The Ownership Brief
You paid for it. Whether you own it is a different question.
Paying the invoice completes the transaction. It does not necessarily transfer the work.
Published August 12, 2026 · By Aurelia Mitchell Durant
A founder commissions a logo. The designer sends three concepts, the founder picks one, the invoice is paid, and the source files arrive. Everyone behaves as though the transaction is complete, because commercially it is.
Legally, something may not have happened.
Under United States copyright law, the person who creates a work is its author and the initial owner of the copyright in it. Paying an invoice is not, by itself, a transfer. Two mechanisms change who owns the work, and both have requirements that commissioned creative work frequently fails to meet.
Mechanism one
Work made for hire is narrower than the phrase suggests
The Copyright Act defines work made for hire narrowly. It covers work prepared by an employee within the scope of employment. It also covers specially ordered or commissioned work, but only if two conditions are both satisfied: the work falls within one of nine enumerated categories, and the parties sign a written instrument agreeing that it is a work made for hire.
Those nine categories are:
- A contribution to a collective work
- A part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work
- A translation
- A supplementary work
- A compilation
- An instructional text
- A test
- Answer material for a test
- An atlas
Read that list again with your own assets in mind. A logo is not on it. Website copy is generally not on it. Standalone product photography is not on it. Software is not on it. A brand identity system is not on it.
This is why an agreement stating that “all deliverables shall be works made for hire” often accomplishes nothing for the assets a founder-led business cares about most. The clause is present. The statutory predicate is absent.
Mechanism two
A written assignment does what the designation cannot
A transfer of copyright ownership is not valid unless it is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed. An assignment is the instrument that does the work when the work made for hire designation cannot.
Carefully drafted agreements use both. They designate the work as made for hire where that designation legitimately applies, and they add a present assignment covering everything that does not qualify.
Two refinements are worth knowing, because they explain why practitioners do not treat these as interchangeable.
Works made for hire are not subject to the author’s statutory termination right, which allows an author to terminate a grant decades after it is made. For a business that intends to hold a brand asset for the long term, that difference has real consequences.
In the other direction, some states attach employment consequences to the designation. In California, designating a commissioned creator’s work as a work made for hire can make that person a statutory employee for workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance purposes. Businesses working with California-based contractors sometimes prefer a clean assignment for that reason.
The right answer depends on the asset, the jurisdiction, and how long the business intends to hold what it is buying.
Why the gap stays invisible
Possession and use feel like ownership
Nothing announces it. The files are on the server. The logo is on the packaging. The website is live. Possession and use feel like ownership because in daily operation there is no difference.
The difference appears at a specific moment: a licensing negotiation, an investor’s diligence request, an acquisition, a franchise or distribution deal, or a disagreement with the contractor who made the thing. At that moment someone asks for the document, and either it exists or it does not.
The practical test
Start with the assets that carry commercial weight
Rather than trying to audit everything, begin with what matters most. For most founder-led businesses that means the logo and brand system, the website, the course or curriculum, the principal product photography, and any custom software. For each one, look for three things.
- A signed writing. Not an invoice, not an email confirming the fee, not a statement of work that describes the deliverable without addressing rights.
- A present assignment, not only work for hire language. If the agreement relies on work for hire alone, check whether the asset falls within the nine categories.
- The chain. If you contracted with an agency, the agency needed to obtain rights from the individual who did the work before it could pass them to you. A chain with a missing link performs the same as no chain at all.
Where a document is missing, the problem is usually fixable. Confirmatory assignments are ordinary and most former contractors sign them without difficulty. What makes them expensive is asking during a transaction, when the other side knows exactly how much you need the signature.
The Ownership Layer
Paying for work and owning it are two different events. In most commissioned work, only one of them is documented.
The gap costs nothing to close now and a great deal to close in the middle of a transaction.