Emotionally gratifying, but poison pills or deleting a site/repo is just a fast way to a lawsuit or a complaint with the local district attorney if they're feeling vindictive. It wouldn't take much to argue that such actions fall under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act or various state equivalents, for instance.
You're always better off having your attorney send a letter threatening legal action for nonpayment and breach of contract rather than trying to force them through those sorts of methods. The client might be willing to screw over a solo freelancer because there's limited risk to them; worst case, they pay up after all and you go away. But if their other suppliers hear about such actions, there's always the possibility that those suppliers might change their payment terms in response to the perceived risk of bad behavior on the part of the client. Those changes could cause a lot of problems with cashflow operations, and most companies will go out of their way to avoid that sort of reputation loss.
"You're always better off having your attorney send a letter..."
If you think most freelancers have an attorney to send letters on their behalf, you have only seen a very small, very privileged minority of freelancers. Many don't even have health insurance, let alone an attorney to help with non-paying clients.
The $1250 I spent once to have a business attorney draft up a template for my services agreement is the best $1250 I ever spent in the past 7 years. That $1250 makes me money, because I never have to harass clients to get paid, because they know I have legal recourse if they don't.
Since then I've maybe paid him $1000 to deal with things clients wanted to redline in my service agreement.
That $2250 total (which is a legitimate business expense) is a pittance compared to what I would lose for a single unpaid invoice.
Meanwhile, I always hear from freelancers that don't get paid, but claim lawyers are "too expensive". You know what's really expensive? Getting $0 for the last N days you worked instead of $X. $X is a hell of a lot more money, and unless you have a contract in place, you expose yourself to that possibility every time you engage with a client.
I've already seen that video. What does it have to do with the fact that many, many freelancers don't have $1250 to spend?
Good for you. It's great that $2250 is a pittance compared to a single invoice you send. You sound like you're easily in the top 10% of the US in terms of your income. That's commendable. You were probably in fine shape without this law, but by any ethical measure the law still needs to protect those who can't afford to have lawyers send letters to their clients. Starting from the base assumption that everyone in a fluid economy has four figures to put down on legal when they first start freelancing in a new field just isn't a reasonable assumption... especially when the 41% of US adults have less than $500 in personal savings and millennials are also crushed by student debt.
> What does ["Fuck You, Pay Me" talk] have to do with the fact that many, many freelancers don't have $1250 to spend?
Then they are not in a position to conduct freelancing and they risk starving
and/or getting homeless.
A freelancer usually cannot assume stable 40 hours per week for four weeks per
month. He/she has to have a money buffer that allows to live for weeks
without additional income. $1250 is not an expense too big to be covered by
this buffer.
As you may or may not be aware, decreasing rates of labor participation in the US have pushed many who cannot secure full-time work to seek freelancing gigs in order to avoid starving and/or homelessness.
Saying "they are not in a position to conduct freelancing" doesn't make the problem go away. If it did, US construction, fruit picking, home cleaning and other manual labor industries could be reorganized with a single utterance.
If you read the article, you'll see there are 55 million Americans freelancing. Surely you don't think all of those people are highly paid designers or engineers like those visiting Rackspace in the video! Yes, a few fit that demographic, but it's a small group.
On the whole, freelancers are more likely to be drivers or home cleaners than tech workers.
Would not it be cheaper to find a sample agreement on the Internet? While it might have some faults it is still a legal document that might be used to scare the client.
First, you're not looking to scare a client, you're looking to clearly define the terms of the engagement. If you were hiring your client, dollars to donuts they would be giving you a contract of their terms to sign.
Second, a business attorney is not doing a custom one-off for you. When you call around, you should be asking if they often work with freelance technology consultants -- that's who you want to hire, someone who is familiar with what your needs are, and what's reasonable to ask of a client. They have a baseline template that they've developed that will serve as the framework for what will be modified for your specific needs. They've likely had cases where the business relationship between the consultant and a client went south, so based on that experience (and well known cases, etc.) they're going to ensure that you -- and your client, as contracts are a two-way street -- are sufficiently protected if things were to go awry.
