Who owns your logo? Probably not the company that paid for it

Last weekend I found that several logos I had delivered were still mine.

I was writing a piece about copyright in logos. Halfway through I decided to go through my own files, more out of habit than concern.

Several projects from this year. Designed, delivered, invoiced, paid. And in none of them a single line about transferring the rights.

Which means those logos were still legally mine. Not because anything went wrong, but because something was missing.

That same afternoon I drew up the deeds and sent them out. This piece is about what is actually going on in that situation, and why the odds are it applies to you too.

Four moments when it gets expensive

While the logo is simply in use, nobody notices anything. There is no error message and no letter arrives. It starts to bite at four moments, and all four come out of growth.

At a change to the design. You want the logo modernised, or worked up by a party other than the original maker. Whoever holds the copyright can object to the work being adapted. In practice that means a conversation with someone you may have stopped working with years ago.

At a trademark filing. You want to register the mark with the Benelux Office. The maker can oppose it, because filing a mark based on work they hold the rights to affects their position.

At expansion. A second entity is added, or an acquired business carries on under the same flag. The original right of use does not automatically stretch that far, because it applied to the purpose the work was commissioned for.

At a sale. This is the expensive one. Due diligence maps out the intellectual property. If it turns out the rights to the mark were never transferred, that lands on the table at the moment price is being discussed. And the buyer then knows you cannot repair it without a third party's cooperation.

What those four have in common: the problem is created years earlier and becomes visible at the moment there is a deadline.

Paying the invoice does not make you the owner

Article 2 of the Dutch Copyright Act places copyright with the maker. Not with the party who commissions the work, and not with the party who pays for it.

That feels counterintuitive. You buy a machine and it is yours. You buy a logo and what you have is a right of use.

The payment counts as compensation for the work. If you want the rights as well, that has to be recorded separately. If it is not, you may use the logo for the purpose you ordered it for, and no further than that.

What that purpose was turns out to be surprisingly hard to establish after the fact. Was the logo from the website also meant for the company vans? For packaging? For a sister company that arrived two years later?

Three situations, three outcomes

Made by an outside party with nothing agreed. The rights sit with the maker. This is the most common situation, and it is the one I was in.

Made by an employee. Article 7 assigns copyright to the employer, provided that producing that kind of work was part of that employee's job. If your own marketer drew the logo, this is settled.

Made under direction and supervision. Article 6 places the right with whoever the work was created under the direction and supervision of. That asks for more than giving input; it assumes the creative decisions sat with the client. In practice it is a narrow exception.

Transfer only works on paper, and since January the bar is higher

Copyright can be transferred. Verbally or by implication it cannot.

There has to be a deed: a signed document setting out which rights pass over. That requirement already existed.

What came in on 1 January 2026 is that the agreement itself now has to be in writing too. That follows from the Dutch act strengthening copyright contract law. Previously you could agree that the rights would pass and formalise it later with a deed. Now both have to be recorded.

No notary is involved. An ordinary signed document is enough, and one document may cover both.

What does and does not transfer is written in the deed, literally

This is the part that most often goes wrong, including in deeds that look well made.

The law states that only those powers transfer which are named in the deed, or which necessarily follow from the nature of the agreement. Whatever you do not name stays with the maker.

A deed that only says copyright is transferred is therefore thinner than it looks. The right to have the work adapted, the right to register it as a trademark, the right to sell it on to somebody else: those are separate powers, and each of them belongs in the text.

There is one more catch. Powers covering forms of exploitation that do not yet exist at the moment of transfer only pass over if that is stated explicitly and the copyright transfers in full.

Even after a complete transfer, something stays with the maker

The moral rights in article 25 do not travel. The maker can keep objecting to distortion or damage to the work, and can claim attribution.

Anyone who wants that ruled out has to have it waived in the same deed. A transfer without that clause is therefore incomplete, however thoroughly the rest is worded.

The check takes two minutes

Pull up the quote, the order confirmation or the terms of the party that made your logo. Search for the word transfer, or overdracht in a Dutch contract.

If it is not there, the rights probably do not sit with the company. If there is wording about a licence or a right of use, that is exactly what it says: use, not ownership.

Do the same for copy, photography, video and software. Same law, same outcome.

Why I am publishing this when my own files were wrong

Because it was not down to carelessness on my part, and probably not on your supplier's part either.

I have worked in this field for fifteen years and in all that time I have rarely seen this arrangement as a standard part of a quote. Not at agencies, not among freelancers. It is not one person being negligent, it is a gap in how the industry works.

On my side it now sits in the order confirmation by default. That took an afternoon.

For you the only question is whether it is there for what you already have. If it is not, it can be repaired with one document and one signature. The conversation gets harder once the working relationship has ended or something is at stake, and that is a reason to do it now rather than at the next step.

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. I build brand systems and run into this at companies that are growing or have just been acquired. If the check above leaves you in doubt, put it to a lawyer who works in intellectual property.