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Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people are saying that this was the wrong move because it will hurt the designer. Maybe. It's still the right move for other reasons: everyone doing business with these guys now knows they don't pay and to demand payment up front or not work with them at all. There are already mentions of this on consumer reviews [1]. Basically nycfreshmarket is likely to go out of business over this issue as that market is already so cutthroat.

This action is the best action for the community at large - if every designer did this, the world would be a better place and everyone would be sure to pay their designers for work done. Win win situation for everyone involved (besides for crooks).

[1] http://www.yelp.com/biz/nyc-fresh-market-new-york https://www.facebook.com/NYCFreshMarket

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Let's extrapolate: What if you were thrown out of your apartment if you failed to pay rent, the hospital would make the pacemaker stop working if you didn't pay your bills. Your lawyer would tell your secrets and tell the court you are guilty if you didn't pay his fee. Guys would show up to collect the TV you had failed to pay for. Your citizenship would be revoked if you didn't pay taxes etc. etc, all without the creditor having to go to court first. Oh, and everything would be posted on Facebook, Linkedin etc for your friends to see.

Stopping services and naming and shaming clients who don't / can't pay is a slippery slope and not always civilized. Be happy not all creditors act this way.

Wait, I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, because just about all those things that you mentioned actually do happen.

You DO get evicted if you fail to pay rent. The hospital won't make the pacemaker stop working, but they'll refuse further treatment that might be necessary. The lawyer wouldn't tell all your secrets, but might be asked to help track you down. Repo men DO come and collect your TV if you don't pay for it. Your citizenship won't be revoked if you don't pay your taxes, but you can go to prison, thus having your liberty (arguably the most important part of citizenship) revoked. And most of these things happen in public, for everyone to see.

Note that eviction requires the landlord to go to court, not just unilateral action on the part of the landlord. Somehow I doubt this web designer got a court order to allow them to deface their client's page.

Hospitals will not refuse treatment that is necessary to provide life support.

Collections agencies generally operate by sending you mail and calling your phone repeatedly until they get their payment. The contents of your mail and phone calls are generally private.

Note that most of these are private matters, generally considered confidential.

> Hospitals will not refuse treatment that is necessary to provide life support.

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/22357873/ns/health-health_care/t/f...

That's not the same thing, now is it?

Not without going through court and that's the whole point.

> Guys would show up to collect the TV you had failed to pay for.

This happens all the time, it's called a repossession.

Different jurisdictions, different rules and names. In general, jurisdictions that allow repossession without going to court, requires the creditor to follow strict procedures with reminders etc, and usually it's also a requirement that the actual act of taking possession is handled by public bailiffs or at least repossession agents (that act under strict liability). It's not just some dude from Best Buy who drops by when it suits him, puts a sign on your front lawn that says you haven't paid him, kicks the door in and takes back the TV.

You definitely get thrown out of a rented apartment if you don't pay your rent and if you finance your electronics and fail to pay they will eventually repo your goods.

As for hospitals (in the US), they don't even talk to you about replacing your failing pacemaker before proof of insurance that will pay.

  thrown out of your apartment if you failed to pay rent

This doesn't happen? I'm pretty sure it does. Try renting an apartment in a decent area and then never paying the rent. Let me know how long you're able to stay there.

  the hospital would make the pacemaker stop working

The hospital will never install a pacemaker if you don't pay in full up front or have medical insurance that will guarantee payment. They'll happily watch you die in the ward if you can't pay.

  Your lawyer would tell your secrets and tell 
  the court you are guilty if you didn't pay his fee

Don't know enough about the payment of lawyers to comment here, but I'm pretty sure not paying your lawyer is a particularly bad mistake to make.

  Your citizenship would be revoked if you didn't pay taxes

You get to keep your citizenship, but they will happily take your freedom and put you in jail. I think I'd rather lose my citizenship to be honest.

I don't understand your examples. Having your website go down if you don't pay the guy who made it sounds pretty normal. I have a friend who installs burglar bars on windows - if you don't pay him, he will come to your house with a crowbar and take those burglar bars back regardless of how much of your house he has to break to do it. He still has plenty of customers, since it's standard practice in that industry to take back the burglar bars. They argue (successfully, it seems) that the bars are still their property until you pay them.

Sorry, but a website is still classified as non essential to sustain life or we'll being. It can even be considered by some as luxury. And Web designers are many times shafted in that process. Good move on his part. Hope he gets paid.

Others have mostly covered your myriad errors, but:

> Your citizenship would be revoked if you didn't pay taxes

Per US Supreme Court decisions going back decades, citizenship cannot be "revoked" from a natural-born US citizen under any circumstances, and may only be removed from a naturalized citizen in case of fraud during the naturalization process. Failure to pay taxes is a criminal offense, not a grounds for loss of citizenship.

And:

> Your lawyer would tell your secrets and tell the court you are guilty if you didn't pay his fee.

Attorney/client privilege attaches the moment you begin speaking to an attorney as a client or prospective client. It is not dissolved by failure to pay. It is not dissolved by anything except, sometimes, death of the client (and courts are inconsistent on that one).

An attorney who did what you described would be disbarred, and the "evidence" would be inadmissible in court.

The parent comment wasn't an assertion these things happen, it was a "what if these things did happen?" (and, in particular, without going to court first).

To be meaningful, "what ifs" must be based on scenarios that are somehow comparable. The two I called out implicate not property rights, but fundamental constitutional rights.

That's not an absurd objection, but you should have made it clearer. All I got from your comment was an assertion that these things weren't the case, and of course they're not the case - that was the point of the preceding comment.

