Client taking off the copyright

[Carole]

Is there anything I can do to get the copyright put back on a page I designed for a client? I designed a page for a "friend", got paid to do it, and now she has locked me out of her site and changed the copyright to her name and completly wiped my name off her pages. Her arguement is that she changed the graphics and some of the coloring therefore I don't own the copyright anymore. The base layout is exactly the same tho; she did not re-design the website.
I still have payment records, the orginal layout work, emails with her site's personal info forwarded by her own email, plus corrospondance bewteen us as we were building the site.
If I contact her host, can they make her put the copyright back on or delete the site, or is she actually in the right?
I just want to be credited for my work or have her change the whole page.

- Carole

[Jason]

Hi Carole,

Sounds like quite a jam. As far as having a host edit the site, I've never heard of such a thing being done. If the person is paying for hosting, then I'd imagine the host would take the word of a paying member, however if it is a free host, they might terminate the account if they think one of their members is hosting stolen content.

As far as your copyright notice, you are correct, they do not have permission to remove it. Every web software or script you purchase has notice within it which says that you may modify the program, but you must still leave the copyright notice. In the future, I would suggest using this notice yourself, so as not to hit an area that the client considers to be a "gray" spot.

As far as your friend goes, I would not keep contact with somebody that would rip you off in such a way, doesn't seem very friendly to me. Besides asking her, the only thing you can really do is pursue judgment to get the copyright notice back on, or sue her to pay for the copyright breach, since she only purchased a license to use it, and not the copyrights (which you might want to remind her of). If you don't have the time or money to do this, then you may just have to take this as a "lesson" so to speak, and clearly establish the rules of your work before selling a license to it.

[cloud9]

:) This sort of thing happens to me all of the time, so now I watermark all of my images, I can tell you 10s of sites with my images on, but hey life goes on ;)


:D looking on the bright side


c9

[Android]

Originally posted by cloud9
:) This sort of thing happens to me all of the time, so now I watermark all of my images, I can tell you 10s of sites with my images on, but hey life goes on ;)
c9

Is your method a secret known only to you? I can see how one might alter an image at high resolution and keep it a secret. Personally, I use my own original artwork scanned in, and copyright the original art.