Who owns the LinkedIn posts a ghostwriter wrote for me

One published post carries three separate claims

Most disputes about ghostwritten posts stall because both sides are arguing about different things and neither has noticed. A single published post is not one piece of property. It is three claims stacked on top of each other, settled by three different instruments, and the first useful question in any disagreement is which of the three you are actually in.

Deed one: copyright, and why work made for hire usually does not apply

In a typical freelance arrangement the writer owns the copyright the instant the words exist, and it moves to you only if the agreement says so in writing. Paying an invoice does not transfer copyright. This surprises people because the commercial intuition is that a commissioned thing is a bought thing, and copyright does not work on commercial intuition.

Work made for hire is the phrase every book industry template reaches for, and it is a narrow doctrine rather than a general description of paid work. It covers material created by employees inside the scope of their employment, and it covers a short list of specifically commissioned categories, agreed in writing. A LinkedIn post commissioned from an independent contractor is usually outside that list, which means the template phrase does the opposite of what the buyer assumed and the copyright quietly stays with the writer.

The practical consequence is invisible for as long as everyone is happy. It becomes visible the first time you want to move the words: into a book, onto your company site, into an investor deck, into a paid advertisement, or into a completely different platform. That is the moment the difference between an assignment, an exclusive licence and silence starts to matter.

What each arrangement actually permits once the engagement is over.

One clause fixes most of this, and it is the payment trigger. An assignment that takes effect on receipt of full payment protects both sides: the writer is not handing over property before being paid, and you are not relying on a promise. Without that trigger the assignment is either premature or perpetually pending, and both versions produce an argument at exactly the wrong moment.

Deed two: the licence you granted the moment you pressed publish

Publishing on the platform grants the platform a licence in what you posted, on the terms of its user agreement, and your ghostwriting contract cannot take it back. That is not a trick or a hidden term, it is how a hosting service is able to display, distribute and reformat what you upload. What matters here is the consequence nobody in the book industry ever has to think about, because a publisher signs your contract and a platform does not.

The first consequence is that ownership and control separate. You may own the copyright completely and still be unable to undo distribution that has already happened. Deleting a post removes it from the feed. It does not retrieve it from screenshots, from newsletters that quoted it, from third party tools that indexed it, or from the caches of anything that crawled it.

The second consequence is the one worth acting on. When you upload content, you are in effect representing that you have the rights to it. If your writer never assigned copyright, you have been publishing material you do not own under a warranty you may not be able to support. Nothing bad happens for as long as the relationship is good, which is exactly why nobody notices, and it is why the assignment clause matters more on a platform than it does with a publisher.

The practical instruction is short. Read the current user agreement before you assume any ghostwriting clause overrides it, get the assignment in writing before publication rather than after, and treat deletion as a reduction in distribution rather than as a recall.

Deed three: the account, the archive and the export nobody runs

Whoever holds the login holds the archive, and that is a separate question from who owns the words. An executive can own every post outright and still be unable to produce a clean record of them, because the record lives inside an account that a departing writer or a former agency was administering. Copyright language does not solve a retrieval problem.

Work out what is at stake with your own numbers rather than a survey. Assume three posts a week and forty eight working weeks, which is one hundred and forty four posts a year, or two hundred and eighty eight across a two year engagement. Assume an average of two hundred and twenty words each, which is a normal length for an executive post. That is roughly sixty three thousand words, which is the length of a business book, produced at a pace nobody would have agreed to if it had been proposed as a book.

Almost nobody extracts it. The engagement ends, access changes hands, and the asset stays where it is, retrievable in theory and never retrieved in practice. The extraction takes an afternoon and it should happen while the relationship is still cordial, not after.

If the writing sat on a company account rather than a personal profile, the same questions arrive with a different answer, and that case is worth reading separately in what happens to the account afterwards.

The portfolio clause is where your anonymity is actually priced

Your discretion and your writer's portfolio rights are the same clause read from opposite ends, and templates usually offer two settings when there are five. A writer who can never reference the work loses their strongest sales asset, and that loss goes into the rate whether or not either party says so out loud. Choosing a setting deliberately is cheaper than discovering later that you each assumed a different one.

