"Why not just remove your code from the site until they pay you?"
I thought about that, but one has to be very careful about that, or one stumbles into illegal territory.
Also, it is complicated, there were several programmers working on the site, and none of us owned any portion of the code, by which I mean: each programmer was free to edit any portion of the code (which is an awful idea - the code quality was terrible because no one had any sense of ownership over the code).
I signed an agreement with MyBailiwick (Miles Spencer and Todd Carter) which said I owed the copyright on my work until I was paid, so in theory I still own some partial copyright, but my code is mixed in with the code of every other programmer, so it would be tough to enforce my copyright without tripping over someone else's code, which might in fact have been paid for.
More so, I was paid for the first 2 months of work I did for them, it was only the last 6 weeks that I was never paid for. So even among my code, it would tough to say which parts I was paid for and which parts I was not paid for.
The way to get around this if you absolutely want to be able to disable a clients site for none payment is to have the code call out to an authorization server that you control. In which case you can shut down authorization on your own system for non-payment. This is akin to a dongle and is legal.
In saying that upon payment it is a good idea to have a routine that kills the check to your server as an authorization check that fails in production could shoulder you with a good deal of liability.
"Why not just remove your code from the site until they pay you?"
I thought about that, but one has to be very careful about that, or one stumbles into illegal territory.
Also, it is complicated, there were several programmers working on the site, and none of us owned any portion of the code, by which I mean: each programmer was free to edit any portion of the code (which is an awful idea - the code quality was terrible because no one had any sense of ownership over the code).
I signed an agreement with MyBailiwick (Miles Spencer and Todd Carter) which said I owed the copyright on my work until I was paid, so in theory I still own some partial copyright, but my code is mixed in with the code of every other programmer, so it would be tough to enforce my copyright without tripping over someone else's code, which might in fact have been paid for.
More so, I was paid for the first 2 months of work I did for them, it was only the last 6 weeks that I was never paid for. So even among my code, it would tough to say which parts I was paid for and which parts I was not paid for.