Who Owns Commissioned and Employee-Created Work in Ghana?

A business pays for a logo, a website or a photograph and assumes it owns the result. The designer or employee may assume the opposite. Under the Copyright Act, 2005 (Act 690), neither assumption is safe. The Act sets a default, and the default has limits.

A protected work, not an idea

These rules apply only to a protected copyright work. Section 1 lists the eligible categories, including literary, artistic and musical works, sound recordings, audio-visual works and computer software or programmes, and section 1(2) requires the work to be original, fixed in a definite medium of expression, and connected to Ghana by authorship, publication or a treaty obligation.

Section 2 draws the line that matters most in practice. Copyright does not extend to ideas, concepts, procedures, methods or other things of a similar nature. A client's brief and a campaign concept are not, by themselves, copyright works. The Act protects the original expression that has been fixed, not the instruction that produced it.

Two rights, not one

Section 5 gives the author of a protected work the exclusive economic right to do or authorise its reproduction; its translation, adaptation, arrangement or other transformation; its public performance, broadcasting and communication to the public; the distribution of originals or copies by first sale or other first transfer of ownership; and the commercial rental of originals or copies.

Section 6 adds a moral right alongside the economic right, not inside it. The author may claim authorship and demand that the author's name or pseudonym be mentioned when any act in section 5 is done in relation to the work, and may object to a distortion, mutilation or other modification where that act would be or is prejudicial to the author's reputation or discredits the work. That second limb is not a veto over every edit: cropping a photograph or rewriting a paragraph does not, on that fact alone, meet the threshold in section 6(1)(b).

The default for employees and commissioned authors

Section 7 is the provision most often shortened past recognition. It reads: "In the absence of any contract to the contrary, the economic right of a work shall vest in an employer or a person who commissions the work where the employed or commissioned author has created the work in the course of the employment or commission."

Three limits sit inside that sentence. What vests is the economic right, not the moral right. The rule yields to a contract to the contrary. And the work must have been created in the course of the employment or the commission, so work an employee does at home, unconnected with the employment, is not caught merely because the author is employed.

The heading is "Employed authors", but the text covers a commissioner as well as an employer, so neither a company nor a freelance designer can safely assume the other owns a paid-for logo. The default vests the economic right in the commissioner where the work was created in the course of the commission and no contract says otherwise.

Section 7 does not define a commission or classify every paid supplier relationship as one, so whether an engagement qualifies depends on the facts and the agreement. The Act also says nothing about who owns the file or print delivered: copyright in a design and ownership of the copy are separate questions.

Assignments must be written; licences need not be

Where the parties want a different result, section 9 supplies the machinery. Under section 9(1), the owner of copyright may transfer the economic rights in section 5 in whole or in part, but the transfer shall not include the moral rights in section 6. Section 9(3) allows transfer by assignment, testamentary disposition or operation of law, and section 9(9) allows an assignment or a licence of an existing work or a future work.

The formality differs sharply. Section 9(4) requires an assignment to be in writing and signed by the owner or by a person the owner has authorised. Section 9(5) allows a licence to be oral, written or inferred from conduct. An invoice or a receipt is not the signed writing section 9(4) requires, so a business that wants ownership rather than a right to use the work needs that assignment. Payment alone assigns nothing: the commissioner may already hold the economic right under section 7, or only a licence inferred from conduct.

Section 9(2) should be read with section 9(1), not instead of it. A contract requiring the total transfer of the rights in section 6 is limited in scope to the use that contract provides for. The Act contemplates contracts about moral rights, but confines them to the stated use. It is not accurate to say either that moral rights can be signed away without limit, or that no contract can touch them.

Joint authors, and how long the rights last

Where a work is of joint authorship, section 9(6) makes an assignment or a licence subject to the authorisation of the joint authors. If one withholds consent, section 9(7) refers the matter to the Copyright Administrator to determine whether consent should be granted and on what conditions, and section 9(8) allows a dissatisfied person to apply to the High Court for review. Several contributors do not automatically make a work one of joint authorship.

No single figure describes duration. Section 12(1) protects the economic rights for the author's life and seventy years after death, unless the Act states otherwise, with section 12(2) measuring a joint work from the last surviving author's death. Section 13 instead gives a body corporate seventy years from when the work was made or first published, whichever is later, and sections 14 to 16 set separate periods for anonymous or pseudonymous works, audio-visual works and sound recordings.

Moral rights differ again. Section 18 says the moral rights under section 6 exist in perpetuity, enforceable by the author during life and afterwards by the author's successors, whether or not the economic rights remain vested. Assigning or exhausting the economic right does not end the moral right.

What to check before relying on the default

Before relying on the default, check whether what was delivered is a protected work or an idea section 2 excludes; whether it was created in the course of an employment or a commission; whether any assignment is in writing and signed as section 9(4) requires; whether joint authors must authorise the dealing; and which duration rule applies. None of these decides a dispute by itself, and whether a modification prejudices an author's reputation depends on facts this note does not have. The intellectual property practice at Ohene Gyan & Associates advises businesses and creators on the ownership and licensing of copyright works.

A note on the text relied on

This note is based on the text of the Copyright Act, 2005 (Act 690) reproduced by the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization from the WIPO Lex text, retrieved on 28 October 2026. It records assent on 17 May 2005 and the replacement of the Copyright Law, 1985 (P.N.D.C.L. 110). It is not a Gazette consolidation, and no official consolidation or amending Act was checked, so this note does not say the Act is unamended. No judgment was read, and none is cited. The Copyright Regulations, 2010 (L.I. 1962) were not reviewed.

If you need advice on a specific commission, employment or licensing arrangement, contact the firm to discuss it. This article is general information about the Copyright Act, 2005 (Act 690). It is not legal advice, and it does not create a solicitor-client relationship.