Maybe I'm making a large assumption here, but since you're doing web development you presumably have access to their site. Why not just remove your code from the site until they pay you?
You need to not do that unless you have it in your contract stipulating you can.
In my contracts, it states you will not use the work until we've received payment, and we will unhappily file DMCA takedowns against infringing users who've not paid for work done which isn't theirs yet but they aren't paying yet continue to use. (As we only transfer rights to the work upon final payment).
After a certain (long) period of no payments, we have a forfeiture clause, which removes all right of them to ever use the work without removing the debt for items already performed. This works considerably better than interest.
A TRO is a much cheaper thing to get than a small claims judgement.
For most clients, we additionally do not provide the source code for them until they've paid in full.
Right and you still cannot physically remove the site, you must go through the courts to have it removed. Please guys if you get into this situation do not remove the site, you are bring down a lot of trouble on yourself. I have seen too many people do this and get into a world of trouble, even though morally, I feel you are in your rights the law sees the entry into the companies system as unauthorized access. As such you can be brought up on a host of criminal charges. This is the worst thing that you can possibly do in a payment dispute!!
While that might be true, you cannot simply log into their server and delete your stuff. There are, however, legal routes you can take to get the stuff removed.
IANAL but this isn't as clear as that. A contractor can't come in and take out the new bathroom he installed because you didn't pay him, and I'm guessing similar protections apply to repossessing a website.
"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.
