calling the legal advice team
I have recently been informed that “there is no legal ground (that I am aware of) on which you can stand with your payment requests.”
so, while i appreciate the votes of support and sincere thoughts from kynn, richard, matthew, kriselda, geekman, amy, pieter, chris and others, who have shared their thoughts in backchannels…. now i have a bit of a crisis for this theory of imposing cost on blogspammers.
my service provider received a complaint about my thank-you note and payment request to a spammer, and as a result, i’ve been asked to stop emailing people requesting payment, with the above justification.
so, i’m calling any lawyers within eye-shot of this post – help me craft functional, legal, and binding commercial applications license terms.
i think there are grounds here. i’m providing a service (hosting, storage, bandwidth, professional editorial review, and a prominent posting place), and in return demanding a fee. there should be a nice, simple way to explain that i expect payment for the services provided. i think there is probably a solid precedent for collecting fees for services.
i knew this was a quick hack, and full of holes, but i guess it’s time to get serious. if one complaint from a spammer is enough to shut down this experiment, the spammers have already won. ladies and gentlemen, pack up your blogs and go home.