I get questions all the time from people involved in situations where a business outsources the creation of their website, marketing materials, or other photography work about who owns the copyright in the final work product and what can the other side do with it. And I get these questions from people on both sides of the relationship – the hiring company and the artist.
In these situations, my first question is always, “What does the contract say?” Under the U.S. Copyright Laws, if you hire a third party to do your graphic design, photography, or similar work, the artist owns the copyright in whatever you’ve hired them to create unless you have a written and signed contract that says you will own the copyright in the final product. A lot of business owners don’t understand this. They think they automatically get the rights in whatever they’ve hired someone to create just because they’ve paid for it. And that’s not true. Without an explicit contract that says they own the copyright, the artist owns it and the business has an implied license to use it.
Look at it this way – if you buy a poster for your office, you’re only buying the print. You don’t get the copyright with it. You can decide where you’re going to hang it or if you’re going to get rid of it, but you can’t make copies of it and sell them. Likewise, if you hire someone to do photography work for your website, you’re only buying the digital images, not the copyright in them. If you wanted to do something else with the images, you would need the photographer’s permission. If wanted to buy the rights, you could do that, but expect to pay extra.
There are many artists who write their contracts to say that the business hiring them owns the copyright in whatever they’ve hired the artist to create once they’ve paid their bill in full. That means if the client hasn’t paid their bill, they don’t own the rights to the work product, and the artist has rights to remove it from the client’s website if the client is using it without complying with the terms of the contract. I recently had a discussion with a website designer about modifying her contract template to explicitly state that she can and will shut down the client’s website if they are using her work and they haven’t paid the balance owed to her.
Here’s a video I did on additional issues you want to consider if you are or working with a third party contractor.
If you are a third party contractor or working with one, please read your contract carefully. This is the document for managing your relationship, including who owns the final work product and what happens if a problem arises. If you have contract templates in your work, make sure a skilled business and intellectual property attorney reviews them before you use it, because otherwise you may be stuck with terms that you don’t like.
If you want to chat more about working with contractors, copyright, and/or contracts, feel free to connect with me on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, or you can email me. You can also subscribe to the Carter Law Firm newsletter.
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3 responses to “What Are You Buying When You Use an Independent Contractor?”
This post helps create good awareness, Ruth. Thank you.
With respect to photographs, I think most people believe that if a photo is of them, they own the rights to the picture. I’ve seen this at play even with attorneys–I have had more than one employee leave my firm, then use the professional headshots for which I paid at the “new place” OR use the photos which I took at the “new place.” Grrrrr….
As an attorney, I’ve also fallen victim to the idea that if I paid for a website to get created, I owned the design and the content. WRONG! A couple of years ago I found myself in the situation of having to create EVERYTHING from scratch after canceling a contract with a firm I worked with (and spent 100s of thousands of dollars with) over an 8 year period.
In the end, this ended up being the best thing that ever “happened” in my professional “marketing” world. I just didn’t think so at the time.
Thanks for bringing these challenges to light for the world to see.
My pleasure. I’ve run into a lot of people who think that they have rights to a photo just because they’re in it, which is not necessarily true: http://bit.ly/1gOMVoX.
[…] Because the penalties can be so high, you want to be careful when you use other people’s content on your website or marketing materials. You need to be sure that you own or have permission to use content created by third parties. […]