QUESTION
Who does a website content/concept/name belong to?
Asked on Jun 06th, 2011 on Intellectual Property - Alabama
More details to this question:
A friend of mine was given a website by its creator. Unfortunately she took other persons to help her with the website, its promotion and a message board affilatied to it and one of them a week after being removed from this organization decided to make the website "his" as he was in charge of registering domain and url who then were registered to his name and prevent those who had removed it access to it.
It seems to me, that no matter who the domain and hosting are registered to, my friend is the legal owner of the site's content (she did most of the work on it), concept and name. I mean she might have to reload the full site on new domain and hosting, though the others were paid with her organization's funds (unfortunately no legal statuses for this organization), but it gives no rights to the other person to keep on using/updating the website as it is on the other hosting and url nor its name and impersonate this organization? Are there any legal procedures possible? Thanks!
1 ANSWER
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Nancy J. Flint Attorney at Law, P.A.
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The situation as you set it out is complicated, and unfortunately happens too often when people have creative works made for them. If you have someone create something for you, if you want to own the rights in it you must have a written agreement or else the creator must have created it as your employee. First, did your friend have a written agreement from every creator that he/she would own the rights in the website? If not, then your friend only had a license to use the creation and can't stop any of the creators from doing anything they want with the work they did. Given the complexity of the facts you state, you would have to sit down with someone well versed in intellectual property to go over this because they almost certainly will need to ask additional questions.
Answered on Apr 07th, 2012 at 2:14 PM