Compensation for Bandwidth Costs is Extortion? 865
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.
Wow what a site! (Score:5, Informative)
More Information (Score:3, Informative)
Perhaps this should be a lessong to all to work out your contracts a bit more clearly in advance.
Let's do some math here... (Score:3, Informative)
$100,000 for one year, which is...
$ 8,333 for one month of hosting.
(blatant_plug)
Well, don't host with that guy, come host with Tigerhost.com [tigerhost.com]. We only charge $100/month for businesses! (And $16 for personal sites.)
(/blatant_plug)
Seriously, though, at those rates, he could retire on just that one site.
Yes, it is extortion (Score:1, Informative)
If someone owes you money and they are not giving it to you, the correct thing to do is hire a lawyer. Vigilantism may make you feel better, but it's against the law.
Article Text (Score:1, Informative)
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A Shelby Township Web site operator is accused of trying to extort $300,000 from the county's primary law enforcement agency the Macomb County Sheriff's Office.
Patrick Arthur Richard, 37, faces four felonies, including extortion, for allegedly holding the sheriff's office Web site hostage in exchange for money. Richard's Running Wolf Inc. operated the sheriff's office Internet site for nearly three years as a free service before shutting it down three months ago because the county wouldn't pay him.
"This is a case of someone trying to get rich quick," said Eric Kaiser, chief trial attorney for the Macomb County Prosecutor's Office. "He was given the privilege of carrying the banner of the Macomb County Sheriff's department and he tried to take advantage of it."
Richard's attorney, James Simmons, however, called the charges "absurd" and said his client merely attempted to negotiate with Hackel and his staff.
He argued the conflict should be resolved in civil court.
"Everyone should sit down and come up with a negotiated price," Simmons said. "This is no more a case of extortion than someone going to a car dealer and offering the dealer less than the listed price, then leaving because he didn't get it. This is really extortion by the sheriff's department."
Richard, who is free on a $5,000 personal bond, faces a preliminary examination today in 41B District Court in Mount Clemens on charges of extortion, using a computer to commit a crime, larceny by conversion and obstruction of justice. The most serious charge carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and a $10,000 fine.
Richard, a former reserve deputy in the sheriff's marine division, more than three years ago offered to provide the Web site at no cost to the county as an in-kind contribution. Hackel, who enthusiastically supported it, said Richard agreed to operate it in exchange for publicity for his company.
The Web site, www.macombsheriff.com, debuted in March 2001 to praise by officials. Richard said it attracted 3.5 million hits per month from throughout the world.
The site provided comprehensive information about the department, a way for the public to communicate with police and archives of newspaper articles.
A year or so ago, Richard started talking with Hackel's staff about earning income from the site. An attempt was made to secure advertisements for the site with profits going to Richard, but Hackel said that generated only a small response.
Richard then demanded $300,000 of taxpayer dollars from the county. Richard said the money would offset the huge expense of running the Web site for the 33 months.
"That was by no means the end of negotiations," said Simmons, Richard's attorney. "He shut it down because he didn't want to lose any more money."
But Hackel said that exorbitant demand amounts to extortion.
"He built up the site so that we would rely on it so much and would pay him," Hackel said. "(But) that content belongs to all of us."
Kaiser said the actual expense to run the site was miniscule compared to the demand.
Simmons said the Web site included a disclaimer that said it was owned by Running Wolf Inc.
"The sheriff's department never disputed that fact when the site was up," Simmons said.
Kaiser responded to Simmon's claim that the case is a civil matter.
"The O.J. (O.J. Simpson) case showed us that a criminal case can be a civil case," he said.
Hackel said Richard also impeded the investigation by the Macomb Area Computer Enforcement team, which seized Richard's computer and related records. Richard lied to investigators by claiming he sold the domain name to a Virginia company, Hackel said.
Hackel said his mistake was placing too much trust in Richard and agreeing to have Richard pay the nominal domain fee. Richard retains authority of the domain name.
Since the
Re:Wow what a site! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Oh, gotta rant, gotta rant on this one... (Score:5, Informative)
According to the second link in the article, he spent $300,000 of his own money and is not asking for his inventment back. He simply tried to tell the county that, going forward, he couldn't afford to pay for it himself. When they ignored him, he closed up shop to keep from losing more money. They retaliated by arresting him and slapping him with exortion and other charges.
