Split sheet, work for hire, or producer agreement — which one do you need?

22 · 2026-08-20 · 16 min read · Español

These are three different documents doing three different jobs on two different copyrights. A split sheet records who wrote the song and in what shares. A work-for-hire clause tries to make somebody other than the writer the author from the moment the work exists — and outside two narrow situations it cannot — while a producer agreement moves rights in the recording and fixes what the producer gets paid. Reach for the wrong one and you do not get a weaker version of what you wanted. You get nothing, and you find out years later.

• A split sheet records shares in a musical work. It assumes the ownership question is already settled rather than settling it.
• A work-for-hire clause only operates in two situations: an employee working within the scope of employment, or a commissioned work falling into one of nine categories listed in section 101. Musical works are not one of the nine.
• Where a work-for-hire clause fails, an assignment is what moves the rights, and an assignment is a different legal act with different requirements.
• A producer agreement is the only one of the three that both moves rights in the recording and sets a payment.
• The choice decides whether the rights can come back. A grant can be terminated in a window opening thirty-five years later; a work made for hire cannot, and Canada reaches a similar result by a different route.

What is each of these three documents actually doing?

A split sheet records the writer shares of a musical work. A work-for-hire clause decides who counts as the author from the moment the work exists. A producer agreement moves rights in the recording and sets what the producer is paid.

They act at different moments, which is the part nobody says out loud. The work-for-hire clause acts at the origin, before the work has an author. The split sheet acts afterwards, writing down a state of affairs it believes is already true. The producer agreement acts last, taking something that exists and moving it somewhere else.

Almost every expensive mistake here is a document asked to work at a moment it does not reach. A split sheet cannot reach back to change who the author was. A work-for-hire clause cannot reach forward to pay anybody. Neither touches the recording at all.

And the shares are a separate problem from the paper. The law divided the song the moment it existed, in equal undivided shares, whether or not that matches the room. Your sheet corrects a default rather than creating one.

Can a work-for-hire clause make you the author of a song someone else wrote?

Only if that person was your employee. For everybody else, a work is made for hire only if it falls into one of nine categories, and a musical work is not on the list.

This is the fact the whole clause turns on, and it is sitting in plain sight in the definitions. Section 101 gives exactly two routes:

(1) a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment; or (2) a work specially ordered or commissioned for use as a contribution to a collective work, as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, as a translation, as a supplementary work, as a compilation, as an instructional text, as a test, as answer material for a test, or as an atlas, if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire.

Count them. Collective work, motion picture, translation, supplementary work, compilation, instructional text, test, answer material, atlas. Nine. A song is not there, and neither is a record.

When it does apply, it is the strongest instrument of the three by a distance. Section 201(b): “In the case of a work made for hire, the employer or other person for whom the work was prepared is considered the author for purposes of this title.” Not the owner. The author. The Copyright Office says it in one flat line on its own page for the term — “The employer is the author of a work made for hire” — and that is why people reach for the clause. It does not move a right. It arranges for the right to have started somewhere else.

So the question is whether your co-writer is an employee, and the contract does not get to answer that by calling them one. In Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid the Supreme Court held that “employee” is read “in light of the general common law of agency”, and listed what that means: the right to control the manner and means of the work, the skill required, who supplied the tools, where the work happened, how long the relationship lasted, whether more projects could be assigned, discretion over hours, the method of payment, who hired and paid assistants, whether the work is part of the hiring party’s regular business, whether that party is in business at all, whether benefits were provided, and the tax treatment.

Run your producer through those thirteen. Nobody withheld their tax, they brought their own laptop, they set their own hours — and the sentence in your contract is doing nothing.

One of the nine does reach music. A work commissioned “for use … as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work” is on the list. Write a song for a film under a signed agreement saying it is a work made for hire and the category fits; write one in a bedroom with a friend and it does not. If your paper came from a music supervisor, you are in the one situation where the clause is the operative part.

The recording is its own version of this problem, and the master piece works through it. If what you are settling is which contributions were authorship at all, that test has its own case law and it comes before any of this paper.

What does a work-for-hire clause do when it does not work?

Nothing, on its own. That is why the clause is normally written with an assignment behind it, and the assignment is the part that operates.

You have seen the construction even if you did not know what you were looking at. The clause says the work is made for hire, and a second sentence says that to the extent it is not, the contributor assigns everything anyway. Two instruments stacked, because the drafter knew the first might be scenery. The master piece has the anatomy of that fallback.

The comparison is the part that belongs here, and it is sharper than it looks. A work-for-hire clause and an assignment are not two spellings of one idea. One claims the right never left the buyer; the other concedes it started with the author and moves it. That reads as lawyer’s bookkeeping on the day you sign, and it decides the last section of this piece.

