Who owns the copyright on websites?

I built a website for a local non-profit organization and maintained it until recent. I was paided and gave them an extreme discount, because I built the site while in school and would impliment new techinques for no charge.

They decided to have a parent in the organization to handle the website now, since that would cost nothing. I have no problem with this, except the parent had copied a previous version of my entire site and is reposting it in a free forum as his own design.

I feel this is a copyright and intellectual property infringement, but I am finding conflicting information about ownership. Can someone clarify this for me? (Please let me know if you are involved in legal or where your answer is based from)

Simple solution, grab a tire iron, and have a "friendly" talk with that parent.

I had a similar situation, but I am a professional. I did a non-oprofit for cheap, and after about 18 months they decided to replace it. Fine, I don't care, since they weren't paying me for all the support calls, good riddance.

As for copyright of the web site itself, the legal term for it waws "work for hire" unless you had a contract stating otherwise. I had a contract, but it did state it was a work for hire explicitly.

"work for hire" means THEY own the resulting intellectual property, including the design and the copyright, and frankly any in-between work materials that may have been created.

As for the reposting of the design, is there really anything special or unique about the design itself?

Designs are not copyrighted, but actual instances of them are. Honestly, there are really few ways to express a typical web site design that rise to the level of originality (as opposed to being a "derivative work") these days. And copyright of "derivative works" rests in the original author, not the most recent one. so that means the guy may be reposting copyrighted works form the organization, but not you. It is the organization's task to do something about it if they care.

Now, if you created a unique logo, or something like that, the site MIGHT be willing to re-assign copyright back to you for those elements, and then you could talk to the guy with a grounded case.

But for now? Lesson learned I hope, and if you want to keep intellectual property of your work, you need to have all the legal dots in a row (and I have only mentioned some of them here)