Re:Yes, it is extortion (Score:5, Informative)
The real issue is whether he's owed money or not. As someone pointed out, he's basically asking for over $8,000 per month hosting what should be a relatively small local site (I'd like to see how his hits were measured -- if those are unique visits, I'd be pretty surprised). The article seems to imply that he already had a verbal contract to provide the service for free in return for publicity (as suggested by the article). If that's the case, then he's essentially trying to change the terms of his agreement unilaterally while holding the site hostage, and that's what's getting him the extortion charge.
Re:Oh, gotta rant, gotta rant on this one... (Score:1, Informative)
But there are companies who will rip you off. I did a web site for a friend, and he started complaining about an extra $1 charge the ISP levied, calling them all 'crooks', and ultimately none of us ever got paid - and we were doing it 'cut rate' because he kept reminding us he was our friend and should be entitled to a 'good deal'.
Re:Wow what a site! (Score:2, Informative)
Re-read TFAs (Score:5, Informative)
The quotes you state are from the Justice 4 Pat campaign, an apparently biased source drumming up support for Pat.
Personally, I'd trust a newspaper over blatant assertions by an activist site any day.
Re:The Guy Made Mistakes All Along (Score:4, Informative)
"You owe me $300,000 for services rendered."
vs.
"Pay me $300,000 or I'll shut you down and keep you out of your data"
What was the oral contract? The Sheriffs dept most likely owns the website and the content on it, and this guy was just hosting it.
If he doesn't want to host it, fine, they take their business elsewhere. He sues for services rendered, etc..
But if he threatened to hold the content hostage, he probably crossed the line into extortion. He was demanding money to release property he didnt have a claim over. It would be like me taking home the sourcecode from my company, and demanding a payoff to give it back.
DA's file charges, not local podunk Sherriff's (With whom I work with every day so I know how little power they actually have). DA's usually aren't very thrilled when Barney Fife shows up with some frivolous overblown charge.
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What's wrong with what he did? (Score:3, Informative)
"Richard, a former reserve deputy in the sheriff's marine division, more than three years ago offered to provide the Web site at no cost to the county as an in-kind contribution. Hackel, who enthusiastically supported it, said Richard agreed to operate it in exchange for publicity for his company." [emphasis mine]
If that is accurate, then the guy tried to retroactively change the fee, exploiting the fact that there wasn't a written contract. The response is definitely extreme, though; it could probably have been settled with much less drastic measures.
Re:Oh, gotta rant, gotta rant on this one... (Score:3, Informative)
FWIW, his firm is Running Wolf [runningwolf.com] with an IP address of 66.216.120.156 which is owned by none other than... Rackspace.com. I don't think their bandwidth is quite so expensive.
Just do some research on this 'Sheriff'... (Score:3, Informative)
Needless to say, I am certain that one could find something searching goole, The Detroit News or Detroit Free Press and other Michigan, Detroit Area publications.
Re:Let's do some math here... (Score:4, Informative)
Dedicated T1 + 100G/month bandwidth plus colo/management fees: 1100/month in the Denver market. We ate up the bandwidth several times (lots of large file traffic) and even with overage charges we never went over $2000/month. 2000x33= 66000. So he's saying that his work on the site was worth $90,000/year? I don't think so. Not for one site, and a relatively small one at that.
Re:According to Alexa... (Score:2, Informative)
Alexa's statistics are generated/limited to the people who have that silly little Alexa toolbar installed on their system - and frankly, that is a very small segment of the population.
As a staff person for a website ranked in the top 300 of the world (by Nielsen//NetRatings), I can say that I'd never give much weight to any statistics that are based on Amazon's Alexa service.
Re:Let's do some math here... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Oh, gotta rant, gotta rant on this one... (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, that's 3.5 million users per month...
