The FAR® Blog

Who owns the copyright to your business logo? You, or the graphic artist who created the image? And does it make any difference if you came up with the idea for the logo design yourself, or if it’s a product of the graphic designer’s imagination?

In general, copyright belongs solely to the person who is the author of a work – the artist who first fixed the image in a tangible medium by drawing it or printing it out of a computer. Many people think that graphic design work is considered work-for-hire under the U.S. Copyright Law, and therefore is the property of the person commissioning  the work. But the work-for-hire copyright rules are much narrower than you might think, and don’t apply to most contracted graphic arts work.

Graphic arts is not the only area where the question of work-for-hire copyright rules comes up. Many of the world’s greatest paintings and sculptures are commissioned works, including a famous Rembrandt painting – the Night Watch, a portrait of a corporate board of directors, which hangs in the Rijksmuseum. Portraits of children, spouses, organization leaders, pets and houses continue to be key bread-and-butter work for many artists. But who owns the rights to these commissioned images?

In this article, attorney and Fine Art Registry legal analyst Cindy Hill takes a close look at the work-for-hire copyright law, walking step by step through the law relating to commissions and work for hire. Whether you are an artist who is commissioned or employed to create artwork under the direction of a customer or a boss, or whether you are in some other business looking to employ an artist to produce anything from a logo to a corporate lobby painting or board of directors portrait, you will want to know who owns the rights to that image and what can legally be done with it, before you enter into your artist-customer contract.

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