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Ownership of written work

Who owns company documentation written by staff or contractors?

Updated

A buyer licensing a knowledge base will ask who wrote it. The answer turns on whether each writer was an employee, a contractor or someone outside the company.

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Employees in the United States

Under 17 U.S.C. 201(b), the employer or other person a work made for hire was prepared for is treated as its author and owns all the rights, unless both sides agreed otherwise in a written instrument they signed. The Copyright Office's Circular 30 covers a work an employee prepared within the scope of employment.

Source: Knowledge base legal protection

Employees in the United Kingdom

Section 11 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 makes the employer the first owner of copyright in a work an employee makes in the course of employment, subject to any agreement to the contrary.

Source: Knowledge base legal protection

Contractors and freelancers

17 U.S.C. 204 makes a transfer of copyright invalid unless it is in writing and signed by the owner, and section 90 of the UK Act says the same of an assignment. Pages a freelancer wrote stay theirs until such a document exists.

Source: Knowledge base legal protection

Next for your knowledge base

The database right in the collection is covered on is a company wiki a trade secret.

Describe the knowledge base your company wrote

14 of the 20 docs and wiki vendors we read say the pages are yours. Tell us where yours are kept and who wrote them, and we will reply about them: a licence while you trade, a sale of a closing company's pages, or a partner route.

The pages

What is most of the knowledge base?

  • One person reads each knowledge base enquiry
  • No docs tool on the board learns what you told us
  • Keep page text and file exports out of the form

Sources

This site's own datasets, every figure quoted from its source and dated:

  • Who takes written company knowledge for AI: 9 of 17 organisations whose pages we read name documents, articles or other written content among what they take, read 28 October 2026.
  • What protects a company knowledge base in law: 15 provisions of US and UK law on who owns and what protects a company's written knowledge, each quoted from the statute, the court or the authority's own page, read 27 October 2026.
  • Knowledge base software data terms: 3 of 20 knowledge base software vendors whose terms we read reserve the right to use their customers' data in aggregated or anonymised form, read 28 October 2026.
  1. Atlassian Product-Specific Terms (Confluence)
  2. Atlassian AI Trust Center
  3. Confluence, export content to Word, PDF, HTML and XML
  4. Notion Master Subscription Agreement
  5. Notion AI Learning and Early Access Program Terms
  6. Notion privacy practices
  7. Notion EU Data Act FAQ
  8. Guru Terms of Service

Ask what your knowledge base could be licensed as

14 of the 20 docs and wiki vendors we read say the pages are yours. Tell us where yours are kept and who wrote them, and we will reply about them: a licence while you trade, a sale of a closing company's pages, or a partner route.

Ask about my knowledge base
Ask about my knowledge base