Brand, Marketing
& Creative Agencies

Yes, in most cases. Work-for-hire applies automatically only to employees, not to agency-client relationships, so without a written assignment the agency owns the work at creation. The fix is two clauses: a clear assignment of copyright, and a payment trigger that holds back ownership until invoices are paid in full. The U.S. Copyright Office's Circular 30 confirms that for commissioned work, the parties must expressly agree in a signed writing that the work is made for hire, and only nine narrow categories qualify. Ad copy, branding, and most agency deliverables are not on that list.

Probably not, unless the prospect signed an NDA or copied your specific expression. U.S. copyright law protects the expression of an idea, not the underlying idea itself, which is why competing agencies routinely arrive at similar concepts independently. The protective layer is contractual, not statutory: a mutual NDA before sharing, copyright and confidentiality notices on every page of the deck, or a paid pitch fee that converts the work into compensated services with defined IP terms.

Without a written work-for-hire or assignment agreement, the freelancer is correct. Payment alone does not transfer copyright in the United States. Per the U.S. Copyright Office's Circular 30, commissioned work qualifies as work made for hire only if it falls into one of nine specific categories and the parties signed a written agreement before the work began. There is sometimes an implied-license defense, but it is a defense, meaning litigation cost to assert. The cleaner fix is a signed contractor agreement on every project.

The agency shares legal liability with the brand and the creator when disclosure fails. Per the FTC's Endorsement Guides FAQ, advertisers and the agencies they hire are responsible for the conduct of endorsers they pay or otherwise materially connect with, including monitoring active campaigns. Disclosures must be clear and conspicuous in both caption and audio or on-screen text. Platform tools like TikTok's "creator earns commission" badge or Meta's "Paid Partnership" tag have been ruled insufficient on their own in 2025 NAD decisions. Affiliate links and free products count as material connections.

Work-for-hire is a copyright term of art, not a billing description, and it applies in only two situations. Per 17 U.S.C. § 101, a work qualifies if it was created by an employee within the scope of employment, or if it was specially commissioned in writing AND falls into one of nine listed categories (collective works, motion pictures, translations, supplementary works, compilations, instructional texts, tests, test answers, atlases). Ad copy, branding, illustration, and most agency deliverables are not on the list, which is why the cleaner mechanism is a written assignment of copyright rather than relying on the work-for-hire label.

Do not respond on letterhead until counsel has reviewed the chain of title and the fair-use posture. Most Higbee, PicRights, and Pixsy demands rely on a registered copyright and a statutory-damages calculation that includes a fair-use analysis under 17 U.S.C. § 107. The agency's first move is to pull the original license or work-for-hire documentation from the client and confirm whether the photo was actually cleared. If it wasn't, settlement is usually faster and cheaper than the demand suggests, and counter-notice strategy is available when the use was transformative.

High, even if the voice is synthesized rather than recorded. California's Civil Code § 3344 makes it a violation to knowingly use a person's name, voice, signature, photograph, or likeness for advertising without consent, and the recently amended SB 683 (effective January 1, 2026) added injunction and recall remedies on top of the existing $750-or-actual-damages floor plus attorneys' fees. The federal NO FAKES Act and pending state synthetic-performer laws (New York's bill is awaiting signature) layer on additional disclosure and consent requirements. The fix is a written license from the rights holder before the ad ships.

The trademark belongs to the party offering the goods or services under that brand, which is almost always the client, not the agency. Per USPTO trademark basics, the applicant must be using the mark in commerce or have a bona fide intent to use it, which is the client's status, not the agency's. Most agency contracts assign trademark rights to the client at delivery, contingent on payment. Filing the federal application is a separate decision, often handled by the client's counsel or scoped into the agency engagement as a pass-through service.

Usually no, not without a separate license. Most font and typeface licenses are per-user or per-workstation, and they cover the agency's use in creating deliverables but do not extend to the client's downstream commercial use on packaging, marketing materials, or product surfaces. Foundry agreements like Adobe Fonts, Monotype, and Hoefler & Co. typically require a separate end-user license for the client. The cleaner workflow is to either route the client to license the font directly or scope a font-license-acquisition step into the engagement contract.

At minimum: an independent contractor agreement with written work-for-hire language and a backup full assignment, an NDA covering confidential client material, and a portfolio-rights carve-out the agency negotiated up front rather than discovered later. Per the U.S. Copyright Office's Circular 30, contractor work qualifies as work made for hire only when both parties sign a written agreement before the work begins and the work falls into one of nine eligible categories, so the assignment language is the load-bearing fallback when the work-for-hire test fails.

It depends on what was signed before the pitch landed in their inbox. If a mutual NDA was in place, the client is bound by the confidentiality obligations and cannot share the deck with a competing agency without your consent. If no NDA was signed, copyright protection still attaches to the deck's specific expression at creation, but ideas in the deck remain free to use. The protective layer most agencies miss is a signed pitch-fee or limited-use agreement that converts the pitch into a paid engagement with defined IP terms.

Both, depending on which side of the relationship you're operating on. This page covers the brand-side: agencies that build campaigns, brand identities, and run influencer programs paid for by brand clients. Talent-agency work like commission agreements, California Talent Agencies Act compliance, fiduciary duties to the talent, sunset commissions, and key-person clauses is covered on Talent Agencies & Management Firms. If you administer brand-funded sponsorships for talent the brand is paying, stay here for the brand-deal templates. If you represent the talent for percentage commission across multiple brand engagements, the talent-agency page is the better fit.

This page covers the brand-side templates you push out to creators on behalf of brand clients. The creator-side work, drafting templates the creator owns, FTC disclosure for the creator's own account, content licensing for the creator's catalog, and advisor and equity deals between the creator and brands, is covered on Influencers & Social Media Creators in the Creators, Artists & Influencers hub. Agencies that run both sides of this work usually use both pages: this one for the brand templates, and that one for the creator templates.