Courting the end
Posted: 14 March 2004 at 23:51:50
I e-mailed a friend of mine who wanted to know what the story was on this court case. Upon reviewing my e-mail to my friend, I realized it was a good summary of everything and it deserves to be posted here.
A friend of ours asked us to help a friend of his get his record company website up in 2002. He wanted us to do it cheap as a favor. Like... $500. We told him he couldn't have any kind of secure ordering for that little money, but we'd encrypt order data and e-mail it to him encrypted (i.e. PGP) so at least part of the process would be encrypted.
So, the client changed a bunch of stuff half-way through the process, balked at the cost to make the changes and then demanded we use PayPal (which we probably should have considered). We told him we'd be happy to set up his site to use PayPal if he'd just pay up his unpaid balance ($519). He refused and said he didn't understand why we didn't just spent the "5-10 minutes" to "install" PayPal on his site.
When we wouldn't back down, he told us to take the site down. We never got our money.
Fast forward to November 2003. He contacts us about getting his domain name (which we registered for him). We told him we'd be happy to help him if he paid up his unpaid balance. He threw a fit and said there was no way he was ever going to pay us. We told him we'd help him if he paid us. He said he was going sue us. We told him his domain name had already expired and was picked up some guy in California. He filed a small claims lawsuit. We filed a countersuit to get our unpaid balance.
March 11, 2004: Judge rules in favor of Iodynamics - says we had "the right to reasonable assurance of satisfaction before providing services" — that is, we had every right to ask for payment before doing as our client requested.
The next day, he e-mailed me and told me not to bother sending him an invoice because he's going to appeal the judgement. I suspect he doesn't know you're supposed to have grounds to appeal.