FW: Attempted theft warning.

[Fairlight]

Confusious (Jose Lerebours) say:
> 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).

The man is not disputing data ownership, and expressly indicates that
they've offered to extract the data for migration.

I do concur with your assessment regarding ownership; data always belongs
to the customer, code belongs to the developer, unless otherwise
negotiated.  Even then, "code" applies to a program or package as a whole,
not its modular parts--I have a library of routines I've built up over the
years that is shared or partially shared over many programs written for
myself and for multiple clients.  Even if the "code" is negotiated to be
owned by the client, those sections are non-exclusive--they own the
program/product, but I can still use my own library of routines, some of
which may appear in said "code" (code as an entity).

> 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?

Again, the man is not disputing that, and has stated that they offered to
assist in that process.

What is -not- part of our daily lives (or shouldn't be), is someone skating
without paying valid charges, including licensing and support fees.  And,
in the right situations, use of "the code" without paying those fees is a
breach of copyright law.

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

I took the "data design" part to mean essentially the relational schema
(ie., the ddefine layouts), not the data that would reside within.

> 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.

Yeah, it reads that way to me as well, and I'm pretty sure that's -exactly-
how it was meant.  It felt pretty hostile for an audience that's 99.9%
likely to be entirely uninvolved.

And I think there's a fine line, there.  There's a difference between
copyright infringement and patent infringement.  Let's assume that (as Tim
said), the "even without the processing" applies.  A data schema as such is
not copywriteable.  A document describing the schema is copyrightable.  The
schema itself as a living, breathing entity inside production is probably
not, although it -is- patentable, as it's a way of doing things rather than
an end-product on its own.  I'm not sure that just the ddefine layouts
actually constitute copyrightable information, as opposed to patentable
information.

In addition, laws vary by country.  Several people have informed me that
copyright laws are much more stringent in Australia regarding software and
who may work on it, for instance.

At any rate, no matter my unofficial views on what may or may not be
copyrightable vs patentable, the situation is enough to make one want to
steer about six states wide of anything even remotely like this train
wreck.

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

More like hope Tim's company gets what's coming to them--the money they're
allegedly owed.

> 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.

Two options:

1) They learn, and come back to you on their hands and knees.
2) They don't learn, and spend a mint.  Hey, it's their dime.

mark->
-- 
Audio panton, cogito singularis.