- April 15, 2024
- Posted by: legaleseblogger
- Category: Related News
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## Situation Overview: Parent’s Pool Company and Website Troubles
This story will be all over the place so please bear with me.
My parents own a pool company, and a few months ago my dad wanted to upgrade the company website and get on Google ads to attract more customers. I tried helping him with this, but ultimately one of his friends referred him to a man (we will call him Mark). Mark also owns a pretty successful company and has a significant following on social media. He promised to get my dad a good website programmer, build social media pages, increase our following, put us on Google ads, and more. My dad agreed and paid him (and I believe Mark also built him a pool). Mark gave our company a new name for social media and the website, designed a new logo, and even got custom shirts for our workers with the logo.
## Increasing Costs and Ownership Issues: Website Troubles
A couple of weeks ago, the website programmer started charging us more money, increasing the monthly fee from $500 to $800. Later, when we wanted to add more pages to the website, the programmer charged us $2,000. We decided to change programmers, but when we asked for the website information, the programmer told us we had to speak to Mark because he was the website owner.
Today, my dad spoke to Mark and asked for the website information. Mark demanded $50,000 for it, despite the fact that we had already paid for its creation, paid monthly fees, paid for updates, and even paid for the name change. The only thing Mark has done for us for free is edit a few pictures for social media.
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****** just grabbed a
I can only hope a contract was put in place. Check business registration in your state and see if this business name is registered. If not, do that ASAP just to keep it away from Mark.
Who clearly is an opportunist who was planning on milking you for website residuals and is unhappy that you’re cutting that off.
Edit: I’d also suggest you archive this website immediately. “back in muh day” we used HTTrack but I don’t know if that’s still the best way to do a site rip. You’ll have to pay to remake the website with a new person but at least you’ll have all the content.
What dude – websites are not that expensive to host. Tell this guy to fuck off and hire a contractor to make a new site. This guy is a bad person and not your friend.
Be smarter.
All of this should be laid out in a contract. If you agreed to do this without a contract, good luck.
Build a new site for less than $50/month on squarespace.
I’ll build you a site for free….shit like this makes my blood boil.
It’s one website, Michael. What could it cost? $50,000?
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Could try doing a DMCA takedown on the old website, since it was done as a work for hire, copyright rests with the company that paid for it to be produced.
This is a common, if sleazy/scammy, business model — offer to “help” a small business by setting up and managing their website, then milk them for years.
Copyright for the web pages is owned by whoever built the website, unless a contract was put in place ahead of time making it a “work for hire” or otherwise agreeing to assign copyright to your father. Same for the “new logo”, the artwork is owned by the artist or by whomever the artist assigned the copyright to. It’s also possible that Mark registered a trademark (or two, both a wordmark and a logo mark), in which case that/those would be owned by him also.
The domain name is owned by whoever registered it, although you may be able to force a transfer by using the UDRP, but probably you won’t be able to since see above about trademark. (If there’s no registered trademark, it would default to being owned by the business, I think, but TBQPH I haven’t dealt with trademark much in years.)
Your recourse is either to dump the new name and new brand image and new “friend” and rebuild under a new name and brand again (or under the original that he talked you into dumping), or pay him for the usage. No, a court won’t simply order everything to be transferred to you.
And please don’t throw a hissy-fit saying “no one would do business like this!” Wedding photographers own the copyrights to their photos and sell individual prints to the bride/groom and family and wedding guests all the time. It’s been a common business model for generations already. Is it an asshole move on Mark’s part, sure. Is it something that is done in the normal course of business in this country, sure.
Who owns the domain? If Mark owns it and has no value to your Dad other than what Mark says it’s worth, tell him to kick rocks, create a new domain and find someone else to run your online presence.
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