Morning people,

I have a database at work that was brought in about 5 years ago at an annual cost of £5,500, however for this money they did not help in maintaning the information which they said they would help with.

January this year we cancelled the subscription and have continued using the information, however just recieved a call stating that a seed has been mailed on the 1 April 08, and they want .49p for each company mailed on this list which contains alot of records.

I currently have the list to sort through, and I want to find this seed, is there any usual tricks IT companies use or specific giveaways I should look for on the list.

 

Clever fuckers, they've got you done up like a kipper!

 

and it is going to cost a fortune!!!!!

 

Well thats what happens when you steal someone's information from them and expect to get away with it.

 

been there, done that, got the invoice

 

stealing, its cost 25k over the last 5yrs!

 

and now youve stopped paying it it's gonna cost you even more

 

Its cost 27,500 actually, which is obviously the going rate for that particular data.

In their terms and conditions it will state that continued use of the addresses without paying the annual fee, will be subject to a fee of 49p per address per time used.

You chose to go for the more expensive option (thats the choice you made by default when you stopped paying the money) and now as a result you are upset you have to pay the money?

If I were you, Id be making a VERY polite call to their salesman, explaining it was an administrative error in your company that prevented renewal crossed wires internally led the person in your purchasing department to cancel the wrong contract or whatever, and can you pretty please pay the 5,500 annual fee retrospectively and continue your subscription where you left off.


Failing that, its got NOTHING to do with "IT geeks" or "database help" that you will need, its a bloody good lawyer.

 

I'd agree that if you are continuing to use their database you should pay, either as a flat rate or on a pay-as-you-go basis.

However, IF you found the original data, entered it onto the database and maintained it I'd reckon the data in the database is yours, so I'd suggest that you copy the data into your own database, even Excel or Access for now and tell them to fuck off!

BUT, if they did any or all of that for you, you need to pay them.

 

The problem with that, is you would have to justify in court why you have THEIR seed in "YOUR" database!

 

For £5500 I'll manually retype each record so there is no seed!!!

 

Eh?
Have you any concept of what a seed is in this context?

No, I thought not, so please accept you are bringing NOTHING to this discussion at all

 

You're right I know nothing about seeds.

So I'll piss off now....

Maybe you would like to share the knowledge?

 

the 'seed' will be an email address on the list, you will never find it

 

LOL

Basically the seed in this context, is a planted address, that they have put in there which isnt a real company.

So if anything arrives at that address with that name on it, they KNOW you have stolen their data, as those details dont exist anywhere else but in their database.

 

OK, so I've never managed a Database from an IT point of view but I have been involved in datacleansing at individual contact level for a couple of national organisations, so how hard is it to get your team to go through records and flag the ones that are known, then research the unidentified?

 

Done Up Like A Kipper
owned good and propper

 

well im making assumptions about the volumes of addresses here (ie im thinking there arent 12, lol), and we also dont yet know for certain if it was
email addresses
email addresses and snail mail address

But I would imagine that you are looking at a LOT more money than the 5500 quid, to get each email address or address "checked out" after all, at even only 10 quid an hour, 49p doesnt buy you much time per address to somehow investigate it!

 

Cheers for the reply lads, and I can see the error of our ways, but to clean a few things up...

1) The seed has been caught out by snail mail, which went out on the 1st April, a total of 4,400 records was mailed.

2) The record stems from a list that was brought by the company back in 2003, in this year some idiot added it to the company DB without checking that the information was correct.

So we now have a DB of 18,500 records and a seed is in amongst this lot.

I beleive chip is right, they have us by the balls and the best thing to do is pay the subscription again.