Yow. Well I had this experience once in the offline world. I had an obnoxious client who asked for repeats, changes like mad, till one day he suggested that he'd find another artist.
Well the long and short of it was, he ended up using my design, with minor alterations made by the other artist, and didn't pay me a cent. But I wasn't going back, he caused me too much stress to further trouble myself. Yep, I should'a had it in writing. But I was subcontracted for the work by another company.
Now I'm a development engineer | programmer at large and flash designer.
One way I could see us overcomming this is by forming an association. Say the IFDA - International Flash Developers Association. This group should see about protecting our legal interest internationally, and come up with recommendations and standardized contracts that we use with clients.
To make some minor points:
- yep, keep the FLAs, follow another thread on that somewhere
- yep, I like the watermark idea
- I don't like the defacing the server idea, as it's just plain wrong
- I like the idea of the SWF hosted on your machine (or the text file)
Keep up to ideas guys.
Kirk