Intellectual property: yours or your employer's?

A golf club manufacturer surely would fire an employee who walks out of the plant at the end of the day with a club under his coat. Although the employee may have made the club on the assembly line, it belongs to the company because the company paid the employee to make it.

But what happens to an employee who walks out of an office at the end of the day with a computer program tucked in his brief case? The employee may have written the program, but it still belongs to the company because it paid the employee to write the program.

The products created by many companies in the information age are intellectual property. Computer programmers, technical writers, paralegals, designers, researchers, and other knowledge workers all create intellectual property in the course of their day-today work. Companies that pay employees to produce such intellectual property need to protect their ownership of that property.

Who Owns What?

The rights to any work automatically belongs to the "author" of the work. The author usually is the person who creates the work. Under the U.S. copyright law's work-made-for-hire doctrine, however, the author may be the company contracting for the work or employing the person who created the work.

If, for example, a person is hired by a company to write a computer program, who owns the rights to the program? The answer to that question depends on whether the programmer is an employee of the company or an independent contractor.

If the programmer is an employee and created the work as part of his or her job, then the employer - not the employee - is the author of the work under the work-made-for-hire doctrine. The rights to any work created by an employee for an employer are owned automatically by the employer.