Who Owns the Video?
A creator sells the right to feature a brand in the content they make. Almost every deal to sell it arrives on the brand’s paper, and that paper quietly answers three questions the creator never got to ask: who owns the video, how long the brand can run it, and whether the creator’s face becomes an ad they never agreed to.
A brand deal usually arrives as good news and a PDF. The good news is the fee. The PDF is a five-to-fifteen-page endorsement agreement the brand or its agency wrote, and it is waiting on a signature so the campaign can go live. The creator did not draft it, does not have a lawyer on call, and has a launch date. So the fee gets read closely and the rest gets skimmed. The rest is where the deal actually lives.
This is the structural fact of influencer marketing. The creator sells the same thing over and over, and nearly every deal to sell it starts on the counterparty’s paper. The creator economy is now worth roughly $250 billion and is projected to approach $480 billion by 2027, with brand deals the primary way creators earn.[1] That is a lot of contracts, moving fast, all drafted by the side that benefits from them. The terms below are the ones that decide whether a signature was worth the fee.
The word “ownership” is doing a lot of work
Start with the most valuable thing in the deal: the content. By default, copyright in a work belongs to the person who created it.[2] For a brand to take that ownership, the contract has to move it, and the two common ways it tries are a “work made for hire” clause and an assignment. Both are easy to miss because they sit inside a paragraph titled something bland like “Intellectual Property.”
“Work made for hire” is not a phrase that means whatever a brand wants it to mean. For a commissioned work by an independent contractor, that designation only operates when the work fits narrow statutory conditions and both sides sign the right language.[3] Outside those conditions, the label does not transfer anything, and a brand that wants the copyright needs a separate, signed assignment. Either way, the creator-side position is the same and it is simple: content the creator makes stays the creator’s, apart from the brand’s own trademarks appearing in it. What the brand actually needs is a license to use the post, not the deed to it. A contract that hands over ownership when a license would do is giving away the asset to rent the room.
How far the license runs, and where
Grant the brand a license and the next questions are scope and time. Creators call this the usage rights, and it is often the single most financially significant term in the deal. A license that is limited, non-exclusive, and bounded to the campaign is a normal deal. A license that runs “in perpetuity,” “irrevocable,” “worldwide,” across “any and all media,” and includes the right to edit or make derivative works is a different deal wearing the same word. It lets the brand run the creator’s content indefinitely and recut it into things the creator never shot.
Two carve-outs deserve a creator’s attention. The first is the split between the content and the creator’s identity. There is a real difference between “the brand may run the video the creator posted” and “the brand may use the creator’s name and face.” That second phrasing lets the brand build a billboard, a product package, or a paid ad around the creator, detached from the post they agreed to. The creator-side position keeps name, image, likeness, and handle tied to the content as it appears, not carved off for separate advertising. The other carve-out is the end of the deal. Without a clean stop, a time-limited license quietly becomes permanent: the campaign is over, the relationship is over, and the creator’s face is still selling the product. The position that closes it is one line: after the deal ends, the brand makes no new uses of the content.
The fee you cannot collect
Payment terms fail in a quieter way than most people expect. The number is rarely the problem; the timing is. Two clauses do the damage. The first is a fee due “upon approval” or “upon acceptance,” which hands the brand a switch it never has to flip: the work is delivered, the post is live, and the invoice waits on an approval that is always one round of feedback away. The second is a long payment window. Net 60 or Net 90 terms, common on big-brand paper, mean a creator running a small business floats the brand an interest-free loan for months on money already earned. The creator-side position ties payment to a fixed, short clock, undisputed fees due within a set number of days of the invoice, and not to a subjective sign-off. The companion position covers the exit: if the deal ends early, the brand still pays for the work performed up to that point. A termination clause that lets the brand walk away owing nothing for content already made is a clause that turns a signed deal into free work.
The freedom you did not know you sold
Exclusivity is where a single deal can cost a creator far more than its fee. A category exclusivity or a “blackout” clause bars the creator from working with competitors, or sometimes from posting about the category at all, for a stretch of time. Priced correctly, that is a legitimate ask a brand pays extra for. Priced by accident, it freezes months of a creator’s income for one campaign’s fee. The position is not to refuse exclusivity; it is to make it narrow, defined, and paid for. Read the scope and the length, and make sure the fee reflects what is actually being taken off the table.
