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Compensation for Bandwidth Costs is Extortion?
Tha_Big_Guy23 asks: "According to this article, a man who created a website for his local Sheriff's department is being charged with extortion. This was caused by taking down the website after repeated attempts to get compensation from the county to cover the bandwidth costs. As a result, all his personal computer property, and company computer property was seized and he was jailed."
"After being jailed he was charged with extortion, larceny by conversion, using a computer to commit a crime, and obstruction of justice. This website explains in more detail the circumstances surrounding the situation. Has anyone on Slashdot ever had an experience where a client was unwilling to compensate you for either your work, and/or the resources required to do your work?"
While the end result of this situation is a shame, let this situation serve as a warning for those of you who work, without a contract in place. While it is the general hope that people will behave in an honorable manner, sometimes this is just not the case, and contracts exist to protect both parties, when things go sour.
While the end result of this situation is a shame, let this situation serve as a warning for those of you who work, without a contract in place. While it is the general hope that people will behave in an honorable manner, sometimes this is just not the case, and contracts exist to protect both parties, when things go sour.
This guy gives website designers a bad name. I'd say he definitely belongs in prison. 3.5 million hits per month? Oh, yeah, right. I get the feeling that this guy was planning to pull this stunt all along, but I bet he wasn't counting on getting arrested. Another clue is the fact that he set the domain name up as his own property so the town would be unable to switch to another server. What a noble thing to do. And then there's his final bill... $300,000?! To offset the "huge expense" of running the website? WHAT huge expense? How much was he paying for hosting? DIdn't want to lose any more money? Why didn't he just set it up on a different server and let the town pay for it themselves? I think this guy wants to the town to pay for the loss he's taken running his business in the first place, and shutting the server down while handing over such a massive bill is, IMHO, extortion, and should be treated as such. I hope they throw the book at him, and throw it at him hard, to serve as a warning to anyone else thinking of pulling a stunt like this. Whew, I'm outta breath. Gotta go lay down for a minute.
You are in error. No-one is screaming. Thank you for your cooperation.
Agreed. This is horrible. Throw him in jail. I started out feeling honestly bad for this guy, but the further I get through the article the more I see that he is a waste of our good breathable oxygen. 3.5 mill hits. hahahahaha. Well let's look at it differently. Hosting costs: $100 / month = $3600 for 3 years Design costs: $5000 Interest: $292,000 I think he is figuring in uncle sam too.
This site is ranked 4,978,900 in traffic.
l s? q=&url=macombsheriff.com
It never broke the top 100,000, so there is no way it had 3 million hits, unless each page contained 1 million invisible gif images.
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_detai
If an Indian firm had built the site, some podunk sheriff couldn't abuse his authority over a contract dispute. Offshoring: good for civil liberties.
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
Well, that does sound a bit absurd, but I sure betcha the copy of the site in the Wayback machine will probably surpass that in this one single day thanks to ericspinder's helpful little url link in the parent :-)
No he didn't take anything away from the sheriff, the web site was his property. If the sheriff valued the web site, he should have had a contract that spelled out ownership. Since he hadn't given any money for the site, how can he claim ownership? It shows that the sheriff valued the site a $0.
It's the sheriff who unjustly took property away.
3.5 million hits per month, not year, is what he's reporting. Not that it justifies the $300,000 but the number you've got is off by more than an order of magnitude.
NERDS!!!!
No, it's nto an IP issue at all. This webmaster is not claiming to own the content at all. The issue is over fees and costs for hosting the content. The guy is saying that unless he is compensated for the costs incurred in hosting the site, he will cease to host it. And in fact he did just that and now the domain name is squatted.
As a book publisher if I'm loosing money by marketing your book and after a time decide to stop marketing it and remove all the copies from my warehouse, I'm not claiming to own your IP. I'm just no longer offering your IP to the public at my cost. If you decide to pay me (more), I"ll continue to publish your book, all I'm asking is to at least break even.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
I still don't understand what crime he committed. He shut down his own website. He designed it, owned copyright, and hosted it. I don't see why he can't stop whenever the hell he wants.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Ex-Macomb sheriff Hackel is free today
April 24, 2003
BY ALEXA CAPELOTO
Today marks the end of William Hackel's three years as a prisoner, and the
beginning of his return to freedom following his rape conviction in 2000.
