what right do you think your client has for his site?

A debate I unfortunately got myself into prompted me to write this article.
Love to hear what you guys think about this issue when it comes to your client’s website.
My impression is that web designers from US and Canada are more obsses with retaining full right, but what do I know, the list I belong to aren’t so too members from other countries.

http://lotusfromthemud.com/What-right-do-your-client-has-for-his-website.html

I have heard this argument over and over. The way I feel about it is that if the client pays for it it is basically theirs. What they can’t do is sell it or use it for something else. If they want to do that then they need to purchase the resell rights. The catch is that unless you are policing the web, chances are that you will never know if it is sold or reused. It is a matter of good faith in most cases, but a nice contract is always a good idea.

I am surprised that the people that are overly zealous about their ownership get many clients, I sure would not hire someone to design me a site and need to ask them permission to make changes. Imagine hiring a contractor to add an extra room to your home, and then having to ask permission to change the color of the walls.

What right do your client has for his website?

There are a few grammar problems in the text starting with the title. It should be "What rights does your client have for his website?" or "What rights do your clients have for their websites?"

Thanks for the grammar correction
100 more articles and 100 more corrections, I am sure my English can finally improved .

Totally agree with you, I wouldn’t hire anyone who wanted the full rights for a site I paid him to design and asks for more money when I no longer needed his service. As a matter of fact, this is the very reason I got myself into web design. I have print design background, and used to think web designers are really really talented people; in the early year of internet, I learned a bit of HTML but that was as far as I could reached.

About 4 years ago I wanted a website for my business, the web designers I talked to wanted a simple brochure site (my own design) for $$$$, and said that the html source code belongs to them, so if one day I want to part, I need to pay extra. I was rather new living in the US, it was almost a culture shock to learn it.

Ended up I invested a copy of Dreamweaver, built the site myself. From then on, a new world opened up to me... then I learned the CSS, the web standards, made a few sites for friends and relative, free of charge. One day I realized I can actually offer web design services myself, and able to tell my client that, you pay me for the work, therefor you owned everything of your site, except that you can’t use my design to populate templates for profit.

Quote from: dev_cw at Oct 20, 2007, 06:26 PM

What they can’t do is sell it or use it for something else. If they want to do that then they need to purchase the resell rights.

Er...what country do you live in that this exists?

In the US at least, if you produce work as a contractor, it’s considered to be, in legal terms, "work for hire".  See more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire. So unless you have some crazy ass contract that your customer agrees to, then the customer owns the work you produced. What’s more they can do what they want with it since they own it.

So if your customer commissions you to design a site, and then turns around and sells it for 10x the dollar amount to another customer, you know what recourse you have? Zilch. Welcome to the world of working as a contractor

Quote from: vbrilon at Oct 20, 2007, 07:51 PM

Quote from: dev_cw at Oct 20, 2007, 06:26 PM

What they can’t do is sell it or use it for something else. If they want to do that then they need to purchase the resell rights.

Er...what country do you live in that this exists?

In the US at least, if you produce work as a contractor, it’s considered to be, in legal terms, "work for hire".

You see, that is the problem, seven out of ten US web designers I encounter, believe that their work are not ’work for hire’ because they are not employed by their clients. Quite many of them able to make their clients agreed to their terms. This is just plain wrong and fundamentally unethical to me.

Quote from: chinesedream at Oct 20, 2007, 08:07 PM

This is just plain wrong and fundamentally unethical to me.

Couldn’t have said it better myself

There has never been a question in my mind that ownership of the work should go to the client. So much so that it’s explicitely stated in my contracts that I tranfer all elements of design to them. It’s one of the many pitches I have, since lots of webdesign agency in France retain ownership of the design they make for client

It’s "old business", there is no room for this in a modern economy, in my opinion.

How do they (those who zealously cling to ownership) justify it ? What are the frontiers ? I mean, more probably than not the design techniques they’re using have been "created" by another designer. Like many of us, designers are inspired by best practices, elegant techniques from their fellow designers... Ownership is really fuzzy here and everyone played it this way, this could go pretty far

in design world the design is property of the client but only the finished product not the open files like psd or indesign documents. the pdf produced by the software is.

with web design its the same no psd’s are given to the client, the client pays for a website not for a psd so all generated and used images etc that are directly used in the site are owned bij the client , its made for him.

dimmy

Good point Dimmy indeed you don’t provide the "source material" which would make it re-usable by another designer with little or no work...

How about .fla files for flash sites? A flash site is useless (in terms of upgrades, modifications etc..) without the .fla file.

In the US at least, if you produce work as a contractor, it’s considered to be, in legal terms, "work for hire".

Work for hire can also have terms according to a contract, not all work for hire is the same. I simply add a clause in the contract/proposal that states that they cannot resell the product. Since most clients do not have that intention at all this is never a problem. If someone has this intention we just work it out, it is a formality and we discuss some guidelines regarding credits or whatever and come to an agreement. Very simple.

According the wikipedia post...there must be a written agreement in advance between the parties specifying that the work is a work made for hire:

If a work is created by an independent contractor or freelancer (that is, someone who is not an employee), the work can be created as a work made for hire, or not. In order for it to be a work made for hire, all of the following conditions are required: i) the work must be specially ordered or commissioned; ii) the work must come within one of the nine categories of works listed in the definition above; and iii) there must be a written agreement in advance between the parties specifying that the work is a work made for hire.

I think that the question is if you are hired or contracted, in my case it is contracted.

This sums it up well:

The determination of whether a particular work is a work made for hire can be crucial to the hiring party’s ability to utilize the created work. If a work is considered a work made for hire, the author and owner of the work is the hiring party. If the work is not a work made for hire, the hiring party has no copyright ownership in the work, and its ability to use the work would therefore depend either on the specific terms of its agreement with the author, or upon the concept of an implied license to use the work. If forced to rely on an implied license, the hiring party may find that it has only limited rights to alter, update, or transform the work for which it paid. For example, a motion picture feature may employ dozens of creators of copyrightable works (e.g. music scores, costumes, scripts, sets, sound effects), any one of which could limit use of the entire film by denying permission to copy their contribution; the producers avoid this scenario by hiring the creators as employees or as work-for-hire contractors.

So what you are saying is that a client can resell whatever work you do for them without letting you know first? So I can have custom design made for me, never let the designer know that my intentions are to resell it, and use it as a template and resell it 100 times? Legally the client may have this right (I don’t think they do) but this is 100% unethical and wrong. If your plan is to resell the work then make it be known to the designer ahead of time and let them know your intentions and reach an agreement. Otherwise don’t be surprised to find your designs plastered on template sites.