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Who Owns the Rights to What We Write?

By Michael Stelzner

As a freelance writer by trade, you (or I) might often get asked—“Who retains the rights to what you write?”

This very question was brought up by Naomi from Boston, a career journalist who called me the other day.

If I were in Naomi’s position, I might assume I keep the rights to my work. My experience is a bit different.

As a copywriter, our clients own what we produce for them. I cannot own the ad headline, the slogan, the brochure copy or the white paper I helped produce. This becomes property of the business that contracts me.

For journalists this may be a non-standard practice.

What has been your experience with producing content and “ownership rights?” Have you written white papers or case studies and retained the rights?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Freelance Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

  • Sally - Thanks for stopping in. I agree with you. - Mike
  • When you are a freelance writer or a ghostwriter (almost all white paper writers), you relinquish all rights now or ever to what you write for that company.

    What you can do is create your own contract that says they have full ownership and rights for a certain length of time (2 yrs., 5 yrs) after which time, you can re-use ideas or materials. Often they will want to add that you still cannot use them for their competition and they may actually list the competition.

    That's okay. You now have a list of companies you can write for that can use what you have learned so your learning curve is much shorter.
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