Eileen, that’s horrible! Good for you for reporting him. I wish I were more surprised by clients behaving badly, but I’ve seen quite a bit. This one, though, sounds like a real bad character. Glad you dumped him!

Yep, client had hopscotched over the web, stealing copy from his competitors, and putting it on his own site (with a copyright notice claiming ownership!) until it could be rewritten. The pages he thought should look “more different” were the very pages I’d proposed keeping almost the same. So I guess he didn’t read the proposal, either.

He wanted me to redo everything for free. I said no. Then he wanted a refund, and said he wouldn’t use the material. I said no. So we agreed on a compromise … he would give me original copy, and I would spell and grammar check it and we’d call it even. I agreed. Then I ran his new “original” copy through copyscape, and you guessed it – he’d copied that from someone else, too. I told him I was on to him, reported him to the web host, and told him if it ever showed up on his website, I’d tell the people he stole it from, too. He flipped out, so I stopped accepting his calls. I should have known he’d be difficult – he was the kind of guy who insisted on a phone conference at 4pm on Christmas Eve and then stood me up.

Since that time, I always put a clause in my contract requiring client to certify that he owns intellectual property rights to the originating material.