The former Macomb County sheriff is expected to leave the Charles Egeler
Reception and Guidance Center in Jackson at 8 a.m. after being granted his
first possible parole date last month.
He was transferred to the center in late March from a Kentucky federal
prison in preparation for his release.
His wife and mother will be in Jackson to greet him and drive him home to
Macomb County, said son and current Macomb County Sheriff Mark Hackel. He
said his father's immediate focus is on reconnecting with family.
"He just wants to be with his wife and my grandmother," Mark Hackel said
Wednesday. "I'll try to see him as soon as possible. He's my father and I
definitely want to spend time with him."
Even as the ex-sheriff, 61, readjusts to life outside of prison, he plans to
continue efforts to clear his name. Birmingham attorney and longtime friend
Terence Page said he has asked the Michigan Supreme Court to review an
appellate court's refusal to reverse Hackel's conviction.
The court has not issued a decision.
Meanwhile, Hackel can expect to return to countless friends and supporters
who say they still believe he did not rape a 25-year-old female acquaintance
at the Soaring Eagle Casino & Resort in Mt. Pleasant in October 1999.
Several of them are collaborating on a Friends of Bill Hackel fund-raiser,
scheduled for June 9 at CJ Barrymore's in Clinton Township. Jerry Medley, a
friend of Hackel's for almost 50 years, said he expects 700 to 1,000 people,
as well as the guest of honor, to attend.
"We had an event two years ago and there were police chiefs, police
officers, judges -- all friends of Bill Hackel," he said. Tickets for the
June event cost $25.
Hackel is no longer in the custody of the Michigan Department of
Corrections, but he is still under the eye of the law. His two-year parole
period requires him to register as a sex offender and to check in regularly
with a parole agent.
In addition, he is required to complete sex offender treatment and is
prohibited from contacting the victim or possessing any items related to a
law enforcement agency.
Hackel served as county sheriff for 24 years until he was convicted in April
2000 of two counts of third-degree criminal sexual conduct and sentenced to
3 to 15 years in prison. The crime shocked community members who said they
considered him a trusted leader who cared more about justice than power.
"I'm sure it's not going to be easy" readjusting to life after
incarceration, Medley said. "But knowing the person that he is, he'll get
through it."
My brother-in-law is an experienced contract lawyer. He has made the point to me that the key issue when working with somebody is that good faith must be present on both sides. Irrespective of what any contract says, if it gets nasty and either party starts "enforcing" that contract, the only people that win are the lawyers. I thought that was extremely interesting.
Never, ever lose a file again. Ever.
putting aside the blatant extortion, since when was "using a computer to commit a crime" a crime? Commiting a crime is bad in itself, but when you use a computer to do it, it's even worse? Does that make sense?
One way or another, this is an interesting situation. Not because of what he was charging or the details of the setup to the action, but of the action itself.
Essentially, we have a non-contract situation, and the provider decides to terminate the arrangement, and the ownership of the content and name are in dispute (who would win such a dispute, no matter how obvious the answer, not the point).
For any private citizen, the only recourse would be litigation in civil courts.
Since the customer was a police department, the matter is taken up as a criminal case. His property is seized (the customer took posession of the files in question), and he's jailed, finger-printed, and now has a criminal record of arrest.
Does a senator get to fix his daughter's traffic tickets?
Does a judge get to let his friends off?
Does the dog catcher get to kill his enemy's uncollared dog as a stray, when he knows full well whose dog it is?
The police engaged in kidnapping, battery (by placing cuffs on him), theft and libel.
Not because it was the normal action, but because they COULD. He may be a scumbag, but he's not put in a position of trust by those he's elected (or hired) to protect. He doesn't take an oath of office as certainly the judge who authorized the warrant did, and I suspect the officers did, too.
The wrong fellow's out on bail, here.
Of interesting note... The domain justice4pat.com (The 2nd link) has their DNS hosted by runningwolf.com servers... Runningwolf was the name of Pat's company. Hmmm....
~D
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
Overcharging is a far cry from extortion. He may be a terrible businessman, but that doesn't make him a criminal.
