I have what might be a dumb question But first, in true Snarke fashion, the backstory. I had a regular client for a while. The agreement we had concerning the material I created for him was that I would be given credit for all of my work when it was published online. The relationship has since lapsed. I have yet to be paid for work I completed and submitted in April and when I checked to see if he was still using my work, not only was the work from April still up on his sites, but my name had been removed from everything I turned in and, in some cases, replaced with his name. Now, my question: Because he broke our original agreement, what does that do to the rights ownership (if anything)? I'm not so much concerned with the money. I'm more concerned with that pesky future concern of "if you said you wrote it, why does it have his name on it?" should I want to point to that work as part of my portfolio. I have sent an email requesting that he honor our original agreement which has, of course, gone unanswered. Any rights knowledgeable people in the house?
This will probably get moved to Legal... Contact the host (locate it on Whois.net) and let them know he doesn't have the right to use that content. You can include a copy of your agreement as proof. If there are any, contact his advertisers. Adsense has strict policies on these types of violations.
Latoya's right. Advertisers and the host will hit him hard. I'd also report it to the search engines prior to reporting to the host - if they can see it up with a rights violation, they'll de-index those pages, which will also hit him on the traffic front. And of course, you can always contact a lawyer if you want to go after him for the contract violation.
Thanks you guys--I sent another email giving the client a set time to pay for my work (I sent it to every email I contact point I could find for him). After that time lapses I will do the things you suggested. Interesting thing happened today though: I used the contact form on the website that holds the work and received an email saying that my client had sold the site a few weeks ago to him. I explained about some of the work not being paid for and the violation of the original agreement and he said that because he doesn't have a signed document from either of us, he wasn't going to do anything about the content or the credit. When I checked the whois information on the site, it still showed my client as the owner and when I did a Google search on the client's name, everything I found still linked him to the site. I understand that it can take time to get things changed, but it just feels fishy... I do not know how I manage to find these people, but at least I'm learning things! Lessons learned the hard way are rarely forgotten
You can go after a new site owner whether or not they knew. It's their job to get something in writing detailing what rights they have to the content when they buy a site. Then it would be their responsibility to go after the person who sold him the site with illegal content on it if he wanted to recover his losses. You could technically go after either of them, so it doesn't matter if you can't reach one - still report everything to the search engines, advertisers, etc., and consider suing if it's a big enough issue.