You asked your legal, copyright, and trademark questions, and Jean has answered! All questions are culled from the comments section attached to the original ‘Ask Jean’ post. We invite you to ask more questions.

Hi Jean,

For the past six years I’ve developed the print design department of a small company. There was just me and the computer doing the creative and production work, and the boss facilitating with infrastructure and a wage. I got tired of the office politics, left that company and started my own. Many customers have come with me. My question is, who owns the customer files? If the old company wants to sell them, is that legal, and what are they worth? This is a small community and a lot of goodwill is at stake here. But I don’t want to sacrifice more than I have to.
Thanks for any help you can provide!
Sue

Dear Sue,

If you were an employee of your old company, all the work you did for them for their customers belongs to them as work made for hire. If the customers were given the files and the company transferred the rights to them in writing, then the customer owns its own files. But, if not, the company owns them. The old company can sell the files it owns to anyone who wants to buy them and they are worth what someone wants to pay for them. My advice would be to have to clients ask for their files and pay the difference between what they already paid and whatever the company would have charged them for a full buyout of the rights when they first hired the company to do the work. That way, you stay out of the transaction; the customer gets its files and can do what it wants with them.
Best,
Jean

This entry was posted on Monday, September 8th, 2008 at 10:51 am and is filed under Intellectual Property, RESOURCES. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.