The disclosure that lands on you
The Federal Trade Commission’s Endorsement Guides require anyone endorsing a product to clearly and conspicuously disclose a material connection to the brand, and the standard is meaningful: the disclosure has to be hard to miss and easy to understand.[4] The responsibility does not stop with the creator. Both the advertiser and the endorser can be held responsible for a failure to disclose.[5] The exposure is not theoretical: where the FTC enforces through an order or a rule, civil penalties adjust annually for inflation and ran past $53,000 per violation in 2025.[6]
So a clause that assigns the entire disclosure obligation to the creator, while the brand keeps approval rights over the content, is trying to shift a shared risk onto one side. A creator cannot contract away a regulator’s reach, and neither can the brand. What the contract can do is allocate the private risk fairly, so the party that also controls the content carries its share of the duty. The position to look for is a disclosure clause that tracks the law and reflects that shared responsibility, not one that dumps all of it on the person with the smallest legal team.
When the deal is take-it-or-leave-it
Plenty of brand agreements arrive with no room to negotiate: a national brand’s template, or a deal routed through an agency that does not open its standard form. That does not make reading it pointless. It changes what reading is for. A term the creator cannot strike is still a term the creator can price. Knowing in advance that the usage rights run in perpetuity, or that the exclusivity locks up a whole category, is what turns a bad surprise into a number, more money to cover it, a smaller scope to ask for, or a clear-eyed decision to pass. The costly version is the opposite: finding out what the deal took only once the video is already running.
The question the contract answers for you
For most creators the hard part is keeping pace. One creator might sign a few deals a month; a manager or agency runs brand paper across a whole roster, every contract a little different, every one on the brand’s form, every one waiting on a launch date. Applying the same standard to the fiftieth deal that you applied to the first, on a week when the calendar is loud and the money is good, is the step that quietly gets skipped. That is what a consistent first-pass review is for. Read against the creator’s own positions, ReviewPro surfaces the ownership grab, the perpetual usage rights, the fee gated on approval, and the exclusivity that reaches past the campaign, and it does it in minutes inside Word, while there is still time to ask.
Who owns the video is a question the contract answers whether the creator reads it or not. Reading it first is how the creator gets to answer instead.
See how ReviewPro reviews brand deals for creators and talent agencies →
Notes
- Goldman Sachs, “The creator economy could approach half-a-trillion dollars by 2027,” estimating the creator economy at roughly $250 billion and projecting growth toward $480 billion by 2027, with brand deals the primary creator income source. https://www.goldmansachs.com/insights/articles/the-creator-economy-could-approach-half-a-trillion-dollars-by-2027 ↩
- Copyright in a work vests initially in the author or authors of the work. 17 U.S.C. § 201(a). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/201 ↩
- A “work made for hire” prepared by an independent contractor requires that the work be specially ordered or commissioned, fall within one of nine statutory categories, and be the subject of a signed written agreement; otherwise ownership does not transfer by that designation alone. U.S. Copyright Office, Circular 30, “Works Made for Hire”; 17 U.S.C. § 101. https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ30.pdf ↩
- FTC Endorsement Guides, 16 CFR Part 255, requiring clear and conspicuous disclosure of a material connection between an endorser and an advertiser. Electronic Code of Federal Regulations. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-255 ↩
- Federal Trade Commission, “Endorsements, Influencers, and Reviews,” business guidance stating that both advertisers and endorsers can be responsible for the disclosure of material connections. https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/advertising-marketing/endorsements-influencers-reviews ↩
- Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Publishes Inflation-Adjusted Civil Penalty Amounts for 2025,” setting the maximum civil penalty at $53,088 per violation for the covered FTC Act provisions, adjusted annually for inflation. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/02/ftc-publishes-inflation-adjusted-civil-penalty-amounts-2025 ↩
ReviewPro is not legal advice. Confirm your positions with your counsel and your own contracting policies.