When Your Website Doesn’t Belong To You

Picture the scene. You ask an independent consultancy to design your new website, including special software. You pay for it.

A couple of years later, you decide to re-design the website yourself. The independent consultancy tells you that you are infringing its copyright in the software.

What do they mean, you’ve paid for it, how can you be infringing anything?

Generally, where an in-house employee of a company designs a website or a computer program and this falls within the person’s job description, the copyright belongs to the employer.

However, if a self-employed worker has been engaged to write a computer program and there was no licence agreement saying otherwise, that person will own the copyright. The same goes for outside software consultancies and design companies.