Slashdot Mirror
Dealing w/ Outside Interests in Your Projects?
Anthony Boyd asks: "Last weekend, I built a web site that is a poor-man's version of Classmates. Except that it is custom-built just for my high-school, with no ads or fees. I got a fine response from the people that knew about it, and was busy reconnecting with lost friends... until [last week], when my school's alumni association called and gave me an earful of comments such as, 'that's a rogue site' and 'it may not be legal!' Turns out, they hoped to build something similar, as a platform to entice donations. So, I'm stuck. Before I do anything, I'd like to ask Slashdot: have the projects you built for 'just for fun' been overrun by outside interests? If so, what did you do, and what would you have done differently?"
Yes, it's legal. Assuming your school wasn't a private school, you can hook up as many people as you want for whatever price you want- as long as you make it clear that you're not an employee or affiliate of the school.. You're matchmaking based on a common interest, i.e. that school.
If they contact you about it again, tell them politely that you're exercising your rights as a public citizen and serving as a resource for alumni. If they would like to cooperate with you to avoid competiting services, that would be lovely; however, in the interests of alumni relations you would suggest that they cease their threats of legal action to avoid the inevitable bad press and probable decline in alumni support, as well as the embarrassing and ultimately expensive legal battle. If you keep getting problems, use your alumni network to find legal representation.
If it's a private school, though, you may well be screwed. I doubt it, but you may.
I personally have never been in that situation. That being said, I can't help but think I'd fight it. "Tell me why this is illegal. Tell me why you should be the only player in town. Tell me why we can't work something out."
If they can't answer that, then I'd keep it going until I recieved a cease and desist. Assuming that there isn't any legal issues with the students names being printed there, what's the BFD?
Like I said, I'd fight, though I wouldn't rule out compromise. Maybe you could support donations for them?
If you don't like this kind of bullying, definitely don't give in. Post your correspondence on your web page, with as little editorializing as possible, and let others draw their own conclusions. If their behavior is outrageous enough, I'm sure you'll find that it results in a lot of bad publicity for them, and the last thing they want is for students to have a good excuse to hate the association when they call asking for money. Go ahead and stick a paypal link on the site that lets alums donate to the school at their discretion. Make sure you use trademarks carefully (you can check a primer about this many places online), and build your site with renewed purpose. ;)
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Spurious legal threats, be they from lawyers or just the old boys' club, are one of the worst problems in the legal climate today. Since there's so little cost to fire off a Cease and Desist letter that sounds scary but is essentially contentless, corporations do it as a last resort to harass small developers who they'd never be able to beat in court. The only way I know of to fix this situation is to make there be a *high cost* for waging war against the small guy, and this could easily come in the form of bad publicity if people don't just shut down their sites right away.
By the way, yes, this has happened to me several times. Most recently was my battle with the DMCA over flipping embedding bits