Pierre
- Extortion. Threats of harm or injury to another person or his property? Just what is it he has supposedly threatend to harm?
- Larceny by conversion. This assumes that you took something of value and used it for yourself rather than its original purposes. Just what is it that this guy supposedly took? And how is he using it for his own purposes?
- Using a computer to commit a crime. This assumes a crime is committed. It's also a stupid law. Might as well make it illegal to use a stick to commit a crime. Committing the crime is a crime, no matter what you use to do it.
- Obstruction of justice (bad link). This is based on the guy lying to the police about who owns the web site. Dumb thing to do, but "justice" doesn't figure prominently in this story in any case.
If all they want is the site name, they don't even need the courts. You can't keep someone else's name without a valid reason. That's what all the cybersquatting cases were about. The Macomb Sherriff could simply argue to ICANN that Pat Richard doesn't have a valid claim to the name "macombsherriff.com" and they could get it back. (Technically, it should be "macombsherriff.gov" anyway.)===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Yes - I especially like how they post pictures of SUSPECTS on their website that have not even been convicted of a crime.
Not supplying a free website isn't extortion. I
Hosting something for 3 years, under an agreement that you would do so for free, then trying to charge for it retroactively is definately improper, and a violation of the existing contract.
If he would have merely tried to charge from a set point in time, and perhaps for the content he had created it, he would be safe.
Back charging in violation of the existing contract, this really isn't defensible, and he isn't entitled to that money.
Removing a valuable public service, and withholding all information from that service, unless you receive money you aren't entitled to is just not a fair way to play.
For those of you that might no know..Macomb County is the count just to the north of Detroit.
0 13 82.htm
Now if you read the following link..you will find out why there was so much traffic to that website.
http://www.detnews.com/2003/metro/0303/07/d01-1
Sherrif Hackle is the son of the former sherrif of 23 years who is doing 5-16 years in the federal pen, for laws he violated while in office.....
Oh, he's also squatting on the domain which is all over the police letterhead, was on the cars, etc, etc..
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
The .gov domain was not, until fairly recently, available to non-US federal government agencies/entities.
.com domain so they could tell folks to just go to "city.com". Plus it was easier to fit on the bumper stickers we put on all our city vehicles.
.gov been available at the time most cities might have preferred that to .com. However, for many cities that made the jump to .com that is the branding stuck in peoples minds now and it would be too much trouble/expense to change. My city was "clever" - they selected a site name in the form "citygov.com" (is it a government site or a commercial site - or both?)
Back in the day, cities usually would have a site such as "http://www.cityname.statenameabbreviation.us". As such they would frequently be very cumbersome to tell citizens over the phone - the chances were very good that they (the citizen) would hear/write something incorrectly and then not be able to get to the site which would cause them to call back to try and get the URL again...and again...and again...
Many cities (mine included) then decided to skip that and just get a
Had
So...if you want to blame someone blame the feds
Yes, let's actually link to a site in the Watback Machine that ISN'T reliant on his style sheet code that is no longer there. A MORE ACCURATE reperesentation of the previous site Looks like it's got a ton of good content to me. Plus it was an award winning site in the Law Enforcent Community.
Good response. Gotta love people that actually read an article and get it all wrong.
The thing is, if this was any other business besides a government one (more specifically a police one), they would have to sue him like anyone else, not immediately seize all his gear. This is the problem with cops in general, they have the power to act and ruin your life, and ask questions later.
I don't care if this guy DID try to inflate the prices and such, I do not feel as though the police should have the right to do this to him without a court order.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
Someone isn't telling the truth.
I agree, and didn't mean to imply that he necessarily went about this with the best of intentions (not many people would blow $300k of their own money purely for the benefit of the county government).
But, I can't see any way that the this can count as outright extortion. Even if he did it for publicity or other non-monetary considerations, without a contract (which both articles make clear as one of the big problems in this situation), he has no obligation to continue providing the service.
So does the county "owe" him any money? I'd say morally yes, but legally no. But does he need to keep providing the service if they don't pay? Again, no. Not extortion, just basic capitalism. If I stop paying my cable, and my cable company shuts me off for not paying, I'd get laughed out of court if I cried "extortion!". Even lacking a contract (let's say I found the cable live when I moved in, and just started using it), I would get charged with theft of services when the CC noticed, not the other way around.
