Legal and compliance
What is Copyright assignment?
The written transfer of copyright in commissioned work from the creator to the client. Without it, a developer or designer generally retains copyright in what they produced and the client holds only an implied licence to use it — which is much narrower than owning it.
Also called: IP transfer · ownership clause
What a licence does not let you do
- Give the code to a different developer to modify, in some readings
- Resell or relicense the work
- Move it to another platform without permission
- Use it beyond the purpose it was commissioned for
The sentence to ask for
"All intellectual property rights in the deliverables assign to the client on receipt of final payment." Payment-conditional is fair to both sides: the client gets ownership, the supplier keeps leverage until invoiced work is paid for.
What is normally excluded, reasonably
Third-party components under their own licences, and a supplier’s pre-existing framework or library. Those are usually licensed rather than assigned, which is standard — the point is that the site-specific work is yours.
Where this is covered in depth
A definition can only go so far. Who actually owns your website — a checklist you can verify today covers this properly — 3 minutes, free, no email required.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada and Pakistan. These definitions come from client work rather than from a content brief — where an entry describes a mistake, it is usually one found on a real site. More about how I work.