FW: Attempted theft warning.

[Jose Lerebours]

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 2:01 AM, John Esak <john at valar.com> wrote:

>
> Attention filepro developers.
> Toga County, Pennsylvania, our customer since 1995, has decided to switch
> from us and filepro to a competitor. That is their right and we have offered
> to extract their data from our complex system at a reasonable time and
> materials rate.
>
> They abandoned an in-house reassessment in 2008 (that we provided support
> to) and used us for unjustified political cover. Now they desire to sever
> the relationship.
>
> Unfortunately they have chosen to break our license and copyright agreements
> and search for a third party filepro developer to assist them in delivering
> our entire software design and proprietary data to our competitor.
>
> They are apparently hoping to avoid having to pay over $40,000 in
> contractual, overdue license and support payments.
>
> We will be taking serious action against the county and anyone assisting in
> this clear theft of our intellectual property. With a complete clone of our
> data design and system (even if excluding processing tables), this new
> out-of-state competitor can build on what we have spent over 25 years
> customizing. Obviously the damage to us would be substantial.
>
> Feel free to email or call me for further information or to alert us of
> contact from Tioga.
>

The same old question, who owns the data?  I have always been of the
believe that the data belongs to the client and unless otherwise
specified under contract, the code belongs to me (or at least its
marketing rights).

Isn't loosing and gaining customers part of our daily lives?  Is it
not fair game to have one take a database and migrate its data to a
new database where the business is now going to operate going forward?

Is proprietary "data" in this case information pertaining to the "how"
things are done behind the scenes?

By the way, the notice seem to read more like "if you help these
people I will go after you" more than "stay away from these crooks,
they got me for over $40K, please don't help them get away with it.

That being said, sorry to hear about this and hope they get what they
have coming to them.  Good luck with this!

Regards,


Jose Lerebours
954 559 7186

PS: Funny thing is that people that do this sort of things end-up
spending a lot more than what they are running away from.