True, true...I frequently play devil's advocate and point out the unpopular counter to the "slashdot" view. And I'm surprised how often I get scores like "50% Insightful, 50% Overrated," due to some Slashdotters trying to suppress facts while others are trying to underscore counterarguments.
End result? More information from more points of view, and that's better for everybody.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Indeed. To see what it used to look like, we have to look back further, to 2002.
Here's the 'correct' page
Personally, I'd trust a newspaper over blatant assertions by an activist site any day.
And, the newpaper may have accurately quoted the sheriff and the charges brought by the sheriff. So, while I may trust the newpaper more, I don't trust the sheriff, or the activist site. And, regardless of whether the guy asked for $300,000 or not, it is perfectly within his right to stop providing a service that he is not contracted to provide.
I think the sheriff department is going to get hammered on this one. He asked for money in order to maintain the website, regardless of the amount he is not obligated under any law to continue providing uncompensated services to anyone. The arrest could be considered an attempt to seize the defendants's property i.e. bandwidth costs to continue operating the website indefinitely. Which would be an unlawful seizure by the government. Let's say not only that, but he is expected to continue maintenance activities, i.e. adding new content. That would be indentured servitude. Which is again illegal.
Best case for the sheriff, the defendant did ask for an ungodly amount to maintain the site. The sheriff knew that he was screwed because he didn't have a contract for the site from its inception, and either had to pay, or let the site be shutdown, and not have any rights to the material created by te defendant on the original site. Instead, he decided to bring criminal charges. That is the best case for the sheriff. Worst case for the sheriff, the defendant wanted the bandwidth costs to be paid, and asked for it. After not receving shutdown the site, and the sherrif arrested in an abuse of police power. In between the sheriff is still a vindictive bastard.
IANAL
I haven't read a single comment that is at the heart of this issue. The reason the Sheriffs department considers it extortion, is because they claim they own the content.
And the guy who did the website, on the other hand, has claimed that HE owns the content all along, because he WROTE it.
It's not "work for hire" because there's no contract provision to that effect.
And he put a copyright notice naming himself/his company on it from day one.
A LOT of companies have been burned by this - hiring a company or developer to put together a website, then discovering (when they want to move elsewhere for better service or lower costs) that, like a photographer owning the negatives to your wedding pictures and the right to make copies, the website developer owns the copyright on the website - and thus only he can make changes without an additional contract.
They might have provided the information. But HE wrote the HTML, scripts, etc.
It will be interesting to see how this plays out in court.
And whether any authorship or "content-provider" trade organizations will come to his aid, to prevent the establishment of a precedent that will weaken their hold on their own output. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
If I volunteer to do work for you for free, and then send you a bill for it, that is fraud and/or extortion.
.gov domain, unless he's selling justice he's got no business with a .com TLD anyhow.
Fraud, maybe. But if I volunteer to do work for you for free, and then later tell you I'm not gonna work for you any more unless you pay me, that's just the breaks. If you don't like it, you don't use my services any more. It wasn't extortion when X-Drive said they weren't gonna be free anymore, and I'd have to pay them if I didn't want them to dump my files. It's not extortion when eFax tells me that I'm gonna have to pay them if I want to keep the fax number they've provided for years for free. How is this different?
If the sheriff wanted a SLA guarantee, he would have hired a commercial service. He got what he paid for. And if the sheriff wanted to own the domain, he should have gotten a
[Insert ignorant redneck sheriff joke here]
Try taking this approach with the utility company if you stop paying your electricity bill, and see how far you get.
You'd get pretty far in New York. In fact, some people got so far with it that it's actually ILLEGAL to cancel gas or electric service during the winter months. People need their heat to survive, and cutting them off just because they can't pay would be extortion (or so the train of thought goes).
Hey freaks: now you're ju
This is of course, what is frightening about current state of the legal system. That it's not whether you're right or wrong, it's about whether you've pissed off the wrong person/organization.
It's not about justice or fairness, it's about struggling for dominance, and if someone's got more money and/or power than you, you're screwed. Even if you win the verdict, you have to deal with the expenses and hardships before that (in this case, having his stuff seized), and then have to deal with appeals. Plus, those with power can screw your reputation, leaving you with image problems.
