's gotta work for somebody.
posted by stet at 7:16 PM on June 18, 2004

It would be better if the site redirected to an explanation of ethics. In any case, you did work for them at the request of some member of the organization's administration. They liked it enough to move it and adapt it. You may think their adaptation sucks, but it does denote acceptance of the work. Stop talking, and bill them. I have found that it's best to blandly act as if they are acting in good faith, and behave accordingly. Be cheerful and professional. Provide reasonable documentation and a professional invoice. Give them your standard terms, i.e., payment due in 30 days, 3% discount if they pay in full in 10 days. 1.5% per month plus a $25.00/month late charge on overdue accounts. If they don't pay, go to small claims court.
posted by theora55 at 8:02 PM on June 18, 2004

For freelance work, I think the 1/3 model works well: 1/3 up front, 1/3 at some nebulous deliverable point and 1/3 at final delivery. It gives those fuckers an incentive to get their stuff together and not drag things out. Which is gravy considering it's way easier to pay that last 1/3 when you've already given up the majority of the fee.
posted by yerfatma at 8:06 PM on June 18, 2004

cedar, before you do anything, send the church to collections and give them a deadline for payment with no penalty. After the deadline, charge them interest and late fees. If the amount is high enough, you may even be able to sell the debt to a collector. Additionally, you may have the right to report the church to the credit reporting agencies, but you will have to look into that.

Additionally, you do have the legal copyright to the work, as far as my understanding goes. You might want to try a C&D letter to the person who has stolen your content, the ISP and their upstream provider(s). You may want to even look into DMCA, which is draconian, but it has worked repeatedly for other people. You can certainly find copies of take down notices other people have received online.

You also have the BBB, which has no authority, but can influence businesses to act responsibly.

If you have enough documentation and can afford to speak with someone familiar with taxes, the loss may be able to be written off on your taxes. There are a number of implications of doing so, so weigh your options.

If the amount is allowed in your local small claims court, I would try there. It won't cost you much and verbal contracts are, in fact, still contracts. Any documentation you have, receipts, phone records, emails or whatever you can dig up, including hourly logs, if you kept them, will help. If you win a case against them in small claims, the credit reporting agencies will happily use this information to let other potential creditors know what kind of business this church runs. (If you don't know, a public record on your credit reporting agency can be absolutely devestating.)

It is my contention that the rights remain with me as I was never paid and was not an employee.

If you never assigned them copyright or license to use your work in any way, they do not have the right to use it. Even as an employee, it's not an easy case for the employer to win.

It is their contention that by virtue of owning the domain they own everything related to it.

That will not hold it's weight in court and they know it. They may be able to provide evidence that they own the right to the domain, but simply by hosting content does not give anyone ownership or even license to use it. They are stonewalling you, hoping you'll give up.

The church probably has the right to cancel their hosting with you. I don't believe you can do anything about the hosting other than claim actual damages, which could include cost of hosting so far, cost of equipment and cost of any contracts you assumed for them.
posted by sequential at 8:37 PM on June 18, 2004

At this point, it seems there's no clear-cut path to take, since there's no contract. But there are options.

1. You can hold their domain name hostage. They could just buy a new one, of course, but you apparently could change the password to their registrar account and embarrass them (as appears to be happening already). They might be willing to give you some money just to make you go away, or they might sue your ass. I dunno. This is not what I would call taking the high road.

2. Take them to small-claims court. IANAL. Sounds like a lot of hassle to me.

3. As others have suggested, send them a bill. Wait 32 days. When they haven't paid, send them a letter saying you are referring the invoice to a collections agency. Wait a few more days and do it. I've done this once with a somewhat hinky client, and was astounded at the speed with which a check arrived after I used the magic words "collections agency." A collections agency will take a 1/3 (?) cut, but hey, 2/3 of something is a lot more than nothing. How much should your bill be for? I'd say 1 year of hosting (or whatever length you had previously discussed), but that's your call.
posted by adamrice at 8:20 AM on June 19, 2004

Please update us on everything.
posted by geoff. at 8:54 AM on June 20, 2004