zlacker

They said I was not allowed to ever host the falsely claimed content on Heroku ever again. They said that I should pursue external avenues for disputing the claim. I took my site off Heroku and kept it offline because of the implicit threats of lawsuits from my previous employer. The site was my online portfolio of work and experience I was using for job hunting. However, my Heroku account was also used to host my profit-generating website/business, and instead of taking down only my portfolio site, they took down every site on my account. My account was completely disabled and I wasn't able to even remove the specific site and put my other ones back online, which is why I had to call them to re-enable it, but only after they treated me like shit and like I was murdering babies even though I told them the DMCA claim was malicious.

I did not mention the former employer or any of their projects/clients by their names and did not include any images of those projects that were protected by any copyright that they held. It was screenshots of the website functionality after I had removed all original styling and revamped it myself (on my own time on my own machine using only publicly available HTML/CSS) from the ground up to anonymize it. All branding and images were removed and replaced. These revamps were never publicly released and were only used to create screenshots to display their functionality. They claimed copyright ownership of the images that I took, on my own computer, that had zero resemblance to their own software except for the workflows that they had. These were all public facing sites and there was no internal/proprietary workflow information being shown. The work being displayed was 100% my own creation during my employment, and I was not claiming any credit for work that wasn't done by me.

I did not bother disputing the fraudulent DMCA claim because my former employer that did it was extremely litigious and loved lawsuits and loved making them as long and expensive as possible to punish the people they were trying to bully into submission. The owner would frequently boast in the (open concept) office about all his lawsuits and how he was forcing people to comply to his demands with the threat of ruining them financially with lawsuits.

It did have an impact on my ability to find new employment, but I found employment anyway. I just made a PDF version of my website (well laid out) and send that with my cover letter.

>>beeboo+(OP)
Christ, that's absolutely awful. Sounds like leaving was a good decision though, I wouldn't want to work anywhere that toxic.