42 million per year
115.5 million for the lifetime of the site
Re:What's wrong with what he did? (Score:3, Informative)
Based on that, he CAN (although it's not professional) at a later date say, "Look, this is eating up my time and I feel I should be compensated for this." He *can* charge whatever he wants, too. If they don't like it, they can let him go and get someone else to host it (suing for the domain and site is different than accusing someone of "extortion" and throwing them in jail). Granted, the domain will belong to them since they are the Macomb Sherrif's department, but... what he did is NOT illegal by any means.
It's just as much their fault as it is HIS for not making a contract. His fault because, look, you don't have a contract, they aren't obligated to pay you a dime. It's their fault because
Re:Thankyou sir (Score:5, Informative)
They didn't pay, he shut down the site. Explain the part of that you consider "unreasonable", please?
Whether or not you consider the magnitude of his bill to the county as reasonable, it boils down simply to "he provided a service, sent a bill, bill went unpaid, he stopped providing the service". Nothing more than that.
Theft of service also breaks the law. Key difference, a private individual doesn't have the power to abuse to have people from the country government frivolously arrested.
Also, RTFA (in particular, the second link). He did not send them a bill for $300k... He said his total expenses came out to $300k (not unreasonable, if he actually worked something resembling full-time for 2-3 years... That alone gives $200k+ depending on the going rate in his area for a network admin). He didn't even attempt to recover any of his past expenses on the project. He merely requested they start paying for his services, and when they refused, he stopped providing the service.
If this counts as extortion, it sets a VERY dangerous precedent... A precedent that basically makes slavery legal, by making it a crime to stop performing a voluntary service.
On the bright side, assuming he doesn't end up in prison for a few years, he has a fairly good case for harassment, with monetary damages resulting. He could end up getting considerably more than his $300k (which, again, he did not actually try to bill the county for).
The domain is registered to someone in Virginia (Score:5, Informative)
Fountainhead Media (MACOMBSHERIFF-DOM)
19950 Denby
Portsmouth, VA 23708
US
Domain Name: MACOMBSHERIFF.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Stanley, Michael (36687838P)
fountainhead_463@hotmail.com
Fountainhead Media
19950 Denby
Portsmouth, VA 23708
US
999-999-9999
Re:Let's do some math here... (Score:3, Informative)
Note that as we're in the Styx, prices would be a bit higher.
AT&T (Tier 1) is costing us $698 per month for 2 year contract. Flat rate T1 (unmetered bandwidth) with AT&T providing the router (Cisco 2620) and managing it.
Sprint just started a sale in the same price range with a preconfigured but unmanaged 2620 thrown in.
Re:Let's do some math here... (Score:2, Informative)
500 kbits sustained bandwidth. At 3.5 million users per month (*HA*HA*HA*), that is 37 megs monthly of download per user. We'll pretend that the site was only used half of the time, that's 18.5 megs per user.
What was the guy hosting there? Videos of Rodney King? 18.5 megs is *PLENTY* of download per user.
Re:Oh, gotta rant, gotta rant on this one... (Score:2, Informative)
Who knows, you might inadvertantly save the life of his wife/girl friend or kids who were destined to be beaten or shot to death after he had a bad day.
Re:Oh, gotta rant, gotta rant on this one... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Thankyou sir (Score:5, Informative)
What are you talking about? if you either click on the link in the story, or go to msn.com, type "xfree86" in the box at the top, then click on search, you only get 1 result, which is porn and it warns you about.
If you go to any other search engine there is more than one result and it isnt this nightcrawler business. google has 2.4 million.
tellingly if you search on google for xfree86 nightsurf, you only get 28 results, none of which is the website that msn throws up.
Actually, the current sheriff's dad was the rapist (Score:2, Informative)
The webpage for the current sheriff at http://www.macomb-sheriff.com states that the sheriff is Mark A. Hackel.
Doing a search for William Hackel brings up an article at http://www.freep.com/news/locmac/sher27_20000727.
Re:Oh, gotta rant, gotta rant on this one... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Thankyou sir (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong. If I volunteer to do work for you for free, and then send you a bill for it, that is fraud and/or extortion.
Also, RTFA (in particular, the second link).
The second link is biased, because that's his own website. The first link (which goes to a somewhat unbiased newspaper) clearly says he asked for $300K.
