Copyright and intellectual property policy

Since our main business is building new stuff, we work with intellectual property constantly. You should be aware of how the law affects you – and you can refer back here whenever you need.

Quick primer on terms

“Intellectual property” is something you create with your brain, like code, written documents, and designs. (It’s sometimes abbreviated as IP, but we tend to avoid that since we use that term for IP addresses.)

Intellectual property comes in a few different types, but the main ones we deal with regularly are copyright and trademarks. Each type of intellectual property has an owner who has certain rights.

“Copyright” is the ability for someone who created intellectual property to protect their work, and to prevent others from using it without their permission.

Things you create at work

Your employment contract or freelance agreement outlines the legal terms for intellectual property you create while working at Human Made. The exact terms differ depending on exactly where you are employed or contracting from, so consult your contract for the precise terms as they apply to you. Everyone has these terms in their contract, and you will need to agree to them before you begin working here.

As a general rule, Human Made owns any intellectual property you create as part of your job. If you’re creating it on behalf of a client, they may end up as the owner of it, so you should be aware that you can’t necessarily take a copy of something even if you created it. (In most cases, we agree with clients that we’re allowed to reuse it, but there are some exceptions.)

Releasing work as open source

We’re big fans of open source, so release a lot of what we create back to the community.

Before releasing things as open source, we need to consider whether we are able to. In particular, we need to consider whether we own the intellectual property, as well as whether it’s sensitive data. (Generally, nothing that’s classified as confidential or restricted is appropriate to release as open source.)

For things that we’ve created for ourselves, like code for internal projects or documents (like this handbook!), we can make this decision ourselves. If it’s something that’s valuable to the community, and it wouldn’t be harmful to our business to release it, you should go ahead!

For things we’ve created for clients, we need to check that we’re able to release it – in other words, that we either own the intellectual property or are licensed to use and release it. This will depend on each project’s contract, and generally we want to collaborate with clients on releasing code in any case. For the most part, adapting generic code and releasing it will be fine, so long as there’s nothing specific to the client. You should ask in #company-admin or #dev for advice before releasing anything if you’re unsure.

When releasing something as open source, you should consider the licensing too. The licence you pick sets out how people can use what we publish. For WordPress-based code like plugins, this should be the GPLv2 or later. For other code, consider the available open source licences – we often use the ISC licence. For documents, we should generally use a Creative Commons licence.

Make sure that when publishing works, you correctly attribute the copyright – in most cases, that means it’ll be “Copyright, Human Made”, rather than your own name.

If you think you’ve seen someone using something belonging to HM without obeying the licences we released it under, let us know in #company-admin or at legal@humanmade.com.

Using open source and other projects

When using intellectual property created by others, you should ensure that you’re allowed to do so. You also need to ensure that you follow the terms of the licence they’re published under.

For open source projects, this means checking the licence is compatible with what you’re working on. WordPress plugins are GPL licensed, and can be copied, reused, and forked as needed. For other open source licences, consider the terms of the licence, and ask in #company-admin for any advice.

If you’re forking a project, you may also need to rename it to avoid trademark infringements.