- Paying someone for creative work does not transfer copyright to you. In the United Kingdom an assignment is not effective unless it is in writing signed by the assignor, under section 90(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
- Where the work was generated by AI, there may be no copyright for anyone to assign. The United States Copyright Office concluded in January 2025 that prompts alone do not make a user the author of the output.
- The United Kingdom reaches a different answer through section 9(3), which treats the author of a computer generated work as the person who made the arrangements for its creation.
- If you register the work in the United States, you have a duty to disclose AI generated content and to exclude anything more than de minimis from the claim.
- A knowing failure to disclose can get a registration cancelled, and a court may disregard the registration in an infringement action.
- The practical loss is not the paperwork. It is that an unprotected logo or product photo cannot be used to stop a copycat.
You paid 900 pounds for a logo and a set of twenty product descriptions. The files arrived on time and they are good. Three months later a competitor appears with a mark that is close enough to confuse your customers, and your solicitor asks the question you had not thought about: what exactly do you own?
The answer depends on two separate things that most people merge into one. First, whether the freelancer transferred anything to you. Second, whether there was anything there to transfer. AI changed the second question and left the first one exactly where it was.
That your freelancer used AI somewhere in the job is now the normal case rather than the suspicious one, which is precisely why it needs a process rather than a reaction. Commissioned work has always carried a paperwork problem that nobody noticed while the paperwork was unnecessary. Generative tools did not create the gap. They made it visible, and in one jurisdiction they widened it.
One term to clear out of the way first, because it causes more confusion here than anything else. Work for hire is a United States concept with a narrow statutory definition, and a freelance commission usually does not qualify for it unless the work falls into one of the listed categories and there is a signed agreement saying so. Writing the phrase into an invoice does not make it true, and relying on it is how buyers end up with neither ownership nor a licence they can describe.
Did your freelancer transfer the copyright when they invoiced you?
No, not by default, and this was true long before any of this. An independent contractor is not an employee. Unless there is a written assignment, the creator keeps the copyright and you have an implied licence to use the work for the purpose you commissioned it for, which is narrower than ownership and very often narrower than what you assumed you bought.
In the United Kingdom the rule is blunt. Section 90(3) of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 states that an assignment of copyright is not effective unless it is in writing signed by or on behalf of the assignor. The same section allows a partial assignment, limited to some of the exclusive rights or to part of the term, which is how a photographer can hand you web use while keeping print.
So the first failure mode has nothing to do with AI. It is a purchase order, a PayPal receipt and no deed of assignment, repeated across thousands of small businesses that believe paying an invoice is the same as buying an asset.
Can AI generated work be owned by anyone at all?
In the United States, not unless a human contributed enough expression. The Copyright Office published Part 2 of its artificial intelligence report on 29 January 2025, and its summary of the conclusion is narrow and quotable: outputs of generative AI can be protected only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. That covers a human authored work being perceptible inside the output, or a human making creative arrangements or modifications of it. The mere provision of prompts does not count.
Read that against how your freelancer probably worked. If they wrote a careful brief, generated forty variations, picked one and shipped it, the Office's position is that the selection of an output is not authorship of it. If they generated a base, redrew the curves, rebuilt the type and composed the lockup, there is human expression in the result and the protected part is that contribution.
The courts have gone the same way on the extreme case. In Thaler v Perlmutter, decided on 18 March 2025, the District of Columbia Circuit held that an AI system cannot be the author. The panel reasoned from what a machine cannot do, noting it cannot own property, hold a nationality or sign its name, and that copyright terms tied to an author's life cannot apply to something that was never alive. The court was careful about what it was not deciding: it left open the position where a person who used the tool lists themselves as the author.
Why does the United Kingdom give a different answer?
Because it wrote a rule for this in 1988, before anyone needed it. Section 9(3) of the same Act says that for a computer generated literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work, the author is taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken.
That sentence does work the American position refuses to do. It names an author for output with no human expressive input, and it points at whoever set the thing up. On a plain reading, the freelancer who ran the generation made the arrangements, which lands authorship on them rather than on you, and sends you straight back to needing a signed assignment.
Two things stop this from being a clean win. The provision has barely been litigated, so nobody can tell you with confidence how a court would apply it to a modern hosted model where the arrangements are split between the user who typed the prompt and the company that trained the system. And it does not travel. A mark you can defend in Britain and cannot register in the United States is a mark with a hole in it if you sell to both.
The same deliverable in two jurisdictions
Nobody publishes this side by side, so here it is. The rows are the realistic ways a freelancer actually works, not legal categories.
| How the work was made | United States position | United Kingdom position | What you should do |
|---|---|---|---|
| Drawn by hand, no AI | Protected, freelancer is author | Protected, freelancer is author | Signed assignment, nothing unusual |
| Prompted, output used as delivered | Not protected, prompts are not enough | Arguably protected under section 9(3), author is whoever made the arrangements | Assume no protection in the United States and price accordingly |
| Prompted, then materially reworked by hand | Human contribution protected, AI portion is not | Protected, human authorship is the straightforward route | Get the rework described in writing, it defines what you own |
| Your own sketch fed in as a reference | Your work remains protected where it is perceptible in the output | Your work remains protected | Keep the sketch and its date, it is evidence |
| Nobody will say how it was made | Unknown and unregistrable without a disclosure | Unknown, and your assignment may be from the wrong person | Treat silence as a defect and ask before final payment |
The bottom row is the common one and the one worth dwelling on. Most freelancers are not hiding anything sinister. They use the tools the way everybody now uses them, nobody asked, and so nobody recorded it. The absence of an answer is not evidence of a problem, and it is still a gap in an asset you paid for.