I was in my atty's office last week. A secretary was trying to make arrangements for an apparently frantic client who needed an atty to represent him in front of a judge (request a continuance, I think). The client had 'payment problems' and not a single atty in the office could find the time to rep' him.

In other words, your atty will leave you to swing in the wind.

Is your attorney really yours if you've not paid a fee or retainer?

Let's extrapolate in the opposite direction: what if you could keep living in a place without paying for it, never pay medical bills, never pay your lawyer, never pay for your TV, never pay your taxes, etc.?

I'm pretty sure that society as we know it would collapse.

What's your point? Nobody here is arguing that the client should be able to not pay for services rendered.

The post I'm replying to is basically saying, imagine a world where people deny you things if you don't pay for them. I'm just pointing out what the world would be like if that wasn't true.

No, the parent was saying imagine a world where those things were denied by unilateral decision without judicial mediation.

That's already the world we live in for many things, including some of his examples (e.g. TVs being repossessed), so, I don't see why that matters much.

I think it quite clearly makes a tremendous difference. TVs being repossessed was an erroneous example, yes, but I don't think that presents a significant problem with the point - this was a step beyond simple repossession.

All kinds of things like this happen without court intervention. Don't pay your cable bill? No cable for you. Don't pay for your car? Repossessed. Don't pay your credit cards? They'll report you to the credit bureaus and you'll have a hard time getting any more credit.

Some products fall into a category where it's harder to take stuff away, like health care and housing, because that stuff is critical to life. I'm pretty sure that a web site falls solidly into the first category, though.

Let's make a better example:

You drive in to your car mechanic. You get a full on paint job, new windows, new wheels, new axles, the works. The car is shiny and new.

You come into the mechanic's garrage and say "can i have my car please" the mechanic says "your bill is XXXXXX". You respond with "nono i just need my cara, I'll pay you later...

And then when the mechanic doesn't return the car you complain "WHAT AN UNPROFESSIONAL JERK! PART OF DOING BUSINESS IS WAITING FOR ME TO PAY HIM!"

Analogy to health care:

A poor man with no money to spare is stabbed by a rusty nail. He will get an infection and die unless he gets massive antibiotics.

The hospital turns him down.

The reason we made LAWS preventing hospitals from doing this is because our healthcare is a piece of fucking shit. Most other countries the hospital would get paid in full by the government. Because health care != web design or car repairs!

Why are you assuming the client didn't pay? You know absolutely nothing except that the designer ripped down the website and replaced it with a nastygram. Given that information, I'm certainly not quick to rule out the possibility that designer may be the asshole here.

Or in your mechanic example, maybe that mechanic quoted me $500, and then I show up and he asks for $1500 instead. I don't want to pay $1000 extra, so he threatens to spray paint my car with "balloot is a cheapskate" and park it out front of his shop.

How do you have any idea this isn't what onemine.com isn't doing to the grocery store?

"The client didn't pay" is the basic assumption necessary for most of this conversation to make any sense. If you want to discuss whether or not this particular client really did or did not pay, that's fine, but don't chastise others for having a different conversation than you are.

I love how often this kind of thing pops up in discussions like these.

"Maybe he's lying!" Sure. But you don't get to just pick an arbitrary lie out of thin air that supports whatever point you'd like to make.

If you think somebody is unreliable, then you need to remove their testimony from your pool of facts and re-evaluate. If that testimony is the only source of facts for the subject at hand, then you no longer have anything to talk about.

You cannot both simultaneously say we can't believe this guy and carry out any kind of commentary on the event, unless you've discovered some other info on it and haven't told anyone else about it.

Well put.

We'd love to hear from the client. Unfortunately this is a common enough occurrence that I am giving the designer the benefit of a doubt.

Point is:

Not enough information available.

Also

Pay your developers / designers.

> naming and shaming clients who don't / can't pay

See also, credit histories. Shit does happen in the normal course of business and financial issues can (and do!) happen to most people, but people (and companies) are generally forgiving of good faith efforts to make things right. It seems in this case that the client was a genuinely bad client that made no effort to pay the designer. Most designers don't want to risk their reputations over trivial shit and will only pull a stunt like this with an egregious button pusher client.

Let's draw a line between businesses and human beings.

Your business SHOULD be thrown out for not paying rent.

Your business SHOULD be fined, dissolved, or bankrupted if it doesn't pay taxes.

A business going bankrupt because they don't pay their debts is not a tragedy.

Actually, nobody knows anything except that onemine.com is willing to hijack the websites of its clients. Everything else is you simply accepting their side of the story without question.

Wrong. If the client didn't pay, and clear title to the site didn't transfer, then the site is, if not owned by the designer, then jointly owned by the designer and the client. IP law 101.

and how do you know the client didn't pay?

I can't be absolutly certain, of course, but given the quality of the work itself I can tell that the people who did it aren't amatures. I also know the probability an accomplished, professional designer claiming non-payment when payment was made is virtually zero.

Indeed, having worked in related fields for the better part of two decades, I cannot think of a single example where a designer attempted to shake down a client with a bogus claim of non-payment. But I can think of an astonishingly depressing number of cases where clients wanting something for nothing decided that stiffing their vendors was an easy and acceptable way to increase their own margins.

All other considerations aside, if the client didn't pay, the work isn't theirs. By law. Full stop. And if the client was stupid enough to host their site with a vendor they're shafting, the the vendor is well within their rights to limit access to that site in the fashion they did.

That'd turn this from "payment dispute" into "extortion", wouldn't it? A lot to risk to extract a few grand from a client who already paid you...

> everyone doing business with these guys now knows they don't pay

No. I know that there is a payment dispute involving these guys. I also know that one party to that dispute acted in an unprofessional, possibly defamatory, manner.

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