Who legally owns your website content?

[cav]

Scenario: your web designer goes bust and they can no longer be contacted. Can the website content be recovered? Do you even legally own it or does it legally belong to the web designer?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Edwin]

Do you mean the actual content (text and pictures) or the design (HTML+CSS)?

If you're talking about the content, then the copyright should lie with whoever wrote the text or took the pictures, unless the agreement you have with them assigned it to you. Of course, if you supplied the content yourself (and assuming it's all "original") then the copyright is yours.

If you're talking about the design, then that will depend on the agreement you had (if any) between you and the web designer. If you were buying all rights off of them, then the copyright should have become yours. If it was undefined or you only effectively bought a license to use their design, then it remains theirs. Copyright doesn't disappear when an entity goes bankrupt, it passes to that entity's creditors and/or to the liquidator.

Of course, it might be that whoever picked up the pieces after the bankruptcy will never exercise their copyright, but it's not the same as saying that it doesn't exist.

See for example:
http://www.ukbusinessforums.co.uk/threads/what-can-i-do-if-my-website-designer-goes-bust.236423/

 

[cav]

Thanks Edwin; first class advice as always. I will mention to the approaching organisation re your point on the copyrights of the design.