Does a split sheet transfer anything?

Usually not. A split sheet records shares that already exist, and recording a share is a different legal act from transferring one.

That distinction is settled properly in its own piece, along with what a signature has to do and when the writing is required. Take it as given here, because what follows from it is what belongs in a comparison.

A split sheet is the only one of these three that assumes its answer. It does not decide who the author is — it writes down who everybody thinks the author is. It does not move a right — it describes where the rights landed. Hand it either of the other two jobs and it will take the job, sit there looking official, and accomplish nothing.

One exception is worth watching for. A sheet giving somebody a share larger than what they wrote is not recording anything; it is moving a share away from its author, which is a transfer wearing a split sheet’s clothes. The title on the document does not decide what it is — what it does decides that, and a transfer has requirements a record does not.

None of which is an argument against the sheet. It is a good document doing a narrow job, the fields are not complicated, and a session ending with one signed ended better than most. Just do not ask it to be the other two.

What does a producer agreement do that the other two cannot?

It moves rights in the recording and fixes the producer’s payment in a single document. Neither a split sheet nor a work-for-hire clause standing alone does either of those things.

It is also the only one of the three that is a bundle rather than an instrument. Bart Day’s account of what a producer agreement contains runs to recording costs and an itemised budget, an advance to the producer, a royalty, recoupment of that advance out of the royalty, audit rights, producer credit, and re-recording restrictions — with the ownership line stated flatly: “The record company will own all masters and will normally have approval rights over the masters.”

Read that with your own situation in it. There is no record company — you are the record company, every obligation in that list is now yours, and a document written to protect a label from a producer is one you are about to sign from the label’s side of the table. That is why a producer agreement arrives feeling like it was drafted about somebody else. It was.

What the producer is actually owed is a separate question with real numbers behind it, and the points piece has them. This piece stops at the instrument, which has to exist before any of those numbers mean anything.

Does Canada work the same way?

No. Canada has no commissioned work-for-hire route at all. Employment under a contract of service is the only way authorship starts somewhere other than with the author.

The starting position is the same as the American one. Section 13(1) of the Copyright Act: “Subject to this Act, the author of a work shall be the first owner of the copyright therein.” Then the single exception, at 13(3):

Where the author of a work was in the employment of some other person under a contract of service or apprenticeship and the work was made in the course of his employment by that person, the person by whom the author was employed shall, in the absence of any agreement to the contrary, be the first owner of the copyright…

A contract of service. That is the list, and the list has one item on it.

There used to be a second. Section 13(2) covered commissioned engravings, photographs and portraits, and the consolidation now carries it as repealed, by 2012, c. 20, s. 7. The practical effect for a Canadian artist is clean: there is no category argument to have, because there are no categories. Somebody is an employee, or the author owns it.

Which leaves assignment as the only route, and Canada’s assignment rule and what it reaches is worked through elsewhere. So is the other half of the Canadian divergence, where joint owners need each other’s consent and a co-writer who stops answering can freeze the song.

Does the choice decide whether anyone can get the rights back?

Yes. A grant can be terminated in a five-year window opening thirty-five years after it was signed. A work made for hire cannot be terminated, because no grant was ever made.

This is the part nobody explains at the session, and it is the reason the distinction in the third section is not bookkeeping. Section 203(a) opens on the exclusion before it says anything else:

In the case of any work other than a work made for hire, the exclusive or nonexclusive grant of a transfer or license of copyright or of any right under a copyright, executed by the author on or after January 1, 1978, otherwise than by will, is subject to termination under the following conditions…

The window is at (a)(3): termination “may be effected at any time during a period of five years beginning at the end of thirty-five years from the date of execution of the grant.” And (a)(5) closes the obvious loophole — termination “may be effected notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary, including an agreement to make a will or to make any future grant.” You cannot sign that right away. It is not on the table.

But it only exists if there was a grant. Sign an assignment and you keep a right you cannot sign away. Sign a clause that succeeds in making the work a work made for hire, and there is nothing to terminate, ever, because on the statute’s account you were never the author. Termination is a notice served inside that window rather than an automatic reversion, and the mechanics are not this piece’s subject — whether the window exists at all is decided the day you sign.

Canada gets to a similar place by a different road, and section 14(1) is unusually blunt about it. Where the author was the first owner, no assignment by that author operates “beyond the expiration of twenty-five years from the death of the author”, the reversionary interest devolves on the author’s legal representatives “notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary”, and any agreement the author makes about disposing of that interest is “void.”