"But I trust in the people's capacity for reflection, rage and rebellion." -Oscar Olivera
But what if I say: "Today I don't volunteer. Today you pay me or no more service."
That's essentially what he did. He let them ride free to a point, then asked that they begin paying for service. They refused, so he shut them down. That's 100% legal and within his rights, and I think if that guy gets himself half a clueful lawyer, that Sherrif's office is going to be seeing a handful of both criminal and civil charges against them.
According to Dictionary.com extortion is:
1. The act or an instance of extorting.
2. Illegal use of one's official position or powers to obtain property, funds, or patronage.
3. An excessive or exorbitant charge.
4. Something extorted.
$300,000 is definately an excessive charge for the bandwidth and even his work. My website gets around three million hits too but it only costs a whopping $6/month for hosting. That pretty much means he wanted $10,000/month for his work. Only the courts will be able to decide whether it was an illegal use of one's official position or powers to obtain property, funds, or patronage or if it's just plain capitalism.
He didn't get 3 million visitors... he got 3.5 million hits. Each page has at least 1 hit, plus one more for each graphic, and embedded object like music, or flash animation. Most people will hit a few pages, so it adds up quickly. A good log analyzer can convert that to unique visitors with a very small margin of error.
- Dan
Kod*k hired me to do some work (support dual ported disks across two independant computers and maintain filesyatem consistency). Payment was set contractually, net 10 days. After they were 10 weeks in arrears (and owed the last billing in a few days for a total of 12 shortly), with almost 14 weeks unpaid I did what any sensible contractor would do after nearly daily getting nowhere with the management and accounting to get the funds authorized to be released and a check cut. I told them the end of the week would be my last day of work until paid, then when not paid I called in to work and said when a check was ready I'd show up. I asked that in light of the nature of the arrears I'd resume work when all of the unpaid work was paid in full. My boss tried a power game where all the appropriate checks where cut but he held back the last one having his secretary tell me I'd have to resume work to collect that last check. I said I'd resume work when all the outstanding work was paid for. Kod*k still owes me $3500 plus around 20 years interest. Rather than burn the bridges with all of Kodak since I did work for other divisions, I just refused contracts with that division or any other division that that manager worked for. In an interesting and twisted justification for keeping the funds when I delclined to return to work until they'd pay me, they sent me a letter saying that they were deducting the cost of training my replacement to rewrite a driver I had done for them (which is really funny since I took a stock Digital RSX-11M Plus driver and changed the drive designation letters to RO: so that the batch scripts could easily be read and have one know that was the Read Only port for the drive by convention). The really fun part was they said it was poorly written and lacked documentation! This after a full functional specification as well as a design document for all the parts of the system. Somewhat of a rarity back then.
So even contracts don't always keep things straight. Sometimes you can't afford to get too many folks at a longterm customer riled too much.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
Have /. crowd heard about art of negotiation?
Just look at lawyers - sue someone for a 100 million and then settle for 100 thousand.
Him asking 300,000 is nothing more than starting point. What sucks big time is the sheriff refusing to come up with a reasonable agreement at all.
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
I'm not very impressed by most of the responses. I got kind of a queasy feeling reading the articles and checked out the justice4pat.com site where I was surprised to find he linked to several articles that painted his side negatively. They were in fact the top links. Looking at the lower links I got different information. It sounds like when he offered to set up the site they said we'll work out payment for the maintenance of the site later. They never did work it out later because the sheriff refused to discuss it. More than a year ago he let the sheriff's dept. know he could not afford the ongoing costs and he'd have to take down the site if something wasn't arranged. The $300k figure was what he estimated he'd have charged a paying client for everything. That means his time for maintenance and upkeep, designing the site in the first place, and hosting costs, and whatever other costs may have been involved. (BTW http://web.archive.org/web/20020929171339/http://w ww.macombsheriff.com/ gives a much better idea of the site than the previously posted links.) My understanding is he wasn't asking for $300k, he was asking they take over the costs going forward.r ead/2452/ someone (Nevel) indicates he (Pugzly a.k.a. Richards) helped create that very site and hosted it as well. Then when the cost got too much, because the site grew, they worked it out and are still friends. They're even trying to help with his current situation. Having read all that I'm much more inclined to believe his side than the sheriff dept. press releases in the newspaper articles.
