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So you think onemine.com, and not NYC Fresh Market, has IP rights to nycfreshmarket.com and its website contents, simply because onemine.com was hired as a contract designer?

I would LOVE to see a legal precedent for this claim.

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Given the petulant tone of your response, I'll leave it to you to do your own research on the basics of copyright law. But I will note that, under the law, the contents are owned by whoever created them. If the client failed to pay for the work, and did not secure a clear transfer of title, ownership of the IP remains with the author. This is Copyright Law 101.

The domain is a seperate matter. Presumably, this could happen because the designer was hosting the site. The owner of the domain is free to host it elsewhere, but would need to populate any sites they publish with content they actually own, and not work stolen from people they didn't pay.

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