Re:Oh, gotta rant, gotta rant on this one... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Oh, gotta rant, gotta rant on this one... (Score:3, Informative)
What exactly is Slashdot? (Score:3, Informative)
Well, that is true - but can you say that it gives Slashdot credibility? I guess it depends on what you define as Slashdot. I have noticed the phenomenon of which you speak more and more over the past year. It *almost* seems intentional at times. That would qualify as questionable journalism in my book, posting a misleading story just so your readers will hash out the details for you.
Think of it this way - *without* the faithful Slashdot readers, how good would Slashdot's journalism be?
Not RTFA... RBTFA (b for BOTH) (Score:5, Informative)
Regardless, with the domain name it's IP, a civil issue. It's parked, so the sheriff's office can do the WIPO cybersquatting claim, but, AFAIK and IANAL, it's not criminal.
Who owns the content? If the sheriff's department does, holding the content hostage may be illegal. But then again, there was a private towing company that illegally towed my car from a private lot where I had a legal right to park, and would not return it. They violated two sections of the vehicle code in the illegal tow, then had additional violations (actually flaunting some of them) in the operation of their impound lot. What did the cops say? "This is a civil matter. Pay the impound fees and then sue them."
The cops probably threw him in jail to try to intimidate him, which forced the DA's hand to prosecute, or perhaps it's collusion between the DA and the cops.
The facts will come out at trial. Both sides will tell their stories, a judge and 12 people too dumb to get out of jury duty will decide who is telling the truth, and regardless of the outcome, a civil suit will follow.
Welcome to America, where our courts, fine instruments of law, capable of incredible intricacy and precision in legal thought, are used to bludgeon people like a sledgehammer.
- Greg
Re:They got him dead to rights (Score:2, Informative)
bullshit. piss him off all you like, just don't break the law. i'm not having any of this walking on eggshells around police bullshit. quite a few of my friends are police officers and some of my family members are officers. police are 1) servants of the people and 2) bound to uphold the law.
more simply put...if they fuck with you because they don't like you or you have made them angry without breaking the law, then THEY have broken the law and THEY get to go sit in a cell for a while and think things over. that's the whole godsdamn point of the legal system in our country. NOBODY is above the law...we ALL watch the watchers. to do it any other way would undermine what this country is about.
that having been said, if you read the site (not the article) it appears he may not have tried to collect upon previous monies owed. it looks like he merely told them he would need payment for the future as he could not offset the costs out of his own pocket, using the $300k as an example of the kinds of costs he was talking about. the department refused to pay, thus he had to shut the site down. to which the department responded by arresting him, a gross misuse of the power and trust placed in their hands.
this having all been said i conditionally hope for the following:
1) if he really did ask for $300k in back payment, he needs some time in a small grey cell to think it over.
or
2) if he didn't, and merely asked for payment in the future to offset the costs of running the site. the sherrif and/or whomever made the decision to have him arrested, and possibly the officers who arrested him, should be dismissed and be brought up on charges of wrongful arrest and whatever else they can tack onto 'em.
Re:Thankyou sir (Score:4, Informative)
What we have learned is, when you are setting up a sweetheart deal with the local sheriff's office, and you bill them an outrageous amount, pocket half and give the other half to the sheriff, make sure you have some sort of evidence on hand to use against the sheriff if people start noticing, so you can say "he made me do it! ".
Good Old Boy Politics 101, learned in CLarksville, TN "The Crime and Corruption capital of Tennessee".
not a good comparison (Score:1, Informative)
Have any of you actually read the *facts* ? (Score:3, Informative)
I pay 1.55 a month (Score:1, Informative)
A more unbiased article (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Let's do some math here... (Score:3, Informative)
You're also paying way too much, btw...I pay about a fifth of that for the same deal, though I have a MUCH smaller scale co-loc.
The company I used to work with had a deal that was around $50,000 per month. This was not for an amount of bytes per month (a useless metric, in fact when I asked the IT guy about it he laugh at me and said, "multiply our constant throughput by 250, it's that many gig"), but a number of megabits per second. This was important, because when you have 20 or 30 servers getting constant incoming requests, you have to be sure each of them can send data at a good enough rate. 20 servers on a t1 line, most you can serve is 10 kB/s, or about 5 seconds per page per server. So you pay for the per second line, knowing full well that you'll only fill up the pipe during "rush hour." For that price, you also get ridiculously redundant power, hands on, halon systems and all sorts of cool security features that make your shareholders feel good.