Apparently he's been in a similar situation before. In this discussion thread http://development.gurusnetwork.com/discussion/th
> Does anyone believe that if this was any
> organization besides the local Sheriff he
> wanted cash from to keep hosting their site,
> that the Sheriff's department would have
> arrested him for extortion with the exact same
> set of facts?
>
> I think that's called selective prosecution,
> among other things....
You are getting it all wrong. He had, what sounds like, a verbal contract to provide hosting for a local government agency without charge. After three years he decided that he didn't like the contract, so he demanded $300,000 in "expenses". When they refused to pay - FYI there is no way a local sheriff's department would be able to cough that up anyway - he took the site down and refused to give them the hosted data or the domain name back unless they paid him his $300k.
He has data whose legal ownership will be decided by a court, but likely was contributed in bulk by the sheriff's office. He was essentually holding this data hostage unless the money was paid. And when he hindered investigators, they seized his servers.
This doesn't seem so unreasonable me. This definitely isn't selective prosecution, this is what I would expect any law enforcement organization to do while investigating an extortion case with similarly existing criteria.
This guy is a bone head, and as post #1 rightly said, he deserves what he gets for his actions.
-- No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
I will preface this by saying that I manage a municipality's web presence, and have delegated management of the police department site to a dedicated and competent citizen volunteer, although I still retain control over and bear responsibility for his actions. Likewise, everything I do is subject to oversight and control by several layers of bureaucracy, ultimately ending with the voters. It's a good system.
Both parties in this dispute have grievances which could be legitimate; that will be up to a civil court to decide. I really doubt a criminal case will result from this dispute.
One only needs to glance at the new site and archived copies of the old site to realize both parties are quite clueless about what's involved in web publishing. Pox on them both for their stupidity, I say.
The original article says that the web guy was "a former reserve deputy in the sheriff's marine division." That raises a red flag to me, and perhaps it should have with the sheriff's department. I'm always suspicious of the motives of these "wannabe cop" type people. I wonder if a background check was ever done on him before he was given these "reserve deputy" duties.
I don't know if it applies, but BBC news seems pretty unbiased to me, appreciably moreso than others at least.
This assumes that during these three years he worked only on that web site. Somehow I doubt that it was that much work to set it up and maintain, and that he did not have any other clients during that 3 year period.
A couple of weeks for initial development (at most) followed by maybe 1 or 2 hours per week for maintenance during the rest of the 3 years is more reasonable. Come on, web site design (if done right) is not that work intensive.
Not to mention that $8333/month is quite a nice salary for a web designer... Do you really earn that much in the states? Around here, even certified software engineers doing actual application development (C, java, ...) don't get those kinds of salaries!
If we plug in those more realistic figures:
- 1 month initial work
- 1 day/month maintenance => 35 days = 7 weeks => less than 2 months
==> 3 month.Assume a salary of $4000/month, and 50% overhead => $18000.
A far cry from the $300K he is charging.
The problem is we don't know the facts. Did the sheriff tell him he COULDN"T take the site down when the owner asked for financial help and then threaten to arrest him unless he kept performing the free service? Did the site owner ask for a reasonable payment and then respond with a bill to make it formal when the sheriff told him to get stuffed? We simply do not know what precipitated the $300,000 bill.
It doesn't matter what the owners motives were - asking for payment for a service is not a crime, and taking down you own property (the web site) is also not a crime. Luckily for the sheriff, stupidity for not getting ownership of his own domain name is not a crime either.
Frankly, I don't trust any sheriff who would so clearly abuse his police power to punish the site owner. This is a civil case, not a criminal case, and from the article the sheriff doesn't have a leg to stand on - the site owner can do anytning he wants to with the site, including shut it down. If the sheriff didn't like the site being down there were civil remedies that could have created a court order to keep the site operational until the matter could be resolved. The sheriff didn't do that - he just abused his arrest power and decided to teach the guy a lesson by arresting him.
I hope the site owner sues the hell out of the sheriff just to teach him the difference between civil and criminal law.
