Websites: who owns the intellectual property?

It is very easy to be caught up with the stunning design or exciting technology of your new website.  But it is just as easy to commission a new website only to discover that you don’t own the intellectual property in the design, content and coding of the site.

This often only comes to light when, perhaps some time later, you fall out with the developers and wish to take the site to a new developer and re-use some elements of the design, content or coding.

Copyright is the intellectual property right that will protect the design, the look and feel of the website, the navigation menus, graphics, images, the text or content of each page, and/or any animations.  Similar protection will also apply to the hidden coding in HTML, javascript or other programming language, which the browser reads and interprets to display the webpage on the screen. 

The underlying issue is that the copyright in the various elements of the site will belong to the person who is commissioned to create those elements, unless you agree specifically that this not to be the case.  If the person who creates the elements in question is an employee and he/she is doing so in the course of their employment, then the copyright will belong to that person’s employer in the first instance.

This means that if you engage a third party web developer to create your new website then any elements that are designed or written by the developers (or their employees) will belong to the developers rather than you.  The developers will therefore have the right to prevent you from copying or re-using these protected elements of your design.  Whilst this may not cause any practical difficulties at the outset, it may limit the extent to which you can continue to use those elements if you change to a new developer.

Of course, if you or your employees write the text, create the images or take the photographs which the developers then incorporate into the website, the copyright in these items will belong to you and you will be entitled to use these elements without restriction.