Journal: Can anyone give me some advice about Copyright?

I'm hoping that some of you fine people can help me out with some free advice since I sure can't afford to go get it professionally.

I've been designing websites off and on for 7 years now, usually just one or two here and there but in the last year it's been more and more and I'm trying to make a go of starting an official business. Well, i was checking to make sure my old customers sites were still up and running so I could link to them as references if they hadn't changed them, etc. and I came across something awful.. a website that I made in March 2000 was still up and running under a different domain name, and was exactly the same as when I created it, only he had added a bad midi file to the front page. I noticed my copyright and link was missing from the bottom of the pages and on the links page, where my banner used to be stating "site design by green web design".. there was a crappy little banner that said "site design done by {lying cheating bastard who didn't design the site but who probably added the midi}. Not one single design element had been changed. The custom buttons and background were exactly the same as when I first created them. Nothing had changed. In the source code, the would be webmaster hadn't known enough to take out the "author" tag with my link in it, probably because he used some crappy editor to add the midi and the banner and didn't know what he was doing. Oh, and it turns out after some digging the lying bastard was the son of the guy who paid me to make the page. But I'm getting ahead of myself here..

So I wrote to the supposed webmaster demanding that he take his "site design done by blah blah" banner and replace mine. After all, he had not in fact designed the site or even one graphic on it, nor had he added anything except the midi file and the banner. His father, a very wierd man who i never liked much to begin with, wrote back to me trying to pretend I had never once even worked on his site. I didnt' mention the meta tags, that's one of my aces in the hole. I pointed out that I had cashed a check from him and reported the income on my taxes, so it was pretty easy to prove that I did indeed design the site. So he checked and admitted that he did hire me to work on his site after all, but then said "you never created the graphics or the background or the design and you can't prove you did. sue me, i have nothing but time since I don't work anymore".. I tried pointing out to him that lying is wrong and that if I started printing out copies of Little Women with my name on the cover, I'd get sued for copyright infringement. you just can't take someone else's work and pretend you made it. Fine, he changed the site, who cares.. but that doesn't mean that he designed it from scratch. I did. I took screen shots of the original page I made (from floppy disk backup, how's that for old school) next to the current page, and it shows clearly that they're the same damn page. He's acting all crazy/defensive because the liar is his son (like father like son I guess) and telling mutual friends that I never designed the site and his lawyer says "she is not your web master". hahahahaah.. sorry. anyways.. he's saying that i never designed the site and I know I did. You just don't forget something when you spend weeks working on it and creating the graphics from scratch and all of the things that go along with designing a website. I Have the cancelled check and the disk backups to prove it too. Does anyone have any advice on how to proceed? at this point i'm just so annoyed with his condescending misspelled emails (ALL TYPED IN CAPS TOO.. EVEN MORE ANNOYING..) insinuating that i'm lying that i'd like to get him just on principle, but the fact remains that all original works I create are copyrighted and for someone else to try and profit off of my hard work is just plain wrong. suggestions? comments? anything is appreciated!