..and if the guy did the same thing to a local furniture store's data they'd hire a lawyer and sue in civil court to get their data back. They wouldn't go to the police and try to have him arrested for extortion or "using a computer to commit a crime". If they tried to the police would laugh at them and show them the door while saying "So sue the guy."
I am concerned that the police confiscated his computer. Was that his WEB SERVER? If so, they destroyed his business. Did they charge him with "using a computer to commit a crime" just so they could confiscate his server to get access to "their" data? If so that is a clear abuse of authority and nothing more than theft. You can't steal someone's car just because he won't return your fuzzy dice, and the police can't confiscate a person's business just because they want their web site back. If they have gone into his computers and extracted their data they have proved their bad faith. I suspect they have done just that.
What makes this different is that the police abused their authority and decided they were the law, not the courts. If the guy had a plan to make them reliant on his site and then send them big bills it is perfectly legal. How is that different from your local cable company? How is it any different from the phone companies who until recently owned your phone number so you couldn't change carriers without great hassle? No one tried to arrest THEM, so how is that different from this guy who owned their domain and wouldn't give it to them unless they paid for it?
And one final point: The site owner was a former deputy sheriff and as such I suspect he hates and loathes the ACLU - but this is exactly the kind of case the ACLU takes on. I wonder how he is going to feel about them when the ACLU asks him if he needs help now that he has first-hand experience with the abuse of police power?.
One point I'd like to clarify here is that before everyone goes into sticker-shock over $300k, understand that we're talking about more than bandwidth and hardware expenses. According to what I can see on the wayback machine, the website had a large amount of content. It was not a dubiously popular online business card and photo album. There were updated articles and stories every day. So, how did that content get organized into a website? Did Richard just turn on cheap hosting while the sherrifs demonstrated their web design and organizational skizzles? Maybe that's what they're trying now (from the looks of it) but at the time I would wager that Running Wolf bore the burden of translating police blotter feeds and random user requests into a website that was effectively a news portal.
Also, I don't think the PD imprisoned Richards, impounded his equipment, and charged him with 4 felonies so rapidly over a simple bruised ego. If the website was so important to their infrastructure, prosecuting Richard into the stone age won't bring it back. The important thing I see them doing is confiscating the equipment. Outside of spite, that would serve them no purpose unless there was data on the equipment they hoped to recover (apparently as quickly as possible). This implies that they were relying solely on Richard's free website to house all of their data, and they needed it back just to take care of business. So, if it was their data, shouldn't they have had backups? No seriously, I mean hard copies so you can get your job done during a power failure.. They obviously relied on the workings of the website desperately.
So, here's the rub. You just don't imprison people over shutting down a volunteer website. The PD can't claim to have any investment in the venture, since they never invested a wooden nickel. The PD may have volunteered their content, but Richards was vested with no responsibility of guarding that content with his freedom as a citizen. We could easily replace Richards in this story with Geocities. Sherrifs find nifty WSYWIG content manager and start a free website on geocities. Sherrifs post their nifty web address on cop cars and trust all of their content to this website. Geocities shuts off their account automatically for any odd reason, and all hell breaks loose.
The only other thing Richard had that the PD could chafe over needing was the domain name. but it's only a name. It only has value because of the promotion and acceptence of the website itself. Again, they could have just as easily came to rely on Geocities web and email addresses, printing them on police cars and letterhead. That wouldn't entitle them to any kind of squatting rights over the geocities.com domain, or to have geocities officials arrested on nutty criminal charges.
The truth is that the Police Department was simply freeloading the whole time. When the dust settles they aren't out a shiny penny, just all of their convenient functionality and a contact address or two. Richards is out 3 years of work, all expenses involved whatsoever (whether $300k or what) and a very real possibility of 20 years in prison with even more fines. The PD are the scam artists, not the web design firm.
The way I see it, they essentially sweet talked their way into free room and board at someone's house, and eventually raised hell over all the heartache involved at being kicked out. "But all my letterhead has this address. But all my belongings are here and I refuse to take them anywhere else. Maybe I forgot to get my name on the lease at any point, put people come here to see me not you, so it's my house. I'll now arrest you for not handing over the keys and leaving while you had the chance." It reminds me of that movie "Pacific Heights" with Micheal Keaton.
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.