Who owns what your team creates
Work created by employees within the scope of their jobs usually belongs to the company by default. Work created by outside contractors usually does not, and that surprises people every time it comes up. Designers, photographers, developers, agencies and freelance writers ordinarily keep the copyright in what they produce unless a signed written agreement transfers it or qualifies it as work made for hire, and an invoice marked paid in full is not that agreement. We look at your standard contractor terms, your employee agreements, and any collaboration where ownership was simply never written down, which is common with early logos, site code and founding-era materials. Sorting it out later depends entirely on whether the creator is still reachable and still willing, so it is far cheaper to settle at the start.
Clearing what you did not create
Almost nothing ships without someone else's material inside it. Music in a video, stock photography, icons, fonts, templates and third-party code all arrive with license terms, and those terms often exclude the exact use you had in mind. Fonts are the item companies overlook most often, since a desktop license frequently does not cover embedding in an app, a product or a client deliverable. Stock licenses commonly separate editorial from commercial use and carve out merchandise, packaging or broadcast. We usually review the terms for each asset against the actual planned use, and where the license does not reach that far, we go back and ask for written permission rather than hope the use goes unnoticed.
Records, and questions about machine-generated work
Keeping proof is half of copyright counseling. A license you cannot produce is close to no license at all, so we help clients maintain a simple register recording what each asset is, where it came from, what the terms allow and when the rights end. Registering your own works is worth discussing as well, since it affects what is available to you if you ever need to act on them. Clients now raise a newer question constantly, which is what happens with material produced by generative tools. Authorship generally attaches to human creation, the terms of service of the tool you used may say something different from what the law does, and the material the tool was trained on carries risk your vendor may or may not have addressed. We would rather work through all of that while the material is still a draft than after it is in your product.
