If an outside company or a freelancer built your website, they own the copyright in the words, the pictures and the code they made. It becomes yours only after they sign something that hands it over. Paying the invoice does not move the copyright on its own.
The person who made it owns it until they sign it over
The law is short on this. Section 201(a) of the Copyright Act says copyright “vests initially in the author or authors of the work.” That text sits on the Copyright Office site under Copyright Law of the United States, Chapter 2. That page carries no update date.
The Copyright Office spells out what that means for a website. Circular 66, Copyright Registration of Websites and Website Content, revised March 2021, says: “If a third party hires an individual as an independent contractor to develop a website or content for a website, the contractor is considered the author and copyright owner of the work, not the hiring party.” The same paragraph says the hiring party “would have to acquire all the exclusive rights in the work through a signed written agreement with the contractor.”
Section 204(a) sets the bar for that paper. A transfer of copyright ownership, other than by operation of law, “is not valid unless an instrument of conveyance, or a note or memorandum of the transfer, is in writing and signed by the owner of the rights conveyed or such owner’s duly authorized agent.”
In writing, and signed by them or by someone they have authorized to sign for them. A text message saying it is all yours is thin.
This is not legal advice. Contracts are governed by state law. Have your own attorney read yours before you rely on it.
Work made for hire on the invoice may do nothing
Plenty of web contracts carry the phrase “work made for hire.” It has a narrow meaning in the statute and it does not stretch.
Section 101 gives two ways a work is made for hire. One is a work prepared by an employee “within the scope of his or her employment.” The other is a work specially ordered or commissioned that falls into one of nine listed kinds, if the parties “expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them” that it is a work made for hire.
The nine kinds are a contribution to a collective work, a 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, and an atlas.
A plumbing website is not named on that list. Parts of a site might be argued into “compilation” or “contribution to a collective work.” That argument is a job for an attorney, not for a paragraph on a website.
Circular 30, Works Made for Hire, revised August 2024, sets four conditions for a commissioned work and then says: “If a work fails to satisfy any of these requirements, it is not a work made for hire.”
There is a second trap. Section 201(b) says the employer in a work made for hire owns “all of the rights comprised in the copyright” unless a signed written agreement says otherwise. If the person who typed your pages is on staff at the web firm, the firm owns the work. Not the typist, and still not you.
Most of what people argue about is not protected anyway
Circular 66 is blunt about the limits. “A website is not explicitly recognized as a type of copyrightable subject matter under the Copyright Act.” A site can be registered as a compilation or a collective work if its selection and arrangement is creative enough.
The same circular lists what is not protected on a website: “ideas or plans for future websites; functional design elements; domain names or URLs; the layout, format, or ‘look and feel’ of a web page; or other common, unoriginal material such as names, icons, or familiar symbols.”
Read that twice. The layout and the look and feel, which is what most people mean by “my design,” are not protected. The Office also “generally will refuse claims consisting solely of style sheet languages,” the files that hold a site’s colors and spacing.
What is left is still worth owning: your written pages, your photos, your logo artwork, and code a human actually wrote.
Copyright is also not control. Whoever holds the domain and the logins runs the live site, whatever the copyright says on paper. Those checks are set out in how to find out who owns your website.
The one page to ask for
Ask for a short assignment, signed and dated. It needs five things.
- Assign all copyright in the text, images and code made for your business to your business.
- Carry the signature of the company or the person who made the work.
- Name the work, by domain and by the pages built.
- Cover anyone they hired, including the writer, the photographer and the designer.
- Come with a copy of the files and a list of anything licensed rather than owned.
That last line matters. Circular 66 says third-party content “typically belongs to the author of the content unless there is a valid written and signed transfer of ownership of all rights.” A stock photo license is not that transfer, so it is not ownership. If a letter ever lands about a picture on your pages, that license is the first thing anybody asks for, which is covered in what to do about a photo demand letter.
Ask for the assignment before the work starts, not after it sours. If you are still comparing quotes, the two pages that spell out a build and its terms are what gets built and the monthly plans.
Registering it, and when to skip that
Owning a copyright and registering one are different things. You own it the moment the work exists. Registering is an optional filing.
Circular 4, Copyright Office Fees, revised November 2024, puts the standard electronic filing fee at $65 for a basic claim. It drops to $45 if you register one work, you are the only author and claimant, and it is not made for hire. A site a contractor built and then assigned to you does not fit that, so $65 is the figure to plan around. Recording the assignment document is a separate $95 filed electronically.
Here is the part nobody selling this will tell you. For most local trade businesses, registering the website is not worth doing. Circular 66 says each new version of a site is generally a separate work, and that a claim in a compilation or a collective work “does not cover previous or subsequent iterations of the same website.” Add one service page and the filing is behind. Get the signed assignment instead.
That is a general read of the circulars, not legal advice. Whether your situation calls for a filing is a question for your own attorney in your state.
What to do this week
- Open your contract and search it for four words: assign, assignment, hire, and license.
- If none of them appear, email whoever built the site and ask for a one-page signed assignment. Put it in writing, not on a call.
- Ask in the same email for a copy of the files and a list of anything licensed.
- If they refuse, price the alternative before you argue. Get a quote for new text and new photos, page by page at what a page should cost, then weigh that against a fight over a layout that may not be protected.
- Before you sign with anyone new, get the assignment into the contract. Nobody argues about it before the work starts.
Every legal claim above traces to the Copyright Act or to a Copyright Office circular, each named and dated where it is used. The checklist is practical, not statutory. None of it replaces an attorney in your state reading your contract.