Who Owns What Was Made
Work produced by an employee and work produced by a supplier default to different owners in most places, and the difference surfaces when it is expensive.
Reads as a businessReads as employmentCuts both waysDepends where you are
Four factors, and no total. Every bar is the same length: the side is the claim, the size is not. Nothing here was decided; it accumulated, which is how most of these arrangements change.
Work produced by an employee and work produced by a supplier default to different owners in most places. Businesses discover the difference at the moment it costs them something, which is usually when a relationship is ending.
The practical issue in “Who Owns What Was Made” becomes clearer when expectations and evidence are visible to both sides. Used for remote workforce management software, look through the matching product page can add time and project context, provided the purpose is disclosed, access is limited and every consequential interpretation receives human review.
This is the one area in this collection where a single clause genuinely settles the question, and where its absence genuinely does not.
The Wrike work-management articles offers useful outside context for “Who Owns What Was Made”. Its value is in producing better questions about scope, ownership and evidence, not in deciding a contractor’s legal status.
The usual default
Broadly, and with substantial variation: work created by an employee in the course of their employment belongs to the employer by operation of law, while work created by a supplier belongs to the supplier unless the contract says otherwise.
That is a generalisation across very different systems and the specifics differ considerably by jurisdiction and by the kind of work. What is reliable is that the two cases are not the same, and that assuming otherwise is the error.
What this means in practice
A business that paid for something may hold a licence to use it rather than owning it. That is frequently fine and occasionally disastrous, and the difference shows up when the business wants to sell, to license onward, to modify substantially, or to engage somebody else to work on it.
The clause that fixes it
Short, and it belongs in every engagement that produces anything durable:
All material created in the course of this engagement is assigned to the buyer on creation, or on payment, and the supplier will do what is needed to give effect to that.
The exact form that works differs by place and by what is being created. What matters is that somebody addressed it rather than that anybody drafted it beautifully.
What a supplier reasonably keeps
Their pre-existing material: tools, libraries, templates, methods and frameworks they bring to every client.
Expecting to own those is unreasonable and most suppliers will not agree to it. The usual arrangement is that you own what was made for you and hold a licence to use whatever of theirs is embedded in it, which is worth stating explicitly because an unstated licence is not a licence.
Third-party material
The part that catches businesses out operationally rather than legally. Work frequently incorporates components, fonts, images, libraries and services belonging to other people, under terms the supplier accepted on your behalf.
Asking what is in it, and on what terms, is ordinary diligence and almost nobody does it. The consequences arrive years later when something is audited or a licence changes.
Moral and residual rights
In several jurisdictions a creator retains rights that cannot simply be assigned away, or can only be waived in a particular form.
This affects attribution, modification and sometimes use in contexts the creator objects to. Where the work is creative in character, it is worth establishing the position properly rather than assuming the assignment covered everything.
Accounts, domains and services in their name
Not ownership of work product, but it behaves the same way and causes more emergencies. Domains registered to the supplier, services paid on their card, accounts created with their email, certificates issued to them.
Every one of those is a dependency on a person who may stop answering. Establishing at the start that anything the business relies on is held by the business removes an entire category of exit problem.
Payment and ownership
A useful connection: tying the assignment to payment rather than to creation gives both sides something. You get ownership when you have paid; they retain it until you have.
It is also, incidentally, a far better mechanism for ensuring payment than anything the supplier could do by chasing.
What to do about work already made
For engagements running without a clause, the position is whatever the law where you are provides, and it may be less than you assumed.
An assignment can be agreed now, and most suppliers will sign one without difficulty, particularly alongside an ordinary rate review. What does not work is assuming it, and the moment to find out is not when the supplier has just been told the work is ending.
The audit worth doing once
For each thing the business depends on, establish who owns it, who holds the accounts it runs on, and what third-party terms it relies on.
It takes a day for most businesses and produces one or two genuine surprises. It is also the only item in this entire collection where the thing you discover may have nothing to do with employment status at all, and may still be the most expensive problem on the list.