If this guy had a similar deal...say, he rented part of a cage, included the sheriff's server in the cage for free, and had everybody else LEAVE the cage, then it's entirely possible that he spent $300,000 hosting it. With my old company's setup, it only would have taken 6 months.
Does this mean that the $300,000 isn't overkill for the sheriff's site? No, of course it is. But it's entirely conceivable that HIS cost to host it was very, very high.
Re:Thankyou sir (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Thankyou sir (Score:3, Informative)
"Do You Have A License For Those Facts?" (my debunking and I'm a certified IP wonk).
And how, pray tell, does one get "certified" as an "IP wonk"? That article was not wrong, and in fact it was relatively on the money.
You're completely overlooking a few provisions of the bill. Mainly Sections 5(A) and 5(C)
For an example of how rules this like this have already gone awry, read about this case [ladas.com] over in the UK. In short, a horseracing agency licensed its database of races, start times, horses involved, etc, for use in casino-type betting agencies. William Hill, Ltd, the gambling company, also placed race times, horses, and odds on its website. The EU court ruled that placing even this amount of information on the web was an "unlicensed" use of a subsection of the database.
So, Mr. "IP Wonk", please explain why that won't happen here, given the two clauses above. There are a lot of horse races -- one might even say a "large" number of races -- and the "database" of race times and horses involved is a subset of the larger database of all horse-racing data.
"Your Honor, we conceed that the defendants might have looked /somewhere/ else to get race times, but they had access to race times from us through our database license, which did not allow them to post those facts^W^Wthat database on their website. They /stole/ our property."
And given this country's tendency to "litigate first, and let the court sort it out", plus the courts' willingness to bend over backwards to punish those "pirates", how long before another SCO shows up claiming that the database of error names, numbers, and description strings is theirs? Even Nimmer and Jane Ginsburg, both staunch pro-IP, pro-DMCA lawyers have stated that a database protection bill is unnecessary [pdf] [copyright.gov].
Of course, I might be wrong. I don't have my "IP wonk" degree yet.
-jdm
Re:Oh, gotta rant, gotta rant on this one... (Score:3, Informative)
On the topic of ownership, using the example above, do you own my van? Hell no again. Now we're all assuming this guy bought the domain himself and paid all the renewal fees. We're all assuming he never received any compensation for the website of *any* sort. This guy is a former reserve deputy. Was he given any sort of time off from his reserve duties for maintaining this site? etc... From the single fairly unbiased article we have to work with, it sounds like this guy is in the right. The other site is run by the defendant so we sure as hell can't trust what it says. Maybe we'll get more facts in the weeks to come. It does sound like the guy is in the right.
Re:What's wrong with what he did? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Thankyou sir (Score:2, Informative)
Fox is not American. They were Aussie-owned, last I checked...
Just wanted to remind everyone of that, in the interest of accuracy
Re:Thankyou sir (Score:1, Informative)
My opinion is that if this schmoo was genuinely doing this good will to begin with, then once the cost became too high, he should have offerred to sell the server, or at least the data and the domain name to the sheriffs department for a reasonable price. The domain should be worth approximately $10 in current market times. The server should cost approximately $500 to be able to handle a sheriff departments web site. Another $2000-$5000 to assist in transferring it over and setting it up. There's a well deserved profit for him.
Re:Thankyou sir (Score:2, Informative)
I think that in itself raises a dispute. I've heard that there needs to be some form of payment from both sides in a contract. If I offer to give something away, then you cannot hold me to that. If I offer to sell something, and you give me the payment, then you can. So, there's a question as to whether the sherrif's office "paid" the guy to produce the website, by allowing him to use it for publicity.
But whatever the case, I think an arrest and criminal charge is totally disproportionate. To be charged as a criminal, I feel it should be pretty much indusputable that what the guy has done is clearly a criminal act.