What does an unprotected logo actually cost you?
Nothing at all, until the day it costs you everything you were relying on it for. Copyright is not a certificate you frame. It is the instrument you use to make somebody stop.
Without it, three ordinary situations change. A copycat using a near identical mark cannot be answered with a copyright claim, so you are left with trademark rights if you registered any, and passing off or unfair competition if you can evidence confusion. A marketplace takedown form that asks for the basis of your claim becomes a form you cannot complete honestly. And a buyer doing diligence on your business will ask for the chain of title on your brand assets, which is the moment a missing assignment stops being an abstraction and becomes a price reduction.
Trademark is the separate and more useful lever for a brand mark, and it does not care who drew the thing. We went through that split in what you can and cannot claim over an AI generated logo, and the short version is that registering the mark protects your use of it in trade even where the drawing itself carries no copyright.
What should the contract say?
Four clauses, and none of them require a lawyer to draft from scratch. What they require is being in the document before the work starts rather than after it goes wrong.
- A present assignment of all copyright in the deliverables, in writing, signed. Not a licence, not a promise to assign later. Section 90(3) means an unsigned intention is worth nothing, and a promise to assign on request is worth whatever the freelancer's goodwill is worth in two years.
- A disclosure obligation on AI use. Ask which tools were used, for which elements, and at what stage. You are not asking in order to object. You are asking because you cannot describe what you own without the answer, and because a United States registration will require it.
- A warranty that the work does not infringe, with the AI carve out written honestly. A freelancer cannot warrant that a model's output infringes nothing, because they cannot see the training data. Asking for an absolute warranty gets you a signature on a promise nobody can keep. Asking them to warrant their own inputs and licences is enforceable.
- Delivery of the working files and the licence receipts. Layered source, fonts, stock licences, model releases. This is the clause that turns a flat image into an asset you can edit, defend and hand to the next designer.
If you are commissioning software rather than artwork, the same logic applies and the stakes are higher, because a site you cannot edit is a site you rent. The reason we push people towards software you can inspect, in a repository you control is the same reason the working files clause matters here. A deliverable you cannot open is a dependency with an invoice attached. Supplier paperwork is worth reading properly before you sign it, and our notes on reading supplier terms with AI without outsourcing the judgement cover the mechanics of that review.
What happens if you register it in the United States?
You take on a disclosure duty, and the consequences of getting it wrong are concrete. The Copyright Office's registration guidance, published in the Federal Register on 16 March 2023, puts two obligations on the applicant. One is a duty to disclose the inclusion of AI generated content in anything submitted for registration. The other is to explain, briefly, what the human author actually contributed.
Mechanically, you describe the human contribution in the Author Created field, and AI generated content that is more than de minimis is explicitly excluded from the application, described in the Limitation of the Claim section. That second step is the one applicants skip, because excluding part of your own work feels like giving something away. It is not. It is the difference between a registration that survives scrutiny and one that does not.
The guidance is equally clear on the downside. The Office may take steps to cancel a registration where information essential to its evaluation of registrability was omitted entirely from the application. Separately, a court may disregard a registration in an infringement action if it concludes that the applicant knowingly provided inaccurate information and the accurate information would have resulted in a refusal.
If you have already filed or registered without mentioning AI, the guidance tells you what to do rather than leaving you stuck. For a pending application, contact the Copyright Office's Public Information Office and report the omission. For a completed registration, file a supplementary registration to correct the record. Both are cheaper than the alternative, which is discovering the problem in the middle of an enforcement action you started.
What about the parts of the file that are not copyright?
They are often the ones that bite first, and the AI question is irrelevant to all of them. Running the draft through a checker settles nothing either, for the reasons set out in what an AI detector score can actually prove.
A font has a licence, and a desktop licence does not cover embedding the face in a mobile app or a web font. Stock elements carry their own terms, some of which exclude use in a logo or on merchandise specifically. If a face appears in a generated image, the likeness question is live whether or not a camera was involved, which we worked through in what permission an AI generated model image actually needs. And none of these are discoverable from looking at the finished file, which is exactly why the licence receipts clause exists.
When does none of this matter?
More often than a lawyer will tell you, and it is worth being honest about where the line sits.
If the deliverable is twenty product descriptions, you are not going to enforce copyright in them against anyone, and nobody is going to copy them. They are functional text, they will be rewritten within eighteen months, and the real risk sits elsewhere: whether the claims in them are accurate and whether they trip a marketplace rule. If the deliverable is a social post, a seasonal banner or an email template, the same applies.
Where it matters is the small set of assets your business is actually built on. The brand mark. The packaging artwork. The photography you shot once and will use for five years. The illustration style a customer recognises before they read your name. For those, the paperwork is proportionate and the absence of it is a real exposure.
So triage rather than panic. Make a list of the creative assets you would be upset to lose control of, which for most small sellers is between three and eight items. For each one, find out who made it, when, with what tools, and whether anything was signed. The ones with gaps are your to do list, and you fix them by asking the original freelancer for a signed assignment now, while they still remember you fondly and the sum involved is small.
What to do this week
Write to the people who made your brand assets and ask two questions: will you sign a short assignment confirming the transfer, and which parts, if any, were generated with an AI tool. Send both in the same message so the second question reads as housekeeping rather than an accusation, which is what it is.
Then fix the template you use for the next commission, because every job you brief from here is either going to carry these four clauses or repeat the problem. The cost of adding them is one afternoon. The cost of not having them shows up on the day somebody copies the one thing you could not afford to have copied.