Who owns the work

Once you’ve released your creation into the world — by publishing, uploading, signing, or collaborating — there’s a moment of transfer when it enters its new ecosystem, and that transfer comes with both implicit and explicit claims of ownership. As I mentioned in What it’s worth, in Australia, we get automatic copyright and the ownership is implicit and enforceable1. However, where and how you create and release is governed by other more explicit claims on ownership whether that’s by platform Terms of Service, contractual agreements with your employer, or informal collaborative agreements that may or may not have been written down.

This sounds a bit ominous, especially if you’re not sure of, or have made assumptions about the terms you have already agreed to, but it’s not always clear cut. This week, we’re looking at how to navigate the complexities of ownership, and some of the different ways it can play out.

Scope creep when it comes to what your employer or an organisation can assert control over as part of your employment or body of work is not just a risk as I raised in What you agreed to and What it’s worth, but actively present in all industries and part of contractual boilerplates. It’s a construction that has been present in one form or another for nearly a century.

It has existed since the age of the Hollywood Studio System with actors’ contracts, in the post-war industrial research context as seen in the history of Bell Labs and telephony, and for current times, resources have been written on the impact on founders who start up businesses while employed elsewhere. Academia is also not untouched with the history of academic publishing documenting the industrialisation and commercialisation in this space and related publishing rights (Stevens Institute of Technology, 2024, LSE Impact, 2019).

It’s not a question of if your contract has clauses like this in place, because it almost certainly does. It’s a question of how broadly it covers what you do and what you are aware of. No matter what, read your contracts before you sign, and it’s always worth a re-read when circumstances change to check if it still fits you for where you are right now in your life. If things have changed and the conditions appear murky, consider if this is a situation that could benefit from a chat with your industry reps, labour ombudsman, or your employer. The process your employer follows exists to protect their interests, so it’s reasonable to make sure yours are covered too.

From your employers to your platforms, the environment might be different but the situation is the same, though terms of service as an end-user hit a bit different as a creator. AI training and use has become one of the more visible flashpoints in platform terms, but that again isn’t a new problem, it’s just an old problem with scale.

At its core, every platform you upload to grants you a licence with scope that varies widely, but through a lens of creative work and ownership, it comes down to what rights you retain, what rights you grant, what the platform can do with your work, and what happens to your content if the terms change or the platform changes hands or shuts down. Implicit or internationally enforceable copyright doesn’t apply if you have agreed to terms that override them.

In May 2026, manga artist Masahiro Itosugi, had his entire Google account suspended as a result of AI moderation when he uploaded old manga manuscripts to Google Drive. His content is on the adult side, and Google’s AI moderation tool scans even your private and unshared content for policy violations. According to the Google Drive Additional Terms of Service, “We do not claim ownership in any of your content, including any text, data, information, and files that you upload, share, or store in your Drive account”. However, ownership is not the same as control, and that power is still held by the platform. Google’s terms reserve this right partly to meet legal obligations around content compliance, but without control, what rights does ownership meaningfully give you?

Individual ownership is complicated as it is, but collaboration adds another layer that can be even more challenging.

What is ownership when there’s more than one person involved? How is ownership distributed between who had the idea, and who made it happen? What if the collaboration was informal like a casual chat over a drink, a beta-reader, or someone who provided a sought-after component? Many of these collaborations happen without talk of ownership or attribution.

Sometimes the problem is lineage, like the “Who Let the Dogs Out” origin story — exhaustively investigated in Ben Sisto’s documentary and the 99% Invisible podcast episode. In this case, the lineage of specific creative elements became genuinely impossible to trace. Attribution challenges don’t always have a villain and sometimes the problem is that creativity genuinely moves through culture in ways that resist clear ownership claims. That’s as true for a casual collaboration between two people as it is for a song that spawned dozens of disputed origin stories.

Even so, where you can, bring up the expectations and responsibilities of your collaboration early when you have the luxury of time.

‘Work for hire’ is something I want to raise here because its definition varies based on where you are, the nature of the work, and with whom you work. It’s something you should be aware of so that when you see it, you will take the time to ensure all parties are on the same page about what it means.

In copyright law, as independent operators, the creator owns the copyright of the work in most countries unless the copyright is explicitly transferred (WIPO, 2003) and in Australia, this is supported under Copyright Act 1968. In the US, this is generally the same, however the work must fit into specific legal categories, and there has to be a contractual agreement about the nature of the arrangement (Hume Taylor & Co).

What this means in practice is that if you’re working with someone, whether or not you are in the same legal jurisdiction, don’t rely on the industry defaults for what copyright and ownership means. Make sure you know what your rights are where you are. Get expectations explicitly spelled out early to make sure you’re all in alignment about who owns the rights to the work when the engagement concludes, and when transfer of intellectual property (assets and/or rights) will take place. In most arrangements, the transfer of IP takes place upon receipt of full payment, but this is worth confirming explicitly rather than assuming.

Asking questions can be awkward and hard, especially when it comes to matters of money or contribution, but it’s not as hard as having to fight for something you didn’t think you had to ask for, or that you didn’t know you gave up.

In cases like platforms, sometimes there isn’t anyone to physically ask but you can still question it. What are you being offered, and what is being taken in return? It’s not always out of malice or greed, but platforms and other businesses will be focussed on serving their own interests. Sometimes these interests are in the service of protecting themselves, just as your own interests should protect you.

Elsewhere, there’s usually someone to ask. If something isn’t clear, clarify it, and do it before urgency mitigates any power you might have had to negotiate. If you can’t or aren’t prepared to do it yourself, find a proxy. Industry advocates may be available to you, or at the least can point you in the right direction. There’s rarely a situation where you won’t have a way to get clarity.

But the landscape is becoming more complicated. AI has helped our existing issues scale, and technology has a tendency to outpace the structures meant to govern it. In the next piece, we’ll be looking at how technology, both current and still emerging, is shaping how we think about ownership and control, and how some people are pushing back.

Stay curious,

— Michele

This article is part of the Original Works collection.