Chris123467
New Member
This is not really a copyright question, (and I'm sorry if it's in the wrong category)
I had developed very industry specific software, it's has a extremely small market but has the potential to be worth a lot of money. During the end stages of the development processes a close friend asked if he could show it around and get some opinions on the practical use of it and then ultimately become a salesman for the software. I gave him some of the uncompleted source code to show off (it's really a script so it I didn't compile into object form, I was going to use a byte assembler/encoder on it before the release). I didn't know this at the time but he had assumed that by helping me he would he would get some ownership/claim to the rights of software. Just before the sales launch the rights problem became very clear and I insisted that he sign a distribution agreement before he tried to sell it. At this point he threatened me with something to the effect of; "If I tried to sell any copies of the software without giving him some of the copyrights he would release the code to several retaliated community groups" If he does this the results would disastrous for the value product due to it's market size, I do believe the threat is real and it has stopped me from selling the software for now. My question is; Is treating me in this manor a form of extortion, blackmail or ___ (fill in the term here)___? More then a few people have verbally heard this same threat at different times.
I had developed very industry specific software, it's has a extremely small market but has the potential to be worth a lot of money. During the end stages of the development processes a close friend asked if he could show it around and get some opinions on the practical use of it and then ultimately become a salesman for the software. I gave him some of the uncompleted source code to show off (it's really a script so it I didn't compile into object form, I was going to use a byte assembler/encoder on it before the release). I didn't know this at the time but he had assumed that by helping me he would he would get some ownership/claim to the rights of software. Just before the sales launch the rights problem became very clear and I insisted that he sign a distribution agreement before he tried to sell it. At this point he threatened me with something to the effect of; "If I tried to sell any copies of the software without giving him some of the copyrights he would release the code to several retaliated community groups" If he does this the results would disastrous for the value product due to it's market size, I do believe the threat is real and it has stopped me from selling the software for now. My question is; Is treating me in this manor a form of extortion, blackmail or ___ (fill in the term here)___? More then a few people have verbally heard this same threat at different times.
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