Your work-for-hire clause is probably empty. Who owns the work?
Nearly every freelance contract hands the client ownership with a clause that, for most freelance work, transfers nothing at all. The fix is one different word.
The Delivvo team· July 17, 2026 11 min read
If your freelance contract says the work is "made for hire," there is a good chance your client does not own it. Not because you outsmarted anyone, and not because of a loophole. Because that phrase has a narrow legal meaning, and most freelance work falls outside it.
This cuts both ways, which is why it stays buried. You may still own work you were paid for and assumed you handed over. Your client may have paid for a deliverable that is not theirs. Neither side tends to find out until the work becomes worth fighting over, at which point everyone is reading the contract for the first time.
The clause almost everyone copies
US copyright law defines "work made for hire" in exactly two ways, and only two.
The first is simple: "a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment" (17 U.S.C. §101). On payroll, making things at work, the employer owns it.
Freelancers are not employees. So the second route is the only one on the table, and the second route is a list. A commissioned work can be a work made for hire only if it is specially ordered for use as one of nine things:
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
That is the entire list. Read it against what freelancers actually sell. A logo is not on it. A website is not on it. Neither is a brand identity, an iOS app, a photo shoot, a Webflow build, a landing page, or a set of illustrations. A magazine article is (contribution to a collective work). Editing on a film usually is (part of a motion picture). The bulk of freelance work is not.
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And the categories are only half the test. The clause also needs the parties to "expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire." Both halves, or nothing. A signed work-for-hire clause on a logo project has the signature and fails the category. It does not work.
When it fails, the default is waiting where it always was: "Copyright in a work protected under this title vests initially in the author or authors of the work" (17 U.S.C. §201(a)). You made it. You own it. A clause that does not qualify does not move that an inch.
The Supreme Court closed this in 1989
None of this is a recent theory. It has been settled for nearly forty years, in a case about a sculpture.
The Community for Creative Non-Violence commissioned the sculptor James Earl Reid to make a piece about homelessness. They paid for it. They gave notes and direction throughout. When the two sides fell out over the copyright, CCNV argued the sculpture was made for hire, because they had commissioned it and controlled how it turned out.
The Court disagreed and set the test still used today: "To determine whether a work is for hire under the Act, a court first should ascertain, using principles of general common law of agency, whether the work was prepared by an employee or an independent contractor" (CCNV v. Reid, 1989). Reid brought his own tools, worked in his own studio with little supervision, was engaged for a short project, and was paid for the job rather than a salary. Independent contractor. Not an employee. And a sculpture is not one of the nine categories, so the second route was shut too.
Reid kept the copyright. The organisation that ordered the work, directed it, and paid for it did not get it. Control over the work is not ownership of it, and it never was.
Row of red hardcover legal volumes on a shelf, the statute behind the clause
Assignment is the clause that works
There is a mechanism that reliably moves ownership from a freelancer to a client. It is not work for hire. It is assignment.
An assignment is a sale. You own the copyright, then you transfer it. It works on anything: no list of categories, no argument about employment status. It carries one formality, and the formality is not optional: "A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed" (17 U.S.C. §204(a)).
In writing. Signed by you, the person giving the rights up. Not agreed on a call. Not implied by cashing the cheque. A thumbs-up in Slack is not an instrument of conveyance.
This is why careful contracts run both clauses at once: the work is a work made for hire, and if for any reason it is not, the contractor hereby assigns all right, title, and interest in it. The second half is the half doing the work. If your contract has only the first half and your deliverable is a logo, the client is holding a clause that reads like ownership and transfers nothing.
One word inside that clause matters more than it looks. "Contractor hereby assigns" is a transfer, happening now, on signature. "Contractor agrees to assign" is a promise to do a thing later, which means somebody still has to do it, and if you have vanished or fallen out, nobody will.
What work-for-hire quietly costs you
Here is the part that rarely comes up, and it is the reason to prefer assignment even when the nine categories genuinely fit.
US law gives authors a right to claw a transfer back. An author can terminate a grant "at any time during a period of five years beginning at the end of thirty-five years from the date of execution of the grant" (17 U.S.C. §203), with notice served "not less than two or more than ten years before that date." You cannot bargain it away. The statute says termination is effective "notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary." It is one of the few rights in a freelance deal that a client's lawyer cannot draft out of existence.
Except for works made for hire. Section 203 applies, in its own words, to "any work other than a work made for hire."
So the two routes are not interchangeable even where both are open to you. Assign the copyright, and in thirty-five years you or your heirs can take it back regardless of what you signed. Sign a valid work-for-hire agreement, and you were never the author in the first place, so there is nothing to reclaim, ever. For a landing page nobody will remember, that is academic. For the illustration that becomes a company's face for three decades, it is the whole ballgame, and you gave it away in a clause you did not read.
