At What Point Does Your Work Belong to the Client?

I have been working on a project as a contractor to another small web design firm for the past 9 months to get a large (250page) website designed, coded and content loaded (turnkey). It was all loaded by hand as we went from single pages as the source to the Joomla CMS.

Why did it take 9 months? Because it's a large agency and getting approvals was like pulling teeth. We would literally go 3 or 4 months in a holding pattern while so-in-so spoke to so-in-so and on and on.

We showed them a design mockup about 3 months into the development and it was just a background image with a small flash file used as an image rotator. But the design was pretty much locked in at that point except for a few layout changes to the side modules. We finally got an approval and I started coding.

I actually created the development site using Joomla 1.5 in July of 2009 and finished the template and 165 pages of the content in January of 2010. It's sitting on my server with a link given to the client for final 'tweaks' and to find out who was finishing the content as the decision had never been handed down when we asked several months back. Basically I went about 50 hours over the original budget, and never asked them to pay me for it. But I couldn't just keep giving my time away for free and we had not written all the content loading into the original agreement, so this was extra.

I took this job DIRT cheap in hopes of having a flagship site in my portolio to show other agencies in this specific niche in the future. I even purchased a new domain that is niche focused with full intent to pursue it as a partnership with the person who landed this job.

Enough front story, here's the kicker... basically they copied our work. Since giving them the link 2 weeks ago, their in house IT department decided to take my design and 'incorporate' it into their site without our knowledge. It's not hexadecimal color coded perfect... and there's only 10 pages or so done to this point, but it's the same header/logo/image rotator/3 column design and layout I created over 6 months ago. Hell it's even got a few logos I created from scratch thrown in for good measure. But it looks like shit, like a 1990 version of my work.

Their copy is live on the internet. And while I have been paid a good portion to date by my partner in this, they have not paid the design firm yet. Supposedly a check is ready, they just haven't had time to get it out yet.

Either way, this design is my own personal work. The code is my work; 9 months of work. Nothing has been turned over to the end client yet, nor does the partnering design firm have a copy of the dev site. I hold it 100% in my possession. But their current live site looks 80% like my 'new' version.

When questioned on it today, they backpedaled and said "don't worry, you will get paid for it." Great, but this doesn't help with the fact that we did the work at a seriously reduced rate on the understanding this would be a great site to add to our portfolio. And since the final work has not been turned over to them yet, they pretty much just took the design and tried to implement it themselves.

This is clearly a bad situation any way I look at it... so the question is, have you ever had your work copied by a client during the development process? If so, what did you do?