Copyright on a Website: Who Owns the Code, Design, Photos, and Text?

You own the domain and admin access to the CMS - but does that mean you also own the rights to the code, design, photos, and text on your website? Not necessarily. Copyright law does not treat a website as a single work, but as dozens of separate parts, each with its own protection regime.

This short overview covers how copyright applies to the code, design, photographs, and text on a website, with links to our more detailed articles on each topic.

Website owners often lump everything together under one phrase: "our website." Copyright law recognizes no such category. The code, the design, the copy, the photographs, and individual graphic elements may or may not be protected, and each is assessed separately. Under Section 2 of the Czech Copyright Act, a work is the unique result of a natural person's creative activity - a machine, a company, or AI cannot be an author (Section 5(1)).

Owning the domain, the hosting, or the CMS credentials does not mean you own the rights to what appears on the site. Those belong to whoever created the content - the developer, the designer, the photographer, the copywriter - until they expressly transfer them to you through a license. This article summarizes how copyright treats the different parts of a website, with links to our more detailed pieces on the topic.

A computer program is protected as a literary work if it is original (Section 2(2) of the Copyright Act). For code commissioned from an external developer, a special presumption applies: under Section 58(7), it is deemed an employee work even when created to order, so the client exercises the economic rights by operation of law. Marketplace templates, plugins, and libraries, however, are often licensed to a different person or domain and do not transfer automatically. And code written by AI without a human creative contribution is not a copyrighted work at all - there is nothing to license. We cover this in detail in Vibe Coding for Web Developers and in a real case in our IP scan case study.

The site design, layout, icons, and illustrations get no statutory shortcut like the one for code - each is a separate copyrighted work, and without a license from the designer you can only rely on the narrowly construed presumed license for the purpose of the contract (Section 61 of the Copyright Act).

Photographs stack two layers of rights: the photographer's copyright in the image itself, and the rights of the people photographed, who must consent to having their likeness captured and disseminated (Sections 84 and 85 of the Civil Code). A photograph or graphic generated by AI without creative human input is not a copyrighted work either - a Czech court confirmed this in the ruling we cover in A Czech court has ruled that AI-generated graphics are not a copyrighted work. We cover the risks around fonts, stock photo libraries, and designer portfolios in our IP scan case study.

Even short pieces of text - product descriptions, taglines, footer copy - are protected where they result from a creative choice. Purely factual information, ideas, and routine functional wording get no protection. A translation of the site into another language is a separate work under Section 2(4) of the Copyright Act, so you need a separate license from the translator for the English version. And text written by AI without a human creative contribution is in the same position as AI-written code - there is nothing to license.

The reverse question - what to do if you find your own text or graphics copied on someone else's site, and what you may do yourself when you come across content that is not a copyrighted work - is covered in Robbing a Work Is Not Inspiration and If It Isn't a Copyrighted Work, Can I Do Whatever I Want With It?

• get a written license or assignment of rights from everyone who contributed creatively - the developer, designer, photographer, copywriter, and videographer,
• check the scope of the license: website only, or also print, social media, and ad campaigns,
• do not rely on copyright protection for AI output; use other contractual guarantees instead,
• get a signed model release for photographs of people,
• verify you have permission to use any third-party content (quotes, images) on the site.

A vendor who has this in order can credibly promise clients, and themselves, that the site really is theirs.

Not sure who actually holds the rights to your website? Get in touch.
In intellectual property, we review licensing clauses, prepare contracts with vendors and subcontractors, and review your whole business through the subsidized IP scan service. Contact Preegal.