Content and copyright

Ownership of commissioned work.

Paying for work is not owning it. Unless something in writing says otherwise, the person who created the material ordinarily keeps the copyright and you have permission to use it, which is a far narrower thing. The difference tends to surface at the worst possible moment, usually when somebody is buying the business or you want to change agency.

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What this looks like when it goes wrong

The first version arrives when a relationship ends. The agency or freelancer that built the site, the identity or the product photography is being replaced, and the working files do not arrive. What was delivered is the finished output. What was retained is everything needed to change it, and the position on ownership was never written down because the relationship was good at the time.

The second arrives in diligence. A buyer or funder asks for a schedule of what the company owns, and the schedule cannot be produced. The logo was drawn by somebody who invoiced once, the codebase had contributors who were never engaged on written terms, and the photography was licensed for a use that ended. None of this stops the deal on its own. It becomes a warranty, a retention or a discount.

The third is material that was never the supplier's to give. A contractor reused a component built for another client, dropped in a stock image under a licence that does not cover what you are now doing, used a font outside its permitted use, or included code carrying conditions nobody read. You inherit those conditions whether or not anybody told you about them.

The fourth is a contributor who reappears. Sometimes it is about money. More often it is about credit, or about objecting to how the work has been altered or where it has ended up. That is a different conversation from ownership, and an assignment does not necessarily dispose of it.

What actually decides it

Start with who actually made the material and in what capacity. Where a work was created by an employee in the course of employment the default ordinarily sits with the employer, and where it was created by a contractor, consultant or agency it ordinarily does not. Both of those are defaults rather than certainties, and whether something was made in the course of employment can itself be arguable. The facts decide it, not the job title.

An assignment of copyright has to be in writing and signed by the person giving it up, and it has to actually cover the work in question. A licence, however wide, is not an assignment. Where nothing was signed, the position may be that you hold an implied permission limited to the purpose the work was commissioned for, and the scope of that is narrower than most clients expect. It does not automatically extend to modifying the work, using it in other media, sublicensing it or stopping the creator using it elsewhere.

The paperwork usually already exists and usually says the opposite of what the client remembers. Agency standard terms frequently reserve ownership until payment in full, retain rights in underlying tools and libraries, license rather than transfer, and limit use to the brief. Where something depends on the drafting, it is decided by the drafting.

Then there is everything embedded in the deliverable that came from somewhere else. Stock images, fonts, plugins, libraries, music, models and open source components all arrive with their own conditions, and a supplier can only pass on what it holds. Moral rights sit alongside all of it, and whether they arise, whether they have been asserted and what any waiver achieves depends on the circumstances and the wording, so credit and alteration are better dealt with expressly than left to be discovered later.

What we do

Find out what you actually own

Who made what, on what terms, and which of it was ever transferred to the company.

Get the assignments in place

Including confirmations obtained after the event from people the business no longer works with.

Where the creator has gone

Contributors who cannot be found and companies that no longer exist, and what can still be transferred and by whom.

Terms for the next piece of work

Ownership, source files, third party material and credit settled at the start rather than at the exit.

Ready for diligence

An intellectual property schedule that survives the questions a buyer, funder or licensee will ask.

Disputes with a supplier

Where files, ownership and payment are being held against each other, resolved without losing the material.

When to spend nothing

Not everything needs chasing. Campaign artwork, social assets and material with a short life are rarely worth the cost of retrospective paperwork, and a business that tries to tidy up every historic engagement will spend more than the exposure is worth. The things worth doing properly are the ones that identify the business or would be expensive to rebuild: the identity, the codebase, the product photography, and anything a buyer would ask about.

Where the relationship is still good, the cheapest moment to fix this is now and the cheapest instrument is a short confirmation rather than a demand. If you only ever intend to use the material exactly as you have been using it, and you will never sell the business or license the work onward, the position you have may be enough. The point at which it stops being enough is the point at which somebody else has to rely on it.