I think what he's trying to get at is that if you don't use the old tables, and instead write a routine to migrate the data (which the client definitely owns) to your own new tables, you can bypass both issues—1) There's no copyright violation, and 2) You've automated the migration, so you won't be spending anywhere near the extra 16 hours you're predicting.



>Obviously I'm NOT making myself clear. - I CAN do anything, create new tables, import data, rename tables, even write a program to do it all. That's NOT the issue.
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> *********Am I violating copyright?*********
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>Thomas says see a lawyer. That's great advise but I don't even have the job yet! I was assuming someone has run into this dilemma before.
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>To be on the safe side I will inform my client we must start over from scratch.
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>As a side point: a recent client who owns their code ( and had a signed document saying so) wanted me to make some changes. The original developer would NOT give them their own code. She wanted to charge the client $5000 for the code! It went to the lawyers and after spending $1000, the client said forget it. They just refoxed the code in the end and got me to pick it up. Moral of the story? You tell me. I just don't want to be stuck in the middle...
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>Thanks for all your responses