Five portfolio settings, from silence to a public case study.

Two rules make this workable. Write the setting down as a number both parties can name, because a phrase like reasonable portfolio use will be read generously by whoever benefits from generosity. And attach an approval step to anything above setting one, so a specific sample is cleared rather than a category of samples.

There is an honest trade available if you need setting zero. Silence costs the writer their next engagement, so expect it to be priced, and consider offering a private written reference under a confidentiality agreement instead. It costs you nothing publicly and returns most of what the clause took away. Whichever setting you pick, it needs to match your public position, which is the argument in choosing a disclosure rung.

What you may lawfully do with two years of posts once it ends

Republishing an archive depends on the scope of what you were granted, not on the fact that you paid for it. A grant is defined by six elements, and a contract that names the deliverable while leaving the grant undefined has settled nothing. Most disagreements about repurposing are really disagreements about one of these six that neither side wrote down.

• Medium. A grant to publish on one platform does not by itself cover a book, a website, an email newsletter, a printed brochure or a paid advertisement.
• Territory and language. Translation is a separate right, which matters if any part of your audience reads in another language.
• Duration. A licence with a term ends. An assignment does not. If the contract says licence and you are planning around permanence, you have a problem waiting.
• Exclusivity. Non exclusive means the writer may license the same material to somebody else, which is an unpleasant discovery to make from a competitor's feed.
• The right to modify. Editing posts into chapters creates a new version, and the right to make one is not automatic just because you may publish the original.
• The right to sublicense. If a publisher, an agency or a platform partner needs to reproduce the work, somebody has to be able to pass the permission along.

The book case is the sharpest illustration and the most common ambition. Turning two hundred and eighty eight posts into a manuscript changes the medium, almost always requires modification, and produces a derivative work built on the originals. A grant that reads publication on LinkedIn under the client's name covers none of those three. This is also where the writer's own position deserves consideration, because the person who wrote sixty three thousand words has a legitimate view about a book made from them.

The reverse question comes up just as often. May the writer republish the posts as their own work afterwards, on a personal site or in a newsletter? If deed one was properly assigned to you, no, beyond whatever the portfolio setting permits. If deed one was never addressed, the answer may well be yes, and you will be discovering that at the least convenient moment.

The assets nobody lists: drafts, recordings and the voice profile

Four things get produced in a ghostwriting engagement that are not published posts, all four have independent value, and a silent contract usually leaves all four with the writer. Executives who negotiate hard over the posts routinely hand these over without noticing, and the recordings are the ones that should worry them most.

The unlisted assets, their usual default, and what to ask for.

Recordings deserve their own line in the agreement rather than a mention. Say who may hold them, for how long, whether transcripts are covered by the same term, and what happens to them at termination. An interview archive of an executive speaking freely is a more sensitive asset than any post it produced, and it is the one asset that never appears in a book industry template because book interviews were historically conducted in a room and written down by hand.

The voice profile is the practical one. If a writer leaves and the document leaves with them, your next engagement starts from nothing, and you pay for discovery twice. Ask for it in the same clause that covers drafts, and ask for it in a format a successor can read rather than as an export from a private tool.

The five things to have in writing before the first post

Five short provisions settle all three deeds, and none of them requires unusual drafting. They are short enough to add to an existing agreement without reopening the commercial terms, which is why they are worth raising even mid engagement rather than waiting for a renewal.

If you can only get one, take the assignment with the payment trigger, because it is the provision the others depend on. If you can get two, add the access clause, since deed three is the one that fails silently and is discovered only when somebody needs the archive and cannot reach it.

None of this is adversarial and a good writer will have thought about most of it already. The clauses that actually generate friction are elsewhere, in approval deadlines, revision definitions and exclusivity, which are set out in the clauses that actually bite. Ownership terms are usually agreed in one email, provided somebody raises them before there is a reason to.