Read that section’s opening condition, because it is the same hinge again: where the author is the first owner. An employment work under 13(3) never had the author as first owner, so the reversion has nothing to attach to. Two countries, two unrelated mechanisms, both keyed to one question — did the right ever start with the person who made the thing?

Thirty-five years is not an abstraction. Sign at twenty-five and the window opens at sixty, which is an age you fully intend to reach. One phrase in one clause decides whether it opens at all, and it is four fucking words long.

So which one do you reach for?

Match the instrument to the job. The rows are not symmetrical, because the options are not equal — most people reading this cannot use a work-for-hire clause at all.

Three of those eight rows are the same answer wearing different hats: get an assignment, signed. That is not a failure of the table. It is what the law looks like when you stop hoping a label solves a problem.

Go and find the last agreement you signed with a collaborator. Search it for the phrase “work made for hire.” If it is in there, find the sentence after it — the one starting “to the extent” — and if that sentence does not exist, you now know exactly which of these three documents you are missing and which section above is about you.

FAQ

Can you put a work-for-hire clause in a split sheet?

You can write one, and on a song by somebody who is not your employee it will not make you the author. The nine categories of commissioned work in section 101 do not include musical works, so the clause has nothing to operate on and the shares stay where the law put them.

If the producer wrote part of the song, does the producer agreement cover that too?

Only if it says so. A writer share sits on the musical work and belongs on the split sheet, while a producer agreement is a recording-side document unless it has been drafted to reach both copyrights. What the producer is owed for producing is a separate calculation on the other copyright.

Does a work-for-hire clause have to be signed by both people?

For a commissioned work, yes. Section 101 requires that the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire. The employment route has no such requirement, because it does not depend on an agreement at all.

Is work for hire a thing in Canada?

Only through employment. Canada makes the employer the first owner of a work made in the course of employment under a contract of service, and the provision covering commissioned works was repealed in 2012.

Sources

• US Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 101 — the definition of a work made for hire: the employee route, and the commissioned route with its nine categories and its signed-instrument requirement. The list of nine is the whole argument of the second section above.
• US Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 201(b) — that in a work made for hire the employer or other person for whom the work was prepared is considered the author, and owns all the rights in the copyright unless the parties expressly agreed otherwise in a signed writing.
• US Copyright Office, Work Made for Hire — the Office’s own plain statement that the employer is the author of a work made for hire. Its circular on this subject is a PDF that would not extract on the machine this piece was written on; this HTML page was read end to end and carries the claim alone.
• Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, 490 U.S. 730 (1989) — that “employee” in section 101 is read in light of the general common law of agency, and the thirteen factors that determine it. Cited here only for employee status, which is a different question from co-authorship.
• US Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. § 203(a) — that a grant executed by the author on or after 1 January 1978 may be terminated in a five-year window opening thirty-five years after execution, notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary, and that this applies to any work other than a work made for hire.
• Copyright Act (Canada), section 13 — that the author is the first owner at 13(1); that employment under a contract of service is the exception at 13(3); and that the commissioned-works provision at 13(2) stands repealed, by 2012, c. 20, s. 7. Consolidation current to 2026-06-17.
• Copyright Act (Canada), section 14(1) — that where the author was the first owner, an assignment does not operate beyond twenty-five years from the author’s death, the reversionary interest devolves on the author’s legal representatives notwithstanding any agreement to the contrary, and any agreement by the author disposing of that interest is void.
• Bart Day, Producer Agreements — what a producer agreement contains: recording costs and budget, advance, royalty, recoupment, audit rights, credit, re-recording restrictions, and the statement that the record company will own all masters. Cited for the instrument’s contents only; every producer royalty figure on this site lives in the points piece.

This is not legal advice. Everything above is US and Canadian law, stated generally, and which instrument your situation calls for turns on facts this page cannot see — what was agreed, where you are, who employs whom, and what paper already exists. Every page cited here was read on the date at the top of this piece. Before you sign one of these documents or accept one, have a lawyer in the relevant territory read it.

Keeping the register

Once you know which instruments a release needs, the work is remembering which ones exist for which track, years later. CatalogTracker generates two of the documents on this page as real typeset PDFs — a master royalty agreement and a publishing split agreement, with numbered sections, split tables, party blocks carrying PRO and IPI numbers, a governing-law clause set from four options (United States — New York or Delaware, Canada — Ontario, or Other) and signature lines. It does not generate a producer agreement, a work-for-hire clause or an assignment, so the instrument this piece spends the most time on is one you will get from a lawyer and not from us. What it does produce prints with “template only” on it, because that is what it is, and it is signed on paper. In development for iPhone.