Work Made for Hire

Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
A university staff writer drafts a grant-reporting template as part of their normal job duties in the communications office. Because it is prepared by an employee within the scope of employment, the university (the employer), not the writer, is the copyright author under 17 U.S.C. Section 101's first category, absent a written agreement stating otherwise.
Is an instance
A journal commissions a named contractor to write a supplementary glossary for a special issue, and both parties sign a written agreement before the work begins stating it is a work made for hire. Because "supplementary work" is one of the nine statutory categories and the signed-agreement requirement is met, the commissioning publisher is the legal author and copyright owner, not the contractor.
Is an instance
A publication agreement between a journal and a corresponding author includes a clause stating that any figures or supplementary datasets prepared by the author's research staff specifically for that submission are worked made for hire owned by the institution or the journal -- research administrators reviewing publication agreements should check for this language separately from any copyright transfer or license clause, since it operates on original authorship rather than transferring rights after the fact.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
A faculty member writes a journal article on their own initiative, outside any specific work-for-hire assignment, and later signs a copyright transfer agreement (CTA) assigning rights to the publisher. This is NOT work made for hire -- the faculty member is the original author and copyright owner up until the transfer; the CTA moves rights that originated with them, rather than the work never having been theirs to begin with. Most university faculty-authored scholarship is treated this way, not as work made for hire, under prevailing academic-freedom norms and many institutional IP policies, even though the same faculty member may be a university "employee."
Not an instance
An independent contractor is engaged to build a laboratory database and no signed written work-for-hire agreement exists, and a custom database does not fall within any of the nine specially-ordered-work categories in 17 U.S.C. Section 101. Without both the qualifying category and a signed written agreement, the contractor -- not the commissioning institution -- retains copyright authorship by default; the institution would need a separate copyright assignment to acquire ownership.

Editorial commentary

Work made for hire is a doctrine under United States copyright law, defined at 17 U.S.C. Section 101 and given its ownership consequence at 17 U.S.C. Section 201(b), under which the employer or commissioning party — rather than the individual who physically created the work — is treated as the work’s legal “author” and default copyright owner from the moment of creation. It does not describe a transfer of rights; it describes who the law says held authorship in the first place.

The two statutory categories

A work qualifies as made for hire in either of two ways:

Employee, scope of employment: a work an employee prepares within the normal scope of their job duties. No separate written agreement is required for this category to apply, though many institutions document it anyway in employment or IP policies.
Specially ordered or commissioned work: a work created by someone who is not an employee (typically an independent contractor), which qualifies only if (a) it falls into one of nine categories enumerated in the statute — a contribution to a collective work, 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, or an atlas — and (b) the parties expressly agree in a written instrument, signed before or at the time the work is created, that it is a work made for hire. If either condition is missing, the contractor remains the default author, and the commissioning party would need a separate copyright assignment to acquire ownership.

How it differs from a copyright assignment or transfer

Work made for hire and a copyright transfer agreement reach the same practical outcome — one party other than the individual creator ends up owning the copyright — by different legal routes. In a transfer or assignment, the creator is the original author and owner, and later signs away some or all of those rights. In work made for hire, the creator never holds authorship or copyright at all; the employer or commissioning party is the author as a matter of law from the outset. This distinction matters for practical questions like reversion rights and termination: U.S. copyright law’s statutory termination-of-transfer provisions (17 U.S.C. Sections 203 and 304(c)) let individual authors reclaim rights they previously transferred after a set number of years, but that termination right does not apply to works made for hire, because the commissioning party was the author to begin with — there is no transfer for the creator to terminate.

Where it shows up in research administration

Research administrators, technology transfer staff, and authors encounter work-made-for-hire language in three recurring contexts:

University employment and IP policies: institutions commonly define, in employment agreements, faculty handbooks, or IP policy documents, which categories of staff-created work (administrative materials, software written as part of an IT role, grant-compliance templates) are treated as work made for hire versus work the creator retains rights in. Traditional scholarly and pedagogical works by faculty are frequently carved out under academic-freedom-informed IP policies even though the author is nominally an institutional employee — this varies by institution and should be checked against the specific policy rather than assumed. See the related guide on work made for hire in university tech transfer for how this plays out for faculty, students, staff, and contractors specifically.
Contractor-produced research materials: when an institution engages an outside contractor or vendor to produce a research tool, dataset documentation, training material, or similar deliverable, a written work-made-for-hire clause (where the deliverable fits one of the nine statutory categories) is one of the two mechanisms — alongside a separate copyright assignment clause — available to secure institutional ownership. Contracts should specify one or the other explicitly rather than assuming ownership follows automatically.
Publication agreement clauses: some journal or publisher publishing agreements include a work-made-for-hire clause covering specific commissioned elements of a submission (for example, a commissioned supplementary work, translation, or instructional text prepared for that publication) alongside, or instead of, a broader copyright transfer clause covering the manuscript itself. Because the two clauses operate on different legal mechanisms, reviewing a publication agreement for one does not substitute for checking the other.

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Work Made for Hire"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/work-made-for-hire" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/work-made-for-hire",
  "name": "Work Made for Hire",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/work-made-for-hire",
  "description": "A work is a \"work made for hire\" under US copyright law (17 U.S.C. Section 101) when it falls into one of two categories: (1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of their employment, or (2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use in one of nine specific categories (a contribution to a collective work, part of a motion picture or audiovisual work, a translation, a supplementary work, a compilation, an instructional text, a test, answer material for a test, or an atlas) where the parties expressly agree in a signed written instrument that the work is a work made for hire. Under 17 U.S.C. Section 201(b), the employer or commissioning party -- not the individual who actually created the work -- is treated in law as the \"author\" and default owner of the copyright, unless the parties have agreed otherwise in writing. This is distinct from a copyright assignment: an assignment transfers rights the creator originally held; work-made-for-hire status means the creator never held authorship or copyright in the work to begin with.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/compliance-regulatory#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/work-made-for-hire",
  "sameAs": [],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-23T07:13:35",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

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