There's also the question of who "owns" the web pages. Did the webmaster write them? Is there any contract that states who owns the resulting code? Does the webmaster retain the copyright, or does the person who hired her hold the copyright?

I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that, if there is nothing in writing, then it gets messy, and depends on the exact business relationship between them. (ie: employer/employee, contractor, independent contractor, etc.)

If the webmaster holds the copyright, then she has the legal rights to require any changes to go through her, regardless of the status of the domain and the hosting account.

That's a good point, Ken, but more likely than not, the court would look on it as a Work For Hire relationship, in which case the person paying for the work owns the product of the work effort unless otherwise clearly indicated by the contractor. IANAL either. :-)

The original question did not appear to say that the Webmaster was trying to force the writer to stay hostage to them. The word "hostage" was used in a loose sense by the site owner, because he felt unable to do anything on his own with the site, due to HTML being used. At most the Webmaster could be accused of not bothering to implement a CMS for the site, possibly due to a small budget originally, or possible due to some personal gain by keeping it to HTML -- or possibly because the Webmaster did not know how to do it. He/she was not really accused of doing a site "kidnapping". In my years in the field, the only hostage holding I have seen done was by a large Internet registrar that used complex contracts, and threats, to prevent loss of accounts -- many of you know who that is!

So what's he going to do once he "wrestles" control away? Badger the next guy with excessive neediness, too? I'm not convinced the webmaster is the entire issue here. This is a communication problem & an unclear contract.

This enthusiastic guy is a great candidate for a CMS system, but that's not what he paid for. He hired a designer to put up a static HTML site, & now he's frustrated that he can't update & fiddle around with it as often as he'd like.

I strongly suspect that the webmaster feels like this fellow's demands are an excessive drain on her resources. He's most likely not paying enough for the level of attention he desires.

If the two of them sat down & actually worked out how much of her time he can reasonably expect for what he pays, & what he would need to pony up for more attention, that would be a good start.

He should also probably start budgeting for a new Joomla site. Or a copy of Dreamweaver & some lessons if he wants to keep it cheap & DIY.

Reminded me of a business client who asked her child's friend to set the company web site up on Tripod. Later, the children had a falling out and the "friend" refused to turn over the access details. Tripod said "too bad for you" and refused to grant the business owner editorial access to the site even though they could prove ownership. Needless to say by the time they got to me they were in quite a lather. I contacted the "friend" just to see if they would open up to a 3rd party and they lied to me (gave me incorrect access information). LoL So I just went through the steps as you said: register a new domain and start anew. Keeping in mind they might want to take over the work at some point, I stuck to simple HTML / CSS / javascript coding, and put a lot of the actual content in PDF files that the client can modify and FTP directly without my intervention. They use the same PDF files in their daily interactions with Customers which further eliminated duplicate efforts on everyone's part.

I have had clients that were a nuisance. I eventually solved most of these "opportunities" by instituting a minimum per-page fee for modifications. This had an interesting side effect of clients putting more thought into their content before throwing it over the wall to the web guy. ;-)