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.