Why Your IP Assignment May Expire After Five Years

What Section 19 requires

Section 19 of the Copyright Act, 1957 governs the mode of assignment. It requires assignment to be in writing signed by the assignor, and under sub-section (3) the assignment must specify the rights assigned, the duration and the territorial extent.

Most freelance contracts fail on at least two of the three. A clause providing that all intellectual property in the deliverables shall vest in the client names the rights loosely and specifies neither duration nor territory.

The five-year default

Sub-section (5) provides that where the assignment does not specify the period, it shall be deemed to be for five years from the date of assignment. That is a striking default, and it means an assignment intended as permanent may not be.

For a freelancer this is not a licence to reclaim work casually. Whether the default applies to a particular clause depends on how the clause is drafted and on the facts, and acting on an assumption here would be unwise. What it does mean is that both sides have an interest in the clause being drafted properly, and that a client insisting on a sweeping but vague assignment is not securing what they think.

Moral rights stay with you

Section 57 preserves the author right to claim authorship of the work and to restrain distortion, mutilation or other modification that would be prejudicial to their honour or reputation. Those rights sit with the author independently of who owns the copyright.

A contract purporting to assign or waive moral rights is common in templates drawn from other jurisdictions. The practical effect for a freelancer is that attribution and treatment of your work are not entirely disposed of by an assignment clause, though enforcing that is a separate matter from having the right.

What a properly drafted clause looks like

• In writing and signed, rather than referenced in an email chain.
• Specifying the rights assigned rather than assigning everything by implication.
• Specifying duration, which for a client wanting permanence means the full term of copyright.
• Specifying territory, normally worldwide.
• Identifying the works with enough particularity to know what is covered.
• Conditional on payment in full, which protects the freelancer without costing an honest client anything.

Using this in negotiation

The useful framing is that a precise assignment clause serves both sides. A client gets certainty about what they own. A freelancer gets a defined boundary rather than an open-ended transfer of everything they touched during the engagement.

Where a client insists on the vague version, that is worth taking to an advocate if the engagement is significant, because the ambiguity will be resolved at the least convenient moment otherwise.