Who Owns What You Made at Work

What follows is the working version of ownership of work created during employment: the decisions in the order you actually meet them, with the reasoning attached.

The default position

Most legal systems provide that intellectual property created by an employee in the course of their employment belongs to the employer. The rationale is that the employer paid for the time, provided the resources and bears the commercial risk of the output. The rule varies in detail between copyright, patents and designs, and the differences can be significant in practice.

Contractors are generally treated differently, which is why commissioning agreements deal with ownership explicitly. The precise default rules are set by national legislation and should never be assumed from general reading.

In the course of employment

The qualifying phrase does a great deal of work, since it excludes creations genuinely unconnected with the job. A software developer writing an unrelated novel at weekends is in a very different position from one writing code at weekends. Factors examined typically include whether the work fell within the employee's duties and whether employer resources were used.

As a general position, working on personal projects using company equipment or during working hours blurs the boundary considerably. Keeping personal projects genuinely separate, on personal equipment and personal time, is the practical protection.

Contracts that go further

Many employment contracts contain assignment clauses extending ownership beyond whatever the statutory default would provide. Such clauses sometimes purport to cover anything created during employment regardless of connection to the role. How far those clauses are enforceable varies, and some jurisdictions limit them by legislation that cannot be contracted around.

Read strictly, disclosure obligations requiring employees to report inventions are also common and are worth reading carefully. Where somebody has meaningful side projects, this is a clause to raise at the offer stage rather than later.

Moral rights and attribution

Several systems recognise moral rights, including the right to be identified as the author of a work. Those rights are often personal to the creator and cannot be assigned, though they can sometimes be waived. Employment contracts frequently include waivers where the jurisdiction permits them.

In the wording, the existence, scope and waivability of moral rights differ substantially between legal traditions.

For creative professionals this can matter as much as the economic ownership of the work itself.

Inventions and compensation

Some jurisdictions provide statutory schemes entitling employee inventors to compensation where an invention proves exceptionally valuable. The thresholds and mechanisms differ enormously and are rarely straightforward to invoke. Patent applications typically name the inventors regardless of who owns the resulting rights, which are separate questions.

Read strictly, recording contributions contemporaneously matters, because inventorship disputes arise years after the work was done. Anyone involved in genuinely valuable invention should take specialist advice rather than relying on general summaries.

Open source and third-party material

Employees incorporating open source components into work products bring licence obligations with them. Those obligations bind the employer, which is why many organisations maintain approval processes for external components. Using material from a previous employer is a distinct and serious risk that arises surprisingly often.

For most everyday situations, starting from a clean implementation, rather than from remembered code or documents, avoids that exposure. Organisations increasingly audit for this, particularly during acquisitions and financing rounds.

The takeaway

Keep side projects genuinely separate and read the assignment clause before you sign it. This is general information rather than legal advice.

Most disputes are settled by whoever kept the better record.