Here's how it worked for me on my initial (free) consultation with the attorney I ended up choosing. I showed up for the appointment. He asked about minutiae of the work I do (since a lot of his clients are freelance contractors that work in tech). He asked if there was anything that was important to me. He then gave me the template (that he developed) that he starts with as a baseline when creating a service agreement. He went over why some terms were there, and why they were worded as such. We talked about what we would add to meet my needs, we talked about what I'd like to modify (too constraining for clients, unnecessary terms, etc.). We shot the breeze for a few minutes, and that was it.
Three days later I get a draft in my inbox. We had a quick phone call, made a few tweaks because I felt a few things would never apply to my company, and that was that. The result is a straightforward six-page document that a sixth grader could understand -- something that my clients really appreciate, because their legal dept. looks it over and finds it completely reasonable.
A template is a good way to cut down on how much time your attorney spends drafting your services agreement but it in no way substitutes for legal review. "Scaring the client" is not the game. Securing a higher class of client is the game. Having a defensible contract that you know forward and back, along with an attorney to consult if the client breaches it, is the goal.
I don't disagree. But a demand letter is fairly simple: it lays out a short, non-emotional overview of the situation, notes the specific resolution demanded, and specifies the alternative should they not take action. You can write a demand letter yourself, and there are literally countless examples for payment disputes available with a quick search.
You can write the letter yourself, and have an attorney review it and send it out from their office. Even a long letter won't take more than an hour's worth of work for the attorney (probably a lot less than that, to be honest), and a local solo practitioner is more than capable of handling it for very little money and without a retainer agreement.
Most of the time, just receiving a demand letter over something as simple as payment for services rendered is going to be enough to get them to pay you. And if there's a particular person at the company withholding payment (i.e., maybe it's some mid-level executive who was told to handle a project), a demand letter will wind up being sent straight to their legal department, counsel, or someone else such matters are assigned to. The letter, in effect, can often serve to bypass the logjam.
ask friends / family, often you are connected to a lawyer closer than you thought.
If you still don't have a free/cheap resource then start CCing your lawyer on emails. Eg. 'I am writing to provide notice that you are now 60 days overdue on invoice X (attached). As you have refused to pay the invoice under the terms of our contract (attached). I am copying my lawyer on this email to bring this matter to their attention.
Edit: and also make sure your contract spells out what happens for nonpayment.
Not really. Every piece of shrinkwrap software comes with a timer that kills itself when it isn't registered in time.
In some cases, it'll even uninstall itself or its core 'premium' components. In others, it'll simply stop displaying information and ask for payment.
Obviously, you couldn't do such a thing if you're a web designer... but if you're a developer, writing a plugin for their CMS or the such, then including a security file in your codebase is a-okay.
And if they call it "work for hire" and attempt to sue you, remind everyone that if you aren't paid then you aren't hired... as per your contract.
It's different when the customer knows about the timer and agrees to it somewhere in the EULA. It's when you hide that security file, or go back in and do something, that you're stepping into a whole new pile of shit.
A lot of PHP software (forum software like vBulletin, CMS's, etc.) have phone-home or license verification mechanisms. That's usually fine, unless you whip up something nasty that does something beyond just disabling the software in question.
You're always better off having your attorney send a letter threatening legal action for nonpayment and breach of contract rather than trying to force them through those sorts of methods. The client might be willing to screw over a solo freelancer because there's limited risk to them; worst case, they pay up after all and you go away. But if their other suppliers hear about such actions, there's always the possibility that those suppliers might change their payment terms in response to the perceived risk of bad behavior on the part of the client. Those changes could cause a lot of problems with cashflow operations, and most companies will go out of their way to avoid that sort of reputation loss.