website ownership rights

I have recently been approached by a real estate company (which shall remain nameless) with regards to re-designing there website and taking over the maintenance. The reason i was approached was due to the fact that:

1 - the current company responsible for the site have not completed the site satisfactoraly (still some 2500 images to be uploaded) and the information on each page is not as it should be.

and

2 - The company will not release the passwords to gain access to the host server, the MD of the real estate company has asked for the passwords and been refused!

So, what are his legal rights? Does he own the domain name, web space, passwords, site designs, images and anything else held on the server?

or does the design company actually have the right to act in this manner (which is completeley unprofessional)

Cheers

MostDef

My recommendation is to start from scratch and advise the real estate company to hire a lawyer for breech of contract or harm to their business as this is causing them economic harm.

We were in a similar issue once when we had to drop a client, yet we still owned the copyright to the site's design since we had purchased a template for their site and it was non-transferrable to the client or their new company and our former client knew that and it was in the contract.

We were still a brand new company, only about 2 months old, but what they didn't know was the two primary investors had a combined total of about USD 600 Million dollars in cash. Needless to say we sued both parties out of business (one for breech of contract, the other infrinigement) and purchased their assests at liquidation prices just as an *#$&# you.

Funny thing is, we haven't had any problems since...