Website with a DMCA Takedown

Summary

This is the second article of work horror stories on dealing with clients and workplaces. You can find the first one here This article revolves around Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I am not fully sure what it entails, but you should read up some info on its position and criticisms. Some time ago, I was on track in working with a client on their old PHP website. Someone developed it, but it wasn’t fully polished. There were a few forms, a few issues with it and some text changes, I was brought on to finish the work and hand it over to an offshore SEO company in India. Easy enough! I got a grip on the requirements, discussed it with clients, they never mentioned anything about who developed or how. It was hosted on name.com. I started one night, woke up next day to a call from the client, saying the website is down, and they got an email. Well, it wasn’t my fault, I didn’t do any drastic changes to break production. That’s where it all begin, they got a notice for a DMCA takedown and only the nameserver is disabled as the hosting service investigate the issue. Hosting and domain access are still present. They wanted the site up and running as soon as possible. A grey animated person who is the angry actual dev who sent the DMCA takedown to the hosting So, I moved the nameserver to Cloudflare free tier temporarily and pointed it to the hosting IP address. We were back on ! The client was happy but came around with a new problem. The developer who actually created the website was the one who gave the notice of DMCA saying he was owed more money but was not given the final payment. The client claims he paid them in full and asked for more money they agreed upon. I haven’t heard from the actual dev, so was wary. That was not the end of the story tho, the actual dev found out and sent the same notice to Cloudflare which forwarded it to the hosting service. The client explained that the dev was alright and professional, but as end came closer, he would go out of contact...