Originally Posted by cyco_cc

And your opinion is absolutely correct and fair. It all comes down to the license agreement. If there is none, I'd tend to side with the person paying for it to do whatever he wants with it. However, I have a feeling that brassmonkey's situation is similar to what you bring up above. That is, the contractor had a majority of the work done in a personal library to achieve the implementation and therefore was able to do it cheaper as a per license script. The fault lands on the developer if he did not properly specify the intended use of the script and also, if he was so serious about owning the rights to the script, there should be some sort of licensing mechanism built in. If there were, it would be obvious that the script was intended for one site and not to be resold--because it would be impossible.

So my , without knowing more, I'd side with BrassMonkey but I think there's a lesson to be learned by inexperienced IC to properly state how they intend their software to be used before agreeing to a project.