As a small business owner, explains Fred Wilf, intellectual property lawyer with law firm Morgan Lewis, “you automatically own the copyright of any work your employees do for you while under your hire that is within the scope of that employee’s employment.”

Wilf recommends that you inform employees of their intellectual property rights upon hire. “Typically, all work the employee does for one employer, whether from home or in the office, is the property of the company.”

But, warns Wilf, the rules change when dealing with independent contractors or freelancers. “If there’s no written document, the contractor owns the copyright. The document must be signed by the contractor and clearly state the works they create are works for hire and that the company is deemed the owner of the copyrighted work.” Work for hire copyrights have the same stipulations as other corporate copyrights: they are valid for 95 years from the date of publication or 120 years from the date of creation, whichever expires first. “The documents should also state,” noted Wilf, “that the contractor assigns all rights in the works not otherwise owned by the business owner.”

Work for hire as applied to contractors applies to nine specific types of work: a contribution to a collective work, part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, a translation, supplementary work, compilation, instructional text, test, answer material for a test or an atlas. “By adding an assignment provision,” notes Wilf, “you can have the contractor transfer all types of copyrightable works.”

Work for hire contracts typically include a description of the services or goods rendered and a detailed expression of the transfer of ownership rights from the creator to the business.

Without a work for hire agreement, you obtain no exclusive rights to any works created by a freelancer or independent contractor, so don’t forget to get it in writing!

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