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Who Owns Your Creative Work: In-House or Outsourced
A mid-sized creative agency runs on two tracks. An in-house design team produces day-to-day social content, while a roster of freelance photographers and illustrators gets brought in for bigger campaigns. When the agency lands a major rebrand and later wants to license parts of that campaign to a new client, someone finally asks the question nobody settled at the outset: who actually owns each piece of it, the in-house designer’s layouts, the freelance photographer’s final shots, the illustrator’s character art? The honest answer depends on more than who happened to be on payroll versus who submitted an invoice.
Philippine copyright law does not treat “we made this in-house” and “we hired someone to make this” as the same question with the same answer.¹ It asks a more specific sequence: is the person who made the work genuinely an employee or an independent contractor? If an employee, was making that kind of work actually part of the job? And if neither answer gives the business the rights it needs, is there a clear written document that does?
The Relationship Behind the Work Decides the Rule That Applies
An earlier piece on this site covered what happens when a business commissions creative work from an independent creator: the commissioner owns the physical work, but copyright stays with the creator unless there is a written stipulation to the contrary.² A large share of creative output inside a business is not commissioned at all. It is made by people the business directly employs, and the IP Code treats that situation differently from the ground up.
Employees Own What’s Outside Their Job, Employers Own What’s Inside It
For work created by an employee during and in the course of employment, copyright belongs to the employee if creating that kind of work is not part of their regular duties, even if company time and materials were used. It belongs to the employer if the work results from the employee’s regularly-assigned duties, unless there is an agreement, express or implied, saying otherwise.³
A 2025 Supreme Court case shows how much can ride on that distinction. An engineer at an engineering firm spent years building software while employed there, and a dispute eventually arose over whether the programs belonged to him or to the company.⁴ His employment agreements as Junior and then Senior Engineer never listed software development among his duties, and there was no separate agreement addressing who would own programs he created. The Intellectual Property Office ultimately determined that the programs were his. The dispute that reached the Supreme Court in 2025 was actually about a different question, whether the company had validly placed him on preventive suspension while the ownership question was still unresolved, and the Court upheld that suspension. The Court was not ruling on copyright ownership itself; it was recounting the earlier IPOPHL determination as part of the history of the labor dispute. Even so, the underlying lesson for business owners holds. A company that assumes ownership simply because work was created on the job, using company resources, for a company project, can still find that assumption tested in practice if the employment contract never actually said so. Job descriptions and employment contracts should specifically state that content, design, or software creation is part of a role, rather than leaving it to a catch-all phrase like “other duties as assigned.”
Calling Someone a Freelancer Doesn’t Make Them One
Which default rule applies, the employee rule or the commissioned-work rule, depends on the real nature of the working relationship, not the label written on a contract. Philippine courts determine whether an employment relationship exists using a four-part test: how the person was engaged, how they were paid, who can dismiss them, and, most heavily weighted, who controls the actual means and methods of their work.⁵
Two contrasting media cases illustrate this well. A television and radio personality negotiating his own fees and controlling his own on-air performance was found to be a genuine independent contractor, since the network was interested in the result of his work, not the method.⁶ Cameramen the same network had labeled as “talent,” by contrast, were found to be employees, because the company controlled their schedules, assignments, and equipment, and paid them directly as staff.⁷ The label in the paperwork did not decide the outcome in either case. A business that treats someone as a freelancer on paper while directing their day-to-day work the way it would an employee may find that the relationship, and the ownership consequences that come with it, reads differently than the contract intended.
For productions and performer engagements, classification is only one part of the analysis. Our guide to talent agreements in the Philippines explains how worker status, performers’ rights, identity use, and later commercial reuse may interact within the same engagement.
An Agency Can’t Give a Client Rights It Never Secured for Itself
The same principle scales up when a brand works through an agency rather than directly with a creator. If the agency’s own staff produced the work as part of their regular duties, the agency owns the copyright by default and can pass it on to the client. If the agency instead brought in freelance photographers, illustrators, or writers for the project, those individuals retain copyright under the same rule that applies to any commissioned work, unless the agency secured a written assignment from each of them. A brand’s contract with its agency is only as strong as the agency’s own paperwork with everyone who actually touched the work. Philippine authorities have generally read a clearly worded written agreement as sufficient to transfer these rights, even without highly technical language, which makes securing that writing at every step of the chain a matter of habit rather than legal complexity.⁸
What This Means for Contracts and Agency Agreements
For businesses with in-house creative staff, the fix is in the job description and employment contract: name the categories of creative work the role is expected to produce, rather than relying on general language, and pair that with a written assignment of rights and a moral-rights waiver for anything that might fall outside the stated duties. For businesses that work through agencies, the fix is a representation from the agency confirming it holds valid, written assignments from every contributor to the project, not just a general statement that the agency “owns” the deliverables. And once ownership of a piece of creative work, particularly a logo, mascot, or other brand mark, has actually been secured, registering that asset as a trademark is a separate, complementary step worth considering, especially for a brand expanding internationally. That protection is not limited to traditional logos either, since Philippine trademark practice now also covers newer, non-traditional mark types such as sounds, motion, or distinctive packaging, depending on what the brand asset actually is.
Republic Act No. 11904 has already recognized creative freelancers as a group whose working conditions deserve dedicated attention, assigning that mandate to a standing welfare committee under the Philippine Creative Industries Development Council.⁹ That policy attention reflects the same reality this article has walked through: a business’s creative output increasingly runs through a mix of employees, freelancers, and agencies, and getting the paperwork right at each link is what actually determines who owns the result.
AJA Law advises businesses on both sides of these arrangements, from structuring employment contracts and job descriptions that clearly capture creative duties, to reviewing agency agreements for the chain-of-title protection a brand actually needs. If your business runs a mix of in-house and outsourced creative work and has not had those contracts reviewed, our intellectual property and employment team is glad to help you close the gap before it becomes a dispute.
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Footnotes
- Republic Act No. 8293, Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines, Sections 178.3 and 178.4.
- Republic Act No. 8293, Section 178.4. See AJA Law, “Paying for Creative Work Doesn’t Mean You Own It” (September 2026).
- Republic Act No. 8293, Section 178.3(a) and (b).
- Santiago dJ. Sillano v. JGC Philippines, Inc., G.R. No. 273562, Supreme Court, February 24, 2025.
- ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corporation v. Tajanlangit, et al., G.R. No. 219508, Supreme Court, September 14, 2021, discussing the four-fold test.
- Sonza v. ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corp., G.R. No. 138051, Supreme Court, June 10, 2004.
- ABS-CBN Broadcasting Corporation v. Tajanlangit, et al., G.R. No. 219508, Supreme Court, September 14, 2021.
- Venus Lubrin v. Glenn “Coco” Dela Cruz, IPOPHL Bureau of Legal Affairs, IPV No. 10-2007-00010, Decision No. 2011-01, February 15, 2011; Republic Act No. 8293, Section 180.
- Republic Act No. 11904, Philippine Creative Industries Development Act, Section 5 (Creative Workers’ Welfare Standing Committee).
