Legal Question

I have a quick question for all of you regarding a small legal issue.  We
just came across a new customer who wants us to host and take over the
maintenance of their site.  However, apparently they are having a disbute
with their current web master.

Here is the scenario:

about 2 years ago, my clients made a verbal agreement with this web master,
in which the web master would host and maintain the site for free in return
for referrals.  Apperently, they web master is not satisfied with the leads
sent his way, while leads have been sent he did not manage to follow through
on a lot of them.  Being unsatisfied with the leads, out of the blue he
decides to charge my customer $200 ever month from this point on.  My
clients do not want to pay the $200 because they feel it is the webmasters
fault that he made a bad deal.

Now, in the middle of all this my clients decided that they are better of
just going elsewhere, but the webmaster claims that he has proprietary
rights to the code, but my client owns the design of the site.

in such a case who owns what?  Our my cleints entitled to the basic HTML
code along with graphics?  Who is entitled to any back end scripting that
runs a database system? and so forth.

I would think that since the agreement was made, my cleints would own the
site, and that it was unfortunate that the webmaster didn't get as much out
of the agreement that he wanted.   but I could be wrong as I hav'nt the
slightest clue about web site legalities.

Does anyone have any comments or suggestions?

Thanks.



Nick

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