Work Made for Hire Author Contract

If a work is made for hire, the employer or the party that specially ordered or commissioned that work is the initial owner of the copyright in the work unless the employer or the commissioning party has signed a written agreement to the contrary with the work's creator. Copyright Term.

Only the author or those deriving rights from the author can rightfully claim copyright. There is, however, an exception to this principle: works made for hire. If a work is made for hire, an employer is considered the author even if an employee actually created the work.

1 For legal purposes, when a work is a work made for hire, the author is not the individual who actually created the work. Instead, the party that hired the individual is considered both the author and the copyright owner of the work.

In the copyright law of the United States, a work made for hire (work for hire or WFH) is a work subject to copyright that is created by an employee as part of his or her job, or some limited types of works for which all parties agree in writing to the WFH designation.

Generally, the person who creates a work is considered its author and the automatic owner of copyright in that work. However, under the work made for hire doctrine, your employer or the company that has commissioned your work, not you, is considered the author and automatic copyright owner of your work.

The general rule is that you own the patent rights to an invention you create during the course of your employment unless you either:were specifically hired (even without a written agreement) for your inventing skills or to create the invention.

But to qualify, a commissioned work must be specified as a work made for hire, either in a contract or other writing, and the work must fit within one of the following categories: (i) a contribution to a collective work, (ii) a part of a motion picture, (iii) a translation, (iv) a supplementary work, (v) a compilation,