Content Ownership
As soon as we send your order to you, you own the copyright. You don’t have to cite us, and we don’t keep a license. We never use text written for you for other clients.
What the Human-Written Content Ownership Covers
Once you pay and receive a particular item, you legally acquire all rights to the item including: copyright, right to publish in any format, the right to change the item beyond recognition, to add your name or someone else’s, and to sell the item in combination with other products. We keep absolutely nothing.
Credit for Articled entries is not a requirement. Most clients publish articles under a founder’s byline, staff writer’s byline, or no byline, and this is the common practice rather than a tolerated exception that we have for this. We consider ghostwriting legitimate.
We do not retain the right to reuse your commissioned work. That means we will not add it to our content library (and resell it to other clients in your industry), nor will we repurpose it as a template for future use. If we want to show something as an example to other clients, we ask you for permission first, and we will respect your decision if you say no.
- Full copyright, assigned to you on delivery
- No attribution to Articled required, anywhere
- No license back to us, for any purpose
- Never resold, republished or reused for another client
- Never used as a public sample without your written consent
How the Human-Written Content Ownership Works
Payment triggers transfer. There is no need for a separate assignment document for us to chase, nor do we have any term that would require rights reversion. Should your legal team seek a signed assignment for their files, all they need to do is ask and we will sign at no cost to anyone.
Until we get paid, the work is ours. This is as much leverage as we have, and the reason we have this is so writers get compensated, rather than so we can pull a fast one and take work somewhere else. With established clients, we deliver the work and then send them an invoice.
Through our services, the writer transfers their rights to you. Every writer agrees to this in their contracts before we award them a commission. Because of this, we’re able to give you clean title instead of a licensed “ownership.”
What we keep
Nothing. The only thing we keep is the order itself — short, dates, invoice — for accounting and to let a returning writer find your voice if you return.
When the Human-Written Content Ownership Applies
We maintain ownership of every product, from 200-word reviews to full-length books, whether it’s written from scratch or ghostwritten. There are no exceptions for length or format. We do not own a fraction or a percentage of products. We have ownership of the entire product.
It applies to derivative work too. If we write a report and you turn it into a webinar, a deck, a video script and six social posts, all of that is yours and none of it triggers a further fee. You bought the words; what you build from them is your business.
With respect to third-party materials (i.e. studies we’ve quoted, images of which we hold licensing rights, words spoken by interviewees, etc.), we adhere to the terms and conditions outlined by the rights holders. We will notify you of any such materials when we deliver the order and inform you of the rights of use and the restrictions that apply.
Human-Written Content Ownership FAQs
Every paid order includes every client, including agencies that subsequently buy through their own account clients. This means you don’t have to ask us for the clean transfer; you can pass it on directly to them.
Email hello@articled.org or use the contact page. If you have a legal team with a specific question about the assignment, please state your question and we will answer it directly instead of redirecting site visitors to this page.
Yes, that is what most of our clients do. Ghostwriting is what we mean. Please don’t say that a piece was written by AI because nothing you wrote could be attributed to something artificial intelligence wrote.
We store delivered files for one year so that we can resend you the file if you ever need to retrieve a copy or if you need a revised document. After this time they are deleted. You can always ask for an earlier deletion.
Then it remains unpublished and it still belongs to you. We do not have a use-it-or-lose-it clause. Therefore, we will not publish something you declined to publish.
Content a person actually wrote
$10 per 100 words, and the writer keeps all of it. Our 1% sits on top, 0.5% goes to trees, and no generated text appears anywhere in the process.