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Ask Slashdot: What To Do When Another Dev Steals Your Work and Adds Their Name?
An anonymous reader writes "I have had an interesting situation arise where I built some web apps for a client about 2 years ago. I have no longer been working with the client and a new developer has taken over purely for maintenance work. Currently I have been looking for new work and have used the said apps as part of my portfolio. During one interview I was informed that I not telling the truth about building the apps and I was then shown the source of a few JS files. It seems the new developer had put a copyright header on them, removed my name as the author and put his own. Now this is grey territory as it the client who owns the source, not the contracting developer. It put me on my back foot and I had to start explaining to interviewers that the developer stole the work and branded it. I feel it makes me look like a fool, having to defend my position in an interview with a possible client and I feel I had lost the chance of directing the outcome of the interview. I have cut the apps from my portfolio, however they are some of my best work and a real testament to my skills. I decided to cut my loss and move on, I am not looking for a fight or any unnecessary heartache. So what you do in my situation?"
the sco trial is over man. you just had a bad dream, that's all.
summarizing the work you did, and identifying you as the original author of the code.
This isn't hard. Yahoo career advice stuff.
will not help with changing what already happened, but for the future put your work on github or some other similar service, keep the project private, then you can use that to prove precedence.
That sounds like a shitty situation, my condolences :(
I suspect the lawyer route is probably a bad idea, but I'd be really curious what a lawyer would have to say on the subject (at least here in Canada we have "moral" rights that dictate among other things an authors ownership of his work (even when it's "work for hire").
...and inform them of the unethical behavior of the new developer, the situation it put you in and how shocked you were to find that they had deprived you of the opportunity to take credit for your work. Somebody at that company hired you and knows what truly happened. Hopefully that person is in a position to put the situation right and give you the credit you are due.
That said, relying on your code being still accessible after you have left it for a while is not a situation you want to be in. Your former clients can take that code down and replace it any time they want, with anything they want. You should have checked to see the status of that code yourself shortly before you tried to present it as an example of your work.
If the original client won't cooperate, perhaps you could send a DMCA takedown notice asserting your ownership of the copyright for the original digital content.
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
Get a referral from the company.
If the copyright message is pointing to the maintainer rather than the company, you may want to point it out to the company since the new developer may be trying to claim ownership of the code (or may simply be naive).
Most of the people here don't give a rats about intellectual property unless they are ranting about how Hollywood and proprietary software's model is broken. When it's one of our own though, it's pitchforks and torches.
Have you considered that the people who argue the former aren't always the people who are upset by things such as this?
The code you developed for your client was most likely never yours to begin with. Despite well-meaning suggestions made here, you really have no right to go back to the client and demand anything. Present the code as your own to prospective clients, explain the situation, and leave it at that.
We all have fantasies of getting back at assholes like the one you described, but in the real world, you just need to take the high road and let it go. From the description you gave, it sounds like you're new to the game. Focus your creative energies on your work, not on vengeance. Your integrity and professionalism will remain intact, which is much more important than striking back at some perceived slight.
Yeah, because when I download a movie, I replace all of the credits with my name and try to pass off to potential employers that I was wholly responsible for the film. Unless it's an Abrams film... he can keep those.
I cannot remember anyone claiming that artist should not be credited. There have been arguments that you should be allowed to copy their stuff for free, but I've never ever seen anyone claiming that you should be allowed to claim you had written that stuff if you haven't.
Or in short: There's a difference between copying and plagiarism.
What the submitter complains about is plagiarism, not copying. From his submission, there's no indication about how he thinks about copying.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
you have commit dates, if the change copyright on your file is newer, there is your proof
you also have the commit history, better proof than anything, unless they suspect you faked hundreds of commits and bug fixes
That would work, but it would be unethical for a developer to commit his code to a publicly-accessible server without client permission to do so.
In the context of an interview the fact that the source was presented could be a perfect opportunity to demonstrate your knowledge of the code by offering to explain its operation and the design decisions that came about during development. Your skills are better proven in how you articulate your knowledge and ideas rather than just pointing to a name on a comment banner. A major lesson learned would be to expect this and to keep cool and not look flustered when someone tries to call you out on it. If you had an amicable relationship with this former employer you might even touch base with them ahead of time to ask if you can list them as a reference so they can corroborate your authorship.
Account -> Discussions -> Disable Sigs
The server itself is still public and it isn't your code to commit. You are being paid, generally, to create code for someone else; thus it is their code. This means that you are putting the code on an outside host of unknown security, and is still wrong.
When you work for someone else as a contractor, you can't just do this. You should spell it out in your contract or whatever before you work for them that you will be archiving your work for reference material for the purposes of demonstrating it to future clients.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Agree: this is more about credit than about copyright.
If you had built a bridge for your city, you should be able to list that as one of your accomplishments. It does not mean that you can walk off with the bridge. At the same time, you'd be perfectly justified in getting pissed off if someone else said that it was they, not you, who had built it.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Even then: there is a difference between "ownership" or "intellectual property" (what many here dismiss) and getting credit where it is due (this case).
It's like in science: scientists (many /. posters among them btw) don't care about who copies their work, as long as their name is in the history books. Most free/open source software: the same story.