Outside the US, the default is even friendlier
If you or your client sit outside America, the picture is simpler and tilts further your way.
UK law states it flatly: "The author of a work is the first owner of any copyright in it" (Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, s.11). The only carve-out is employment: where a work "is made by an employee in the course of his employment, his employer is the first owner." There is no commissioned-work route at all. No nine categories, because there is no mechanism for them to belong to.
Which means a work-for-hire clause in an English-law contract is borrowing a phrase from a statute that does not apply to it. If a UK freelancer's client wants the copyright, they need an assignment, in writing, signed. There is no other door.
The pattern generalises. In most of the world, the person who makes the thing owns it until they sign it away. American work-for-hire is the unusual one, and even at home it is narrow.
The 2026 problem: you cannot assign what nobody owns
Then generative AI arrived and put a hole in the middle of the clause.
The US Copyright Office published Part 2 of its report on copyright and AI on January 29, 2025. Its position is that "the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements," and that protection does not extend to "the mere provision of prompts" (U.S. Copyright Office). Detail and effort in the prompt do not change that. A prompt is an instruction, not authorship.
The Office was careful not to poison the whole file: "the use of AI to assist in the process of creation or the inclusion of AI-generated material in a larger human-generated work does not bar copyrightability."
Put those two together and the practical result is uncomfortable. If part of your deliverable came out of a prompt and shipped without meaningful human authorship on top, that part probably carries no copyright at all. Not yours. Not the client's. Nobody's. Your assignment clause transfers everything you own, which for that portion is a very thorough transfer of nothing.
That is not an argument for hiding AI use. It is an argument for precision, because the exposure lands on you through a clause you have already signed. Most contracts have you warrant that you own what you are assigning and that it infringes nothing. A warranty is a promise about legal facts, and if the facts are wrong, the model does not get sued. You do. Our guide to AI clauses in freelance contracts covers how to draw that boundary before you sign it.
The lever: assignment on payment
The strongest position available to a freelancer is a short one: copyright transfers on receipt of payment in full.
Before the money lands, you own the work and the client cannot lawfully use it. After it lands, the work is theirs and nobody is arguing. The clause costs an honest client nothing, because an honest client was going to pay. What it does is convert a legal fight into a plumbing question: has the money arrived?
Which is exactly where most freelancers fumble it, because that turns out to be a hard question to answer from their own records. The signed contract is a PDF in Dropbox. The files went out over WeTransfer some time in March. The invoice is a row in a spreadsheet marked paid, probably. Then a year later the work turns up in a campaign and you need to establish what they signed, what you actually delivered, and the date the payment cleared. You have three systems, and one of them is your memory.
Close-up of hands signing a business document, the formality section 204(a) requires
Delivvo is built for that seam. The contract is e-signed inside the client's portal, so the assignment clause carries a real signature with a timestamp against it rather than a scan of a scan. The deliverables go out and get approved in the same portal, so what was handed over, which version it was, and when the client accepted it are recorded instead of recalled. The invoice lives there too, against the same project, so payment status is a fact in the record rather than a note to yourself. When the trigger for your assignment is payment in full, that makes payment in full something you can point at. And the money moves straight from the client to your own Stripe, PayPal, Tap, or Telr account, because Delivvo takes 0% of client payments and never sits in the payment path.
An assignment-on-payment clause is worth exactly as much as your ability to prove the signature, the delivery, and the payment. Delivvo keeps all three against the same project, with the payment running through your own gateway at a 0% cut, so the answer to "when did this become yours?" is a record rather than an argument. See how it works.
What to do about it
Stop leaning on "work made for hire" alone. Check your deliverable against the nine. It is usually not there.
Add a present-tense assignment. "Hereby assigns" transfers. "Agrees to assign" is homework.
Sign it, and keep the signed copy. Section 204(a) is a formality with teeth.
Condition the transfer on payment. It costs a paying client nothing, and it is the one point in the deal where you hold something they want.
Carve out your portfolio rights. Assignment does not leave you a right to show the work. If you want to display it, say so in the same clause, before you sign, not two years later over email.
Be honest about AI in the deliverable, and do not warrant ownership of something the Copyright Office says has no owner.
None of this needs a lawyer to begin. It needs you to read a clause you have been copying between contracts for years. If you want more in this vein, our list of contract red flags to catch before you sign is the companion piece.
The bottom line
"Work made for hire" is four words doing a job they mostly cannot do. They cover employees, and nine narrow kinds of commissioned work, and nothing else. For the logo, the site, the app, and the brand, ownership sits with you until you assign it in a signed writing, whatever the contract's heading says. Assignment is stronger for the client and safer for you, and it leaves you the thirty-five-year termination right that work-for-hire silently deletes. Get the word right, tie it to payment, and keep the proof of all three somewhere you can find it in a hurry.
