[thelist] Charging for copyrights

[muinar]

Hi all

My current contracts state that the customer doesn't own the
copyrights to her site. This is what I understood was for a long
time best practice among webdesigners. However, recently I got
somewhat unsure whether I was the last webdesigner who does not
sell the rights automatically - I heard from many others that
do. And I even heard that local courts (Switzerland) are taking
the customer's viewpoint, claiming that a website is useless to
them if they don't own it themselves.

So... how do you handle this? If customer says in the
negotiations 'I want to own the website, including all the files,
as well as the original SWFs', Would you simply say 'Sure, you can
buy them for an additional ... %'? How much? In some of my recent
offers it was 25 percent.

I feel this will be an important point in a meeting that I'll
have in a week. So I'm looking for some food for thought to rebuild
my own point of view...   ;)

Thanks a lot for your insights!

Mike