Dentists sue ex-contractor for holding web domains hostage in biz fight

A group of pediatric dental practices in North Carolina have accused a longtime contractor of refusing to return control of several web domains after his contract was terminated. A dozen-plus dental practices operating under the NC Pediatric Dentistry (NCPD) brand - mostly owned by dentist Dr David Thome - sued [PDF] business …

[MachDiamond]

Not unusual

Several prominent hosting companies have sold people deals where the hosting company owns the domain name making it impossible for people to move to another host. I'm surprised that after years and years of there being the Web, businesses are still naive when it comes to IT ownership. Companies such as Square Space and GoDaddy will box people in by getting them to build web sites that rely on proprietary tools to create web sites that can't be transferred to another host. Yes, the tools are quite nice and many of the ready to go templates are very attractive and have many functions, but when the next year's renewal comes at 3x the price, you either have to pay up or spend time rebuilding your whole site someplace else.

It's all as legal as church on Sunday, so unless there is gross negligence or provable failure to uphold contractual terms, the dental group may be out of luck. Even if they can get some sort of relief, the domains might still wind up in the other company's possession. In the mean time, the sites going dark will mean people deleting their bookmarks and search engine de-listing.

[Michael Hoffmann]

Toothless?

You mean big, green-eyed, cat-like and cute as hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Stonepath Pedo"? Really?

Sounds like a pain, hopefully they can root out the truth and stop the bleeding.

[rcxb]

I can only come up with 3 possible meanings for "pedo"**:

* Relating to children

* Relating to soil

* Relating to flatulence

I can't see a dentist wanting to be associated with any of those three.

** I'm discounting words that happen to concat "ped" then an "o"-word (like "pedometer") because tacking just the "o" onto the "ped" is completely arbitrary and meaningless (i.e. what does "feet O" mean to you?), just as abbreviating torpedo as "pedo" would be.

[Ken Moorhouse]

and they owe him $400K

That's a lot of molar.

[Steve Kerr]

Re: and they owe him $400K

Certainly a lot to chew over.

[ecofeco]

It's either in a contract or it's not

Seems simple enough. There is either a contract for this or not.

Only the judge is going to know before we do.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It's either in a contract or it's not

You'd think so, but apparently not.

Apparently not bothering to do any of the work is not in itself a breach of contract, and neither is theft arbitrarily withholding a few thousand.

Anon because apparently I'm not supposed to name them.

[rcxb]

Re: It's either in a contract or it's not

Apparently not bothering to do any of the work is not in itself a breach of contract, and neither is theft

What you (obviously) *meant* the contract to say, might not be what it actually said. That's why wording in legal documents seems so awkward. And why people pay so much for a lawyer's time to write-up such contracts... to ensure there is no legal ambiguity one party can wriggle through and claim they were not obliged to (employee) do a non-trivial